Trust Me, Ma Ingalls Wanted What You Have

Thoughts from bedside at a Children's Hospital

Laura Ingalls Wilder was so good with words. The pictures she painted of her life have wormed their way into the consciousness, defining our vision of pioneer-era America with her descriptions of dug outs and maple sugaring and snow so deep you needed to anchor yourself to the house before heading out to the barn. All of my kids, at one time or another, have fallen under the sway of the romanticized version of the prairie lifetsyle that Laura presented in her wildly popular series. And you know, I have, too. Who can resist the bucolic imagery, the gentle invitation to step into a time and place that was family-centered, rich in community, and devoid of modern entanglements?

Take, for example, the simple act of churning butter:

When the cream was ready, Ma scalded the long wooden churn-dash, put it in the churn, and dropped the wooden churn-cover over it. The churn cover had a little round hole in the middle, and Ma moved the dash up and down, up and down, through the hole.

She churned for a long time. Mary could sometimes churn while Ma rested, but the dash was too heavy for Laura.

At first the splashes of cream showed thick and smooth around the little hole. After a long time, they began to look grainy. Then Ma churned more slowly, and on the dash there began to appear tiny grains of yellow butter.

When Ma took off the churn-cover, there was the butter in a golden lump, drowning in the buttermilk. Then Ma took out the lump with a wooden paddle, into a wooden bowl, and she washed it many times in cold water, turning it over and over and working it with the paddle until the water ran clear. After that she salted it.

—Little House in the Big Woods

I, myself, like making butter for my family. But it looks a bit different here in 2025 than it did back when Ma was manning the churn. Every Monday, I ladle cream from a few jars of raw milk into a chilled bowl fitted to my trusty KitchenAid. Using the whisk attachment and a decent speed, the job is done in a handful of minutes while I work at some other kitchen task. I do still get to wash the butter as Ma did. That part hasn’t changed. In the pressing and rinsing, I find the comfort of kinship with generations of women before me.

And that’s the point, really, of what most of us seek when we find a piece of ourselves longing for “simpler days.” We look to the lives of women whose primary choice in four whole months could be boiled down to selecting fabric for the new dresses her girls needed, and we become keenly aware of the burden disguised as a blessing we face every day in deciding on which of the ten different tea selections we want to brew for our afternoon quiet time. We look at the events lined up on our calendars and long for whole days to just give over to the task of nothing a single task, no matter how mundane— forgetting, of course, that those tasks looked very, very different even 40 years ago.

If Caroline lived in Kathmandu

I didn’t really grasp this myself until our family moved to Kathmandu, Nepal. An Appalachian native, I grew up just one generation removed from a lack of indoor plumbing (my dad didn’t live in a house with a bathroom until he was 15). More than most my age, I understood what it was to live close to your food supply, to be intimately engaged in the work that raises barns and houses, to rely on the weather for more than just an easier day trotting the kids to playdates and soccer games. I felt fairly prepared for stepping into what we Westerners so casually term a “developing nation.” No convenience foods? Big deal. Unreliable electrical grid? Bring it on.

If anyone is a good candidate for living like Ma Ingalls, I thought, it was me. I had no fear, no reservations, and, as it turned out, no clue.

We lived in a lovely home in what passes for the suburbs of Kathmandu. Nestled near a small market, a bank, and a taxi hub, we were located in the Nepali equivalent of a “subdivision.” Several houses on our street had a car parked in front. Nearly all had full-time help. Despite living on a radically low income by American standards, we were decidedly middle class in the largest, most metropolitan city in Nepal. But it was still Nepal. And so—

Every morning, the house needed dusting and sweeping. This was not the casual brushing up of pet hair or tidying under the dining room table from the night before. Kathmandu ranks as the 3rd or 5th most polluted city in the world, depending on the study you’re reading. It’s also either dry and dusty or damp and muddy, depending on which of the two seasons we’re talking about. Overnight, a fine layer of grimy silt settled on nearly every flat surface, and was often thick enough on the floors to leave faint footprints behind early risers. Ma Ingalls swept the floor of the tiny dugout on the banks of Plum Creek every day, and I began to understand why when I lived in Nepal. Not even daily life on a working farm compares to what it means to battle dust and dirt all day, every day.

Clothes had to be washed by hand. Eventually, we invested in a small capacity machine that required us to fill it with water manually before the wash and rinse cycles. I celebrated this purchase with every ounce of my being, because the magic of squatting on the roof and scrubbing clothes for 9 people clean on a board wore thin far faster than I imagined. And remember, I wasn’t hauling everything down to a creek bed! We continued to have to hang dry every clothing item even after we bought the clothes washer, which doesn’t sound bad at all until you remember the point I made above; living in a profoundly polluted environment meant that what passed for “clean” was decidedly less “clean” than what I was accustomed to.

