“Sometimes our people gossip a little.”
—AMISH GRANDMOTHER
One day as Joyanne and I are having lunch with some of our Amish friends, I ask a question that had been on my mind for a long time. I had been wondering if the tremendous interconnectedness of Amish people ever got on their nerves.
“Is there any downside to having so much contact with your Amish relatives and friends?” I ask. “Do any of you ever get tired of having such a close network of people in your life?”
“Sometimes a little.” Laura is an earnest, intelligent woman in her late thirties. “But I have never been lonely a day in my life.”
Joyanne and I glance at each other with envy. Both of us have known the loneliness of moving to a new city and trying to make friends. To hear someone say such a thing with such conviction is enviable.
“I think I was lonely once.” Norma grins. “For about two hours. It was a couple of years ago.”
Laura’s younger sister, Beth, leans her face wearily into the palm of her hand and sighs dramatically. “I wish I could be lonely sometimes!”
At that, all the Amish women dissolve into belly-laughter.
I have seen these women working in each other’s homes. Each one is as familiar with one another’s kitchens as they are their own. There are reasons for this. They’ve helped deep clean each other’s houses for church. They’ve eaten hundreds of meals together and then washed up the dishes and put away food. They’ve helped prepare for countless weddings and funerals together. There is a bond and a mutual understanding between them that feels . . . unbreakable.
One thing I know about relationships is that true friendships take time. There are no shortcuts to investing the time necessary to build relationships. These women, in spite of caring for houses filled with children, cooking large meals, caring for livestock and gardens, and sewing most of their family’s clothing, appear to have the luxury of that kind of time.
There are many factors involved with this. Having no internet and no television helps free up a lot of time. Husbands who work hard to provide for the family help the women have more time to spend together. Mainly, however, these women intentionally and often make plans to get together—even if it is simply to take turns helping paint one another’s living rooms.
As a young mother, I once talked with an older minister’s wife who had raised four remarkable children.
“How did you do it?” I asked her. “How did you raise such wonderful kids?”
“One thing we did was have lots of good people in our house,” she said. “Hospitality is really important to children.”
“In what way?” I asked. “I can’t see how having people over can make that much of an impact.”
“Those who visit in your home can help validate all the things you are trying to teach your children. It isn’t always easy, it isn’t always cheap, and it is rarely convenient, but having people in your home is worth it. The presence of good people in your life can have an enormously positive impact on your children.”
Those words have echoed in my mind for the past thirty years or so, and it is almost always in the back of my mind when I’m cooking for company.
When our boys were growing up, we had a great many good people in our lives and in our home, and it did make a difference. Our friends became our sons’ friends and helped us watch after and nurture them. Even though my husband and I were living in an area where we had no family, we deliberately created a family with people who shared our values and morals.
In our overworked society, there is a temptation to isolate oneself and one’s family and not bother with the effort of hospitality, but the Amish believe, as I do, that one’s children will be shortchanged by it. I am forever grateful to the good people who were part of our lives as we were raising our sons. It made a difference in the kind of men they became.
The Amish obsession with connectedness does not stop with church services and face-to-face hospitality. Anyone who picks up a copy of The Budget while in the Holmes County area will be struck with how different it is from most other newspapers. The Budget is a weekly newspaper that has been serving the Amish/Mennonite culture for nearly 125 years. It covers some local news, but the bulk of the newspaper is made up of homey letters written and sent in by “scribes” from all over. Both Amish and Mennonite churches are represented in The Budget, and every missive reads like a comforting letter from home, even if you don’t know the people involved.
“Aaron got his new purple martin birdhouses built over the winter, so we’re all ready for spring now,” is the kind of thing a scribe might write. “We’re hoping they’ll come and nest and eat plenty of mosquitoes so we can do a lot of porch sitting this summer.” Or a happy grandfather might write, “Our oldest son from the Oak Hill settlement came by last week. He took the old cradle we had stored in the barn back home with him. Looks like God is going to bless us with a new grandchild in a few months.”
I’ve been to a handful of the settlements from which the scribes are writing and I know some of the people mentioned. I read about a fire in the lumber mill owned by my Old Order friends in Michigan and rejoiced that they were able to put the fire out and rebuild. An auto and buggy accident near Beaver? Oh, how heartbreaking. The Yoders finally got to have a vacation and visit their son in Sarasota, thanks to a neighbor willing to care for their dairy farm in Ohio.
For the modest subscription rate of $45 a year, reading these letters is an interesting way to cheer oneself up on a day when the world seems to be going crazy, and I am just an outsider. The Amish read The Budget from beginning to end as a way of keeping up with extended family members and friends.
In the absence of cell phones and texting, the Amish often stay in touch through letters. Amish girls are notable letter-writers, and some write to their Amish or Mennonite pen pals their entire lives. Letter-writing is a form of recreation for them, and pretty stationery is a favorite gift among school-age girls.
Paul Stutzman tells me there is also an Amish hotline, a number that some people use to keep up with Amish friends all over the United States. Those who access the Amish hotline speak to each other in Pennsylvania Dutch, of course, which is an effective way of keeping the hotline, well . . . Amish.
In other words, the Amish really, really like keeping up with one another and they put a lot of effort into doing so. All this connectedness gives the children a great feeling of security because their lives are so enmeshed with one another.
“Do you ever wish you had more privacy?” I asked Grace, a mother of nine.
“Why do you need privacy if you aren’t doing anything wrong?” Grace answered.
The Amish have the philosophy that it takes both a family and a village to raise a child. The family is the first line of defense in a child’s life, but if a parent falters in emotional or mental stability, has a troubled marriage, financial problems, illness, or dies, there is a dense community of Amish friends, neighbors, and relatives who can and will take over the care of the children.
The security of an Amish child is enviable. A huge percentage of them live in a household where there is both a father and mother. They are also wrapped in the security of a large, extended family, and beyond that, the church and church leadership are intimately involved in their lives.
I saw the effects of that security as I was having dinner with two Amish families one evening. There were around fourteen children present, in addition to their parents. While we got dinner on the table, the children were in another room. When dinner was served, they came out, filled their plates, and went back to the room in which they were playing. I didn’t see any of them again unless they came back out to the kitchen to get more food. In the meantime, the adults were having a nice, relaxing time together.
It took me a moment to figure out why this felt so odd, and I realized that what I’m used to, in general, are nervous, distracted, Englisch parents hovering over children who frequently don’t get along well with one another and constantly interrupt with questions and squabbles.
These children were happily playing and laughing in the next room all evening. What I did not hear was any fighting, whining, or tattling. Not one child came out to complain about something to their parents. Nor did any adult go in to shush a child or to sort out an altercation of any sort. The children just . . . played.
I believe that kind of behavior comes from a deep well of contentment within the children, and that contentment comes from true security—the knowledge that all is right with their world and if it isn’t, there are big people who love them and who will fix it.
Of course there are other factors—decent nutrition, lots of physical activity, lack of television and videos, regular church attendance, and parents who model nurturing relationships. But the fact that these children were so much a part of one another’s lives, and were so used to being in close proximity, no doubt had more than a little something to do with their contentment and serenity as well.
Yet, the more I dug, the more I asked, the more I realized there’s more to it than that. There is something deeply ingrained in Amish culture as a whole that makes these communities—and their children—act as they do, and I think it starts with the idea of uffgevva.