Dear Prudence,
My boyfriend and I grew up in very different circumstances. His brother idolizes a type of political/physical back-to-the-land movement, similar to the circumstances in which I grew up. It drives me up the wall.
His family is from a small suburb with a mild climate and reliable public services. I grew up in an area of the U.S. known for remoteness and isolation. It was beautiful, but also required physically hard labor from the whole family to keep the household going. Think cutting, stacking, and splitting wood for heat; carefully preparing for dark, isolated winters with dangerous temperatures; regular, lengthy power outages during the winter (my parents refused to get a generator); and being alone in the winter dark with a small number of people for long periods. Our community was far from the closest hospital, so if the weather was bad, you just didn’t go. My siblings and I all have stuff like weirdly healed bones from lack of medical care, even though we could afford it. We just couldn’t get to it. We weren’t off-grid, but we weren’t reliably on it either.
Now that I’m an adult, I moved out of state and to a city where daily life is easy. I miss the incredible beauty of my childhood, but I love my soft life. I don’t talk about it because people from different backgrounds act like I grew up in 1910, or like it was some idyllic daydream to live that way. My boyfriend’s brother lives with his parents and talks nonstop about his dream of an off-grid house and life. Every time we visit, his brother talks at length about how perfect his life would be without electricity and when he can “go back to the land.” It’s also paired with some regressive politics. I don’t say much, but it drives me insane. Life without electricity isn’t romantic; it’s cold, damp, fraught with seasonal affective disorder, and babies get carbon dioxide poisoning from creosote buildup in the chimney. We’re visiting in February, and I’m already dreading getting a political sales pitch on my own childhood. How do I deal with this?