Omega Farm, the most recent book by Martha McPhee, is a memoir that is compelling, heart-breaking, and hopeful all at once.
It is difficult to describe the experience of living through COVID in the mid-Atlantic states, but McPhee’s descriptions are palpable. Living in New York City/New Jersey at the epicenter of an international health care crisis is an experience that is incomprehensible—bodies in freezer trucks because morgues and funeral homes were full, cities in total shut down, health care workers on the brink, essential workers finally seen but still underpaid, grocery stores unstocked and empty. It was a time of living on the edge. Many attempted to escape to settings where there was not SO MUCH that was hard. Collectively, we operated with the belief that the one good thing that would emerge from the hard was a return to what was important—a life of family, nature, and reduced stress.
McPhee articulates the challenges of the COVID pandemic in a manner that is compelling and truth-telling. During a time when others in the United States may have been able to take a breather from life stress with bread-baking and family game nights during COVID, many were juggling decisions about how to keep one’s family safe while managing the inadvertent results of damaged relationships and mental health challenges.
McPhee leaves her New York City-based life during the pandemic to return to her rural New Jersey home, where her mother is living with dementia. McPhee, her teenage children, and her husband attempt to settle into the family-of-origin home to provide maternal care and to manage the property. Returning to one’s childhood home is never without issue. Despite universal magical thinking that home is a place of love and a solid foundation, going home often is filled with historical relationship issues re-emerging, family conflict, negotiating new roles with everyone now adults, care-giving and care-taking responsibilities, and the re-living of what happened there in the past. In the best of circumstances, one is able to find a way to negotiate some of the challenges, and possibly, even grow from the experience.
Despite the name, the McPhees’ family farm was more a location with a history of free-spirit living, with many non-traditional elements aligned with those typically thought of in a commune setting—a focus on art and creativity, short-term survival strategies, and adventures. It was also the location of trauma, including sexual trauma.
Omega Farm introduces readers to memories and stories of an unusual childhood filled with unreliable school attendance/lack of focus on formal academics and trips to Mexico with no money and no gas in the family station wagon. There were art-related enterprises, including a Haitian art gallery opened by the author’s (white) stepfather and her mother’s prolific photography career. She writes of relationships with 13 siblings, an environment on the farm of frequent parties, and the collection of people who may have had limited other options. And, there was parental physical and emotional neglect and sexual abuse.
The strength of the memoir lies in the ability to walk the line between overwhelming and often oppressive memories and the ability to keep going. It is rare to see the integration of parental care-giving and trauma well-articulated, despite the frequency in which humans experience it, where the sorting through of the complexities of both are required, in addition to full-time jobs and the raising of family. Part of healing includes finding things that will facilitate healing or allowing those things to find you. For McPhee, the years of property neglect prompt a journey of rebuilding and growth. The farm requires significant clean-up and investment, as well as learning the intricacies of forest management, as the farm is part of a land trust. The grueling process of multiple, often simultaneous, projects related to the property is a significant story line and is the path on which healing begins to occur.
It is appropriate that one’s connection to nature and land is part of the story, as our connection to earth is a universal element in healing. The memoir does not tie all elements up neatly, but rather, through the vulnerable descriptions of process, helps the reader to identify the healing potential in our own lives and the lives of our clients.
Reviewed by Lisa Eible, DSW, MSW, LCSW, a consultant, writer and educator with more than 28 years of social work experience. Lisa has advanced certificates in cultural competence and trauma.