Sidework
Sidework
By Sasha Hom
I am a homeschooling mother of four who has lived with her children off-grid in temporary structures—a big white van, canvas tents with a wood stove, a tipi with the same, and now a yurt, collecting rain drops, sun rays, discarded branches of drooping trees—for over 15 years. Most of that time has been spent in intentional and unintentional communities in California, on the road, and on cooperatively-owned land. Or, sometimes, nowhere at all.
I have worked to support my family as a waitress, a petsitter (still work as a petsitter) and am now a goat farmer. My husband is a musician. Which is to say, life has had its challenges.
This is a brief telling of how in the midst of it all, I continued to pursue my dream (for lack of a better word) and stay, for the most part, centered and grounded in what was important—our collective spiritual journey, and my creative one.
We all have talents, some of which we hone, some which we discard. I am a writer. I can’t not be. I tried, but it was too late—should’ve quit earlier. After my fourth child, frustrated by lack of time, I threw in the towel and began twining rag rugs on a discarded box frame from the apple factory down the road. I’d be a rug maker! I used my daughters’ old clothing, their sling, even locks of hair, long dreads I snipped off from unkempt heads. The rugs morphed into poems. The poems morphed into stories. And there I was again, scribbling furiously by candlelight, beneath the circle of light shining through the smoke hole in the tipi. It’s a slippery slope, as they say. Pass the beer nuts.
I used to think of writing as self-indulgent. I felt guilty for leaving my squalling child in the arms of my husband to bike to some coffee shop to indulge in a pastry, too much caffeine, and time with my muse. Now I’ve come to accept this skill as a responsibility, in a sense, a gift that I must use to create something for the world.
In 2020, I was waitressing in Northern California and I lost my job. The world was on lockdown. Wildfires tore through our hills. And, living in a tent, where zipping up doors and windows won’t do anything to protect little lungs from smoke, we fled. We threw the kids and dogs in the car, the instruments and soccer balls too, opened the door to the chicken coop and said, “Fly! Be free!” as they hobbled out pecking around our feet. And that was that. We drove east to see if we could get out of smoke. We drove for 23-hours straight, and still, the skies bled grey. So, we kept driving. At the time, I was on a full scholarship at a low-residency MFA program, typing away on the passenger seat, sending in assignments over Rest Stop WiFi and working on a book.
The book was about a homeless mother of four waitressing during a Sunday shift at a small family-owned diner frequented by rock stars, marijuana growers, tourists, and locals alike. It begins: “In the winter, when I open, there is no sunrise. At least, not yet. I have to remember to turn on the porch light. As my old manager said to me one slow morning, “No wonder there isn’t anyone in here. They can’t even see the front door!” Until the night lifts its skirt to reveal a strip—kind of pinky, like medium rare.”
In the book, the narrator explores her own mortality, the suicides of others, issues of immigration, motherhood, capitalism, and climate change while serving waffles. And, of course, Love:
Love is a word like a pebble, like those small white stones people in the suburbs put down in their yards. It’s only four letters. I have four kids, still living. That’s why I say it’s an ocean. No, it’s bedrock. It’s something I take drop by drop and dribble into their small bodies every moment, their momma-IV.
But you know what the sad thing is? They have no idea. They don’t feel the sea rollicking inside them and know that is me, or the planet within that is them. I take that as my failure. Maybe I need to make my love bite-sized. Feed them in short sweet sips at regular intervals, pulverized and digestible. But I can’t sugar coat anything. I put nothing on their spoons that’s not on sale. For what are our children but traces of God, and what is God but in everything?
“Hey!” The manager yells across the room at me, which he can do because the owners haven’t yet made their obligatory Sunday guest appearance. “Hey, you! A-girl! Where’s Ty?!”
I slide my phone into the basket-for-phones under the counter, with the image of my children pressed onto my retinas like salt on a breeze.
“How am I supposed to know? I’m not his mother.”
The door swings open and closed, open and closed. The customers have begun their steady march in, unstaunchable.
The book was selected by Black Lawrence Press as part of their New Immigrant Writing Series and published in March of 2025 It was a long road and for part of that time we were without a home again. Oh, we flitted from rental to rental for a bit as well as couch surfed (with four kids)—some of my children’s first experiences with flush toilets—before finding another land situation.
Now we live on 600-acres of cooperatively-owned land in Central Vermont in a yurt still without running water. In the winter, it is cold. Frigid, really. My writing studio is located in an even colder yurt which is where I write this from, and where I just completed my second book—or third, depending on how you count.
But I wish we didn’t sell the van, trading it in for a Honda Fit. Because you never know when you’ll have to throw everything—4 kids, 2 dogs, 18 goats, 2 cats (we always leave the chickens)—into the car and find home.
Explore the Book: Sidework - Black Lawrence Press
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