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The Married, But Solo Prepper  – A Woman’s Perspective, by M.G.

Waking up to the realization that my safe, comfortable world as I have always known it to be was not the result of watching any “end of the world” movies or documentaries, or from reading something about it or from a friend convincing me.  I feel it was a gift, a freebie wake-up call from the heavenly powers that be.   I can’t help but think that I am supposed to be a survivor…..at least long enough to keep my children alive and healthy until they are grown and can then survive without my assistance.  My husband on the other hand, has been given no such gift.  He is in denial of anything going askew with the easy way of life he’s always known.  I have tried in vain to convince him of a very dire economic future.  Having information from very reputable sources placed in front of him does no good as he ignores it or explains it’s all wrong.  I feel though, that on some level he is aware but is afraid to acknowledge the reality of it.  I guess a highly unpredictable future can be too much for some people to stomach – but it’s a future, I feel in my bones is to be encountered.  Nonetheless, it’s a difficult situation for a marriage to be in whether the one who has awakened is the husband or the wife.  But I would bet my home-made rain barrels that it’s definitely tougher to be the wife, or female significant other who is the newly enlightened one.  Men for centuries have usually had the final “say-so” in most situations and our society still predominantly leans that way.  As strong and independent a person as I think I am, I still find it hard to go against his wishes.  When he comes home from work and finds I’ve bought another case of TVP, or made another run to the Thrift Store and scored more wool sweaters for the girls, I also feel pain when he winces or shakes his head in an “I give up!” manner.    Our marriage is still a good one, but because of my prepping it has a few dings, dents and rust spots that I wish were not there. 

My ”awakening” just happened, out of the blue.  One day I was blissfully unaware of any potential economic, political, environmental or other such trouble, just happily skipping through life and the very next day I was aware.  Boom!  Just like that.  My day of “catastrophic awakening” was in early December, 2009.  Sixteen months later I feel I am far better prepared than most in my middle class neighborhood, but still not where I need to be to feel really good about it.  It’s been quite an adventure, and a process from which I never get any rest.  If I’m not actively doing some sort of prepping activity I’m thinking about prepping.  I closely watch the economy to see if I need to hurry my prepping up or can I wait until the credit card flips before using it again.  I can’t help but miss the days of blissful ignorance sometimes, but still treat my gift as if it were made of fragile hand-blown glass.  I must continually read, study, buy, make, plan, think, save, and use my  imagination in anticipation of various disastrous scenarios  and prepare for them for all of us, alone.  My husband’s only contribution is paying for most of it.  He complains frequently and loudly and I ache frequently and strongly.  Buying food and all the hundreds of necessary items on a tight budget is a work of art in itself.  I think only a woman can truly understand the logistics of it all.  If it were just he and I, I might not even try to prep.  But I have kids, and that changes everything.

Another heavenly gift I was given was the desire to never become pregnant.  That didn’t mean I didn’t want children, I most certainly did.  I simply never felt the need to have my genetic code replicate itself in the form of human that was half me, and half somebody else.  Even back when I could still get pregnant I felt an inkling of a looming, foreboding future. My environmental courses while attending university didn’t help me culture a positive attitude about our world.  Why should I bring more people into an already “overly-burdened with humans and their endless problems” planet?  Adoption was the answer for me.  I won’t bring any more people in but I will be more than happy to raise those already here.  So after completing grueling reams of paperwork, background checks, intrusive home studies, and a “wait and hold-your-breath” for acceptance from a certified adoption agency, these two recovering alcoholics were finally off to Asia to adopt the most precious two girls in the world!  I am now determined that these two kids will not only survive life, but have the best chance at the best life that I can, and one the “heavenly-gifter” is willing, to provide.   I’m sure I share this deep, primitive instinctual drive with many mothers across the globe to protect their offspring even to the point of death.   Fathers, I’m sure are also deeply driven to protect their children but I’m experiencing it from a mother’s perspective.  I can only feel what I feel and only assume that fathers also feel it.  

So here’s our family situation.  The four of us, plus our foreign foreign exchange student, are stuck out here in suburbia in a big ol’ two story brick house with an unfinished basement.  And it’s the basement that may be our sanctuary.  It’s dimly lit, cold, cluttered, and just plain dirty but I love being there.  It’s where I feel my prepping call the strongest.  When I’m in my basement and seeing the fruits of my prepping labor, I feel closer to my Higher Power.  I receive more encouragement from being there than anyplace else.  And I need that encouragement since I find it nowhere else except on my favorite survival web sites and blogs from my fellow internet preppers and friends.  It would be best if I could get encouragement face to face but I’ve stopped hoping for that.  My husband certainly isn’t going to encourage me any in this life or death endeavor. 