Cooking became just about putting enough calories into mouths. Now, this is hard to admit, because food—the planning of it, preparation of it, the presentation, the eating—is my love language. But I actually settled into what I will now admit was a full depression, in large part because my job was reduced to a rotation of oatmeal, simi (bean ) soup with roti, and dal bhat (a watery lentil soup over rice). Where Caroline Ingalls could at least pull from her larder of preserved foodstuffs to provide a tiny bit of vairety, such things are unknown in Kathmandu. Rice becomes infested with all manner of weevils and other critters as a matter of course. (Actually, I found it was pretty common to arrive that way to start with.) There is no concept of canning, and freezing is unheard of because of the power situation.

All of these things were hard, and gave me a profound appreciation for Caroline Ingall’s willingness to be dragged across the wilds of the vast continent of North America with all of her worldly goods stacked in a wagon. Now, she didn’t know what she was missing. Ma wasn’t scrubbing her husband’s shirts, watching the water grow murky, and remembering what it was like to sort a load into a machine and come back an hour later to a whole armful of clean smelling, fresh garments she hadn’t bruised her knuckles over. She wasn’t approaching dinner time and musing on what it would be like to throw some burgers on the grills and top them with some good old cheddar cheese before throwing them on store bought buns. But if she could have done those things— if Caroline was alive today— I can tell you, she would.

Ma Ingalls had a hard life. She worked from sun up to sun down. She labored, and while we celebrate the beauty and simplicity of that, the truth is that in many ways, it was anything but. Women of that day struggled. They struggled to feed and clothe their families, and to make their houses homes.

But you know what they struggled with most of all? Keeping their loved ones alive. Keep that in mind when you feel the pull to paint all things “unmodern” as better.

Modern medical marvels

It’s quite popular to hate modern medicine. I myself tend in this direction. I don’t need an over the counter pill to halt the production of acid in my stomach; I need to remember that as spicy as my tongue likes my curries, my internal workings disagree. Not every ache and pain of aging is a symptom of more than just that— getting older. The pharmaceutical mill is out of control, medical schools churn out doctors whose focuses are so specialized that they have forgotten the interconnected nature of the human being they’re treating. I agree with all of this. But also… what a blessed thing to be able to complain about.

I am not being snarky. We have a gift that Ma Ingalls would have loved to have had more than once in her lifetime.

Ma put her hand against Laura’s cheek. “You can’t be cold,” she said. “Your face is hot as fire.”

Ma called Pa, and he came in. “Charles, do look at the girls,” she said. “I do believe they are sick.”

“Well, I don’t feel any too well myself,” said Pa. “First I’m hot and then I’m cold, and I ache all over.”…

Ma and Pa looked a long time at each other and Ma said, “The place for you girls is bed.”

—Little House on the Prairie

If you’ve read the novel, you know that this is the beginning of a horrible bout of “fever’n’ague,” which Laura reveals later in a note to be malaria. It strikes the whole family— indeed, the whole community. Malaria is still a global killer; depending on the specific type of infection and whether or not intervention is available, mortality rates still hover near 100% in undeveloped nations. Here in the U.S., however, you have only a 2% chance of dying from malaria. Our behemoth medical complex has done a few things right along the way, and this one in particular has made a lifesaving difference. Unlike Caroline, I don’t fear sending my kids out to play in the shady creek at the far end of our property. I dab them with a little herbal concoction designed to keep most of the mosquitos off of them, but there are no piles of damp moss lit to smoke out the biting insects. Even if one of my kids did get sick from an inevitable bite, I wouldn’t be at a loss for how to treat what came next. I have an arsenal of home remedies at my disposal and, should those fail, I can make my way to one of the four hospitals within easy driving distance of my home.

Caroline would be speechless.

This week, my 4 year-old got sick. It started off as one of those routine gastro bugs that young children tend towards; shocking and violent at the onset, but lessening in intensity after the first awful night. I hate it when my kids are sick. All mothers do. But I am also keenly aware that I have the gift of assuming that things are routine, that all will be well. Like Caroline, I knew that bed was the best place for my girl. I laid alongside her all the first night, and the next. It wasn’t until the sun dawned on the third day that I felt a creeping unease that something deeper was afoot, and that perhaps my daughter would benefit from outside eyes taking a look at her. But my story diverges wildly from what Ma would have experienced here. There was no sending my husband off on a hunt for what we Appalachians call “Granny Women” (folk healers), an itinerant doctor who might be riding across the prairie, no hoping news of our house’s misfortune had made its way to town, where someone might be dispatched to check in on our homestead. After a quick check-in with our family practitioner, we loaded our little one up and she was being examined in a pediatric specialty center less than an hour after stepping out the door.

