When I began writing this blog in January 2014, I had a simple goal in mind. After twelve years of marriage, Joey and I were about to have a baby and had decided to take a year off from our music careers and any kind of business and just be home together. We wanted to simplify our lives and put roots deeper in the land and community where we lived and homestead. We were going to start taking more responsibility for growing the food we eat and the life we live. And this blog was an opportunity to capture and tell that story—the one that we figured no one would want to hear, but we would want to remember. Joey and I also believed, as we began that journey and this blog, that God was going to give us a great story. And He did. And all these years later, He continues to.
But with all the twists and turns that our story has taken—and there have been lots of them since this blog began (and long before that, too)—I never in a million dreams would have imagined that my older girls would be doing what they’re doing now, and I would be sitting here writing this blog post. There are some chapters that even the best of storytellers would never imagine writing. But here we are, and here I sit, trying to make sense of all the texts and pictures, the online articles and accusations that people have been sending me, and even more than that, the things my oldest daughter, Heidi, has been saying and doing—all in the name of what I’m sure she thinks is for the good of her little sister.
The internet, social media, or in public is not the place to settle family disputes.
Let me begin by saying that this is not how it should be done. Instagram and Facebook are not the places where we should, as people and families, be settling our disputes or differences. I know there can be—and I have at times experienced—the good that can come from social media, but too often, these platforms are used to air our dirty laundry, to say things about, or to, people that we don’t have the courage to say in person. I know it makes for a heck of a show online because people gravitate towards train wrecks, but in the end, it just hurts everyone. Nobody wins except the advertisers who turn our pain into clicks for corporations who could care less about our family or yours.
Most people who are reading or following along with this, or other stories like it, are probably saying, “Awe, that’s so sad… that they’re doing this in front of a million people.” And they’re right. It is wrong in every way. My guess is that one day, my older girls, when they are even older girls, will look back and wish they had found a way to do this differently. I know I will, and I’m only a couple of paragraphs into taking part in it.
And so, I will do my best to try to respond to a few of the things that are being said, with hopes that something in what I write might be helpful…
Why have I not responded online before now?
Although Heidi has been posting hurtful stuff online for months, actually for two years now, I have never responded. Not once. Not because I don’t care or because what she and they’ve been saying is true. And not because it doesn’t hurt me, because it does. The things she’s shared have broken my heart. They still are. But the reason I don’t respond is simple…
I love my kids.
I love my daughters, Heidi and Hopie, with all my heart. And I do not want to hurt them, even if their desire is to hurt me deeply. It mostly makes me want to love them more. I know they are angry and frustrated and want justice for the wrongs they think have been done. But if I’ve learned anything in my nearly 60 years, it’s that it doesn’t work this way. You won’t find real justice here on the internet in an online forum. Or honestly, even in a courtroom. We can sue someone, call child protective services on them, and try to destroy their reputation and make them pay for the pain we feel… and we can tell ourselves that it is in the name of justice, but it’s not. It is usually just justifying our need to be right—at any cost. And in the end, it will only leave us all filled with more guilt and shame.
For a wounded family to find its way to becoming whole, love is the only answer. I am going to have to love you more, even when I’m disappointed in the choices you make. And you are going to have to love me more, even when you don’t like me. That’s the only way through. I feel certain that when this mud-slinging stops, readers get bored, and this story has run its course in the media, no matter who wins, we as a family will be the real losers, and we will be left more damaged than before, with still only one hope of putting the pieces back together… love.
How is Indiana doing?
What makes this hardest, I think, besides that it’s being done in public and by family members that I love dearly, is that Indiana has never been more loved or better cared for than she is right now. She’s ten years old now, and for the first time in her life, she has a mother. She’s, of course, always known that she has a real one—Indy’s seen all the pictures and videos and heard all the songs—but it’s different when she can wake up in the morning and climb on Rebecca’s lap and say, “Good morning, Mama.” When Joey passed away, Indiana had just turned two, and so she doesn’t really remember her. Since then, she has desperately wanted and needed a mother in her life, and it has finally come to be. It is a beautiful, beautiful thing to see happen for her and for all of us.
Rebecca has never had a child of her own, and so it’s the same for her. They and I pretty much walk around every day pinching ourselves because we’re so lucky and thankful that this has come to be. They spent the afternoon yesterday with their little aprons on, making mozzarella cheese for the first time in the kitchen, having a great time together while I’m across the farm working… also a new thing for me. For us to have a family unit, for the first time since Joey’s been gone. Honestly, I feel like I have come home for the first time in eight and a half years. It’s so clear to me why children are ideally meant to have two parents, and I’m thankful for God bringing Rebecca into our lives the way He has.
Does