I look around the basement and notice the windows and French doors and see all the work I still have to do to make them as secure as possible from break-ins.  I study various ways of protection but all are more than I can afford.  So, I must think, ponder, mull over and dream about effective ways of very inexpensive home security.  I feel that sometimes I’ve been guided to the right places at the right times.  I was at Lowe’s when they were selling “imperfect” lumber at 90% off and loaded my husband’s pick-up truck with it, and unloaded it alone when I got it home.  It took me two trips to get it all.   So now I have plenty of lumber of various lengths and sizes.  I bought four (4), metal zinc 6 and 3/8” bar holder brackets and have bolted them to the wall studs, two on each side of the French doors and rammed two (2), 2×4’s through them directly across the doors.  I realize that all one needs to do to easily enter the basement via the French doors is to break the one of the many glass panes, slide the board out of the brackets and proceed to kick the door in or bump the dead bolt.  To prevent this I have screwed two (2), 2-½” screws deeply into the exposed stud next to the end of each 2×4 board.  I can pull outwards on the end of the boards to release them over the heads of the screws to slide them out of the brackets, but I can only do this if I’m already in the basement.  Someone on the outside would have a hard time trying to dislodge the boards unless they had a saw, which could be very likely. I can’t keep them out but I sure can slow them down some. (Hopefully long enough for me to grab my shotgun!)

All sorts of projects are in the works and a few have been completed.  My rain barrel project was at first very intimidating but I persevered and now have three (3) of the plastic blue 55 gallon water barrels daisy-chained together and collecting off of one downspout.  And they are nicely hidden behind the huge cedar tree I took as a seedling from my grandmother’s yard several years ago.  I had read many different plans by many different people on how to make rain barrels but none of them really made clear sense to me.  So I ended up taking a little from this plan, and a little from that plan and created my own plan along the way.  The jigsaw I bought my husband for his birthday several years ago finally got used to saw the tops off of each barrel.  And I had to make a lot of trips to the hardware store and think and ponder as I stood in the PVC section playing with all the different parts and connections trying to figure out something that would work.  (The guys working at the hardware store got used to seeing me drop by nearly every day and are still interested in all of my various projects.) Then I had to decide on the best hose to use (radiator hose) to connect my barrels together, and solve a dozen or more other small but very important details.  I had some minor leaks of course at first.  After taking the barrels  apart and trying rubber versus metal washers, and with some more swearing they finally held water-tight and have been for almost a year now.  They even survived a hard freeze with thick ice on the top.  Water is so extremely important.  It’s the most important thing to have I think after shelter.  I should build more rain barrels, and I will, but only after some other things are done first.   I must admit that I’m very proud of myself for building these all by myself.  It was kind of a hard chore but a necessary one.  Hubby was surprised I did it but I wasn’t!  When I’m in the basement I also see the many 2 liter water bottles that I’ve spent hours washing and filling up with tap water just in case of a water shortage.  I used some of the lumber I got at Lowe’s to make separate shelves for my canned food and home-bottled water.  I have to keep as much on the cheap as possible so I bought 24 masonry concrete blocks for a little over one dollar each and slapped my boards on top.  Each shelf has a total of three concrete blocks on end supporting it.  Two blocks on the ends of each shelf and one in the middle.  Each set of shelves is three levels high.  I’m tall, 5’10”, and the top shelf is at head level.  Canned food and bottled water weigh a lot so these shelves have to be strong.   They are great to see what I have in order to keep them off the floor and to rotate in and out.  Again, no help from anyone. 

Still, so many other skills needed to be mastered. It still seems overwhelming at times.   I often find myself thinking back to the days when I was a young girl and staying with my grandmother out in the country.   She was a real country woman who could have taught me a lot of self-survival skills.  I watched her work in her huge garden, then canning the vegetables she grew.  She even made her own soap from wood ash and lard out in the yard.  I just took it all for granted, but at least I still have the memories.   My grandmother would be proud of me now.  I’ve learned to pressure can, garden, dehydrate veggies and fruit, sew, (build rain barrels!), make soap (but not yet out of wood ash and lard) and am still working my way up the learning curve.  I need to learn how to quilt, make pottery, hunt (dread that but will if I have too), fish for real – not pleasure fishing, and a ton of other skills.  I also think about skills I need to have in case we need to find a new community to live in.  I want to be found useful enough for us to be allowed into a safe situation.  I’m a music teacher by trade.  I’m always trying to improve myself to become more useful by way of skills.    Women are naturally useful in many ways but those who only have training in artificial human-made vocations such as law and economics may be in for an extra hard time if they don’t get practical training in everyday life skills.   Same of course, goes for men.