I don’t know what Ma would have thought of such an amazing gift, but I can guess. Any mother who has felt a child’s sagging body go from warm to burning hot under her touch knows what it feels like to do battle with the reality that we are finite beings— and our children belong to God more than they will ever belong to us. The building awareness that we have gone from a place where things will resolve in a day or two, or even a long week from now, to the place where we’re just not sure how we come back from this without God’s help, well… Caroline knew it well. But unlike her (and every mother who lived in her “simpler” times), we know that the Lord has given us unprecedented access to people literally trained to be God’s help for the sick.

As I sit here writing this, my little girl is hooked to an IV replacing the fluids her little body lost but so desperately needs. She’s asleep, made more comfortable by a medication that has dulled the piercing pain caused by her bowel sliding in a way it was never meant to. She’s had an Xray, and an ultrasound. A whole staff of people is literally just outside the door of this little space. What started as a routine tummy bug became something much bigger so very quickly, right before my eyes. I’ve been a parent for 28 years. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a child through what we so casually call “stomach flu.” There have been some hard days and some long nights, but I’ve never thought of taking a child to the hospital for throwing up. But this time— this one, horrible time— I’m so very glad I had the option.

Caroline Ingalls had a lot, but she didn’t have this. She had a cow to milk, and a wide, open sky of blue above her. She had little girls entertained by using a thimble to scrape patterns into frosty glass. She had a spinning wheel, and a wooden cradle her husband had crafted by hand. She had evenings with her family, listening to her husband’s fiddle lull her children to sleep by the fireside.

But in real life, Caroline buried at least one child. In addition to the bout of malaria, the books list many other ailments befalling them, as they naturally would. Life is, after all, messy. What Laura calls scarlet fever in By the Shores of Silver Lake probably did happen, but Mary’s blindness was most likely the result of viral meningoencephalitis. The symptom list of that alone is terrifying for a mother to read (hallucinations?) and imagine enduring when all you can do it spoon a little water into your child’s mouth every now and then.

No, I’m pretty sure Ma Ingalls would trade the memories of watching her girls delight in batting around an inflated pig bladder for the comfort of even a single tablet of fever reducer.

The takeaway

As much as we yearn to live in times that seem simpler and less cluttered by all the noise and technology that surrounds us, it’s our duty as believers to see the blessing in where God has actually chosen to place us. Friends, it is not a bad time to be alive— at least, no more evil than any other period in history. The Lord was purposeful in putting you here, now. And if He has cultivated in you a desire to step back from the distractions of the current age, then yes, you should respond to that prompting from the Holy Spirit. But while you’re doing it, you should look around and be grateful for those things that can be used as blessings in your life and in the lives of others. It’s no stretch to say that modern medicine can most certainly be one of those blessings.

Sitting here today, watching my daughter sleep, I am praising God for the things that often incite skepticism in my own crunchy leanings. I’m thinking of all the women of the past (and frankly, plenty even today) who would swap places with me in a heartbeat, trading their beautiful, simple lives for my ability to place my little girl into the care of people blessed with the ability to aid in the healing of the physical body here on earth. I’m recognizing that yes, I have been shown a great mercy in being a wife and mother in 2025, not 1825, or even 1925. God is, indeed, good.

“This earthly life is a battle,' said Ma. 'If it isn't one thing to contend with, it's another. It always has been so, and it always will be. The sooner you make up your mind to that, the better off you are, and more thankful for your pleasures.”
― Little Town on the Prairie

Every generation has its battles. Ma and her sisters dealt with the sort that often literally meant life or death. They saw crops decimated and knew it meant empty bellies. Their husband injured himself, and they understood that they were now manning a plow. These women walked in a land less sullied by the annoyances of screens and questions about whether or not their boys had ADHD or were just active in a way not conducive to a classroom setting, yes. They don’t read labels and wonder if whats inside is safe to put on the table. Our battles today are real. I’m not saying that they’re not. But friends, we have our pleasures, too. One of them is knowing that our babies are unlikely to die from a strep infection that spirals beyond what their immune system can handle. Ma would have appreciated that, and we should, too. It’s God’s blessing to the wives and mothers of the modern age. I accept it, gratefully.

In Christ,

Heather