http://ipraudio.interlochen.org/Bootstrapper_WEB.mp3
Author Mardi Jo Link says she an unlikely memoirist. She’s not a celebrity, she didn’t climb a mountain, and yet a major New York publisher has just released 50,000 copies of her book.
Holding On To Her Home
The Big Valley, that’s what Mardi Jo Link calls her farmhouse and property in Grand Traverse County. It’s where she raised her three boys.
“That little thing that looks like a space capsule is the boys’ old tree fort,” says Link. “They used to have so much fun there. They would spend a day there. They would pack a lunch, even when they were younger, and go there.”
In 2005, Link almost lost the Big Valley and everything that goes along with it: the tree house, the farmhouse, her vegetable garden. It was the year she divorced her husband of 19 years. And it’s the year that she’s written about in her memoir – Boostrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm.
Without Help
In witty and honest prose, Link describes this bleak year for her family. At times she wasn’t sure how she was going to feed her growing sons, heat their home, or pay her mortgage. But she was resourceful.
“If there’s something I can do myself I don’t like to pay to have it done and I don’t like to ask other people to help me do it. I just would rather knuckle down,” Link explains. “And maybe that’s because when you finish something like that, when you do something like that, it feels good. It’s very satisfying and rewarding.”
But Link’s insistence on doing things without help also meant she lost opportunities that could have made life easier for her family. She didn’t accept the full child support she was entitled to from her ex-husband, she didn’t ask her parents to bail her out, and she only begrudgingly put her boys on free and reduced lunch at school.
Not Good With Failure
In her memoir Link comes off as a devoted and doting mother who is not afraid to laugh at herself and who is always looking for a chance to teach her sons a life lesson. But at the same time, she admits her stubbornness put them in a tough place.
“You know we could have avoided a lot of those hardships if I was willing to move into town but I wasn’t willing to do that. I just knew this place so well and felt like, ‘This is my home,’ and leaving this place would feel like failure to me,” Link says, adding with a laugh, “And you know I’m not real good with failure.”
Unexpected Heroes
In many cases, it was Mardi Jo Link’s boys who stepped in to help. She started crying a few days before Christmas because she forgot to get a tree. The boys helped her cut one down from their backyard and rigged up a stand out of a bucket and some rope. When she needed to heat her home in the winter her sons helped her scavenge firewood from the roadside. And when Link got struck with swine flu the boys went grocery shopping themselves for the first time in their lives.
Link says the significance of the boys’ help only occurred to her later.
“I think sometimes writers find meaning after they write about something. They know the meaning or they know what they think about something after they write about it and it showed me how heroic my sons were,” she says.
Now Link’s youngest is in high school and the other two have since moved out. She didn’t raise her boys entirely alone, she shares custody with their father and she’s also remarried. But, above all else, she hopes she taught her sons what they’ll need to get what they want out of life.
“I hope that a little bit of that ‘I’ll do it myself,’ I hope I’ve passed that on to them a little bit. Some of it,” says Link, thinking. “Maybe not to be quite as stubborn as I am but I hope some of that I passed onto them. Because that’s how you do things in this world is you work for it.”