Though I speak of possible future community acceptance, right now bugging out is not a viable option for us.   Being a woman, I see things perhaps, somewhat differently from most men.  Instead of focusing on BOLs, BOVs, guns, ammo to a great extent, I prepare for life right here, where we are in our suburban neighborhood.  All of our lives are here, everyone we know and love are nearby.  To “bugout” is not realistic for us, at least at this point in time, so I am preparing for life right here.   I’ve read many pros and cons about bugging out, and feel leaving would definitely not be in our best interest.  If we had a place to go to maybe we would bug out.  But for us to hit the road when all hell breaks loose with nowhere to go would do us no particular good.  My plan is, as a woman doing this without any input or advice from a man, is to stay put for as long as we can.  Danger lurks greater out there for women and children than for men.  I think about situations that probably few men think about.  Most of them aren’t worried about getting raped.  I especially fear something bad happening to my girls such as getting raped, or murdered or both.  Women have deep fears rarely expressed, even to each other.   By far most of our fears relate to our children’s welfare and all the dangers involved.  And all of these fears can happen right at home too.  But I feel my ability to protect is far superior from behind walls with a loaded shotgun than walking out in the open with my kids at my side and all I can carry on my back.  Such exposure I cannot tolerate.  Also, I have to have faith in something greater than myself that we will be alright.  If I do the footwork (prepping) I can leave the results of my prepping to God. 

I didn’t wake up suddenly with a desire to prep for no good reason.  Nor did anyone else who is preparing for disaster whether it be small, great, or somewhere in between.  Those of us who have awoken have done so for reasons that may exist far beyond themselves.  Who knows what the Universe has in store for them.  Hopefully very wonderful things!  If they are fortunate to be living with others of like mind, then their jobs are much easier and much more enjoyable. However, not all of us live in such a good situation and have to carefully balance prepping duties and marriage duties ever so carefully.  Some of us face outright hostility, and others like myself endure mostly silent scorn.  And this hostility, whether it be overt or covert, can cause some irrational feelings to be felt.  I have found myself actually wishing the economy would suddenly crash, or that CME would race towards earth causing destruction of our electrical grid, or even a pandemic to occur just to prove myself not crazy to him.  But that kind of thinking is crazy!  At least I realize it when it happens and see it for what it’s worth.  I’m only human. We’re all only human and so I don’t berate myself about having such thoughts.  I guess if God, or whatever our personal Higher Powers are, wanted us to have help from our spouses or significant others, then we would have their help.  

Prepping is now a way of life for me.  It’s something that I have come to enjoy for the most part, despite having to do a lot of it in secret.  It’s futile to discuss world economic or political situations, or anything that might lead to reasons why I prep.   He and I just aren’t on the same page and attempts to discuss differing points of view always lead to bad feelings in the both of us.  Also, I can’t share even little things like my great news about all the wonderful clothes I bought for next to nothing at my favorite thrift store, in larger and larger sizes for the girls as they grow. Or about the nearly brand new Timberland boots I scored for only $4 at Goodwill!  I bring home my items in secret and store them away in secret without telling anyone.  I check all my favorite web sites everyday for bargains on the things I feel are necessary.  The headlamps, two for the price of one, the large spools of dirt cheap sewing thread, the solar battery chargers and rechargeable batteries, the manual floor sweepers, the survival books, the oil lamps, ceramic water filters, the heirloom vegetable seeds and more – all ordered off the internet in secret.  The other thousand items such as soap, OTC medicines, antibiotics, toothpaste, toothbrushes, boxes of salt, lamp oil, wicks, propane tanks, candles galore, ammo, slingshots and replacement bands, bicycle tires and tubes, toilet paper, tools, etc…. are secretly stashed away in the bowels of the basement.  Sometimes he finds a hidden stash and gives me grief, but I no longer try to explain. He’s finally gotten used to seeing the four shiny galvanized steel garbage cans (though there are five now) packed with dried beans, rice and the tons of food I’ve dehydrated and vacuumed sealed.  I guess prepping is better than many possible alternative addictions.  I could be drinking again!  It’s hard to hide canning jars though so I just leave those out in the open for him to see every day when he walks through the kitchen. 

For women–especially those who are having a difficult time doing what they know is the right thing to do, while keeping the waters calm at home is in the very least, a challenge for which a gold medal should be awarded.  Ending a relationship that otherwise is very good, is a terrible loss.  I refuse to end our relationship over my prepping but wonder would I really if it came down to that? Sometimes I want to, but I can’t help but feel that God put him in my life for a reason, and that someday he will shine as a protector and warrior, as that will be his heavenly gift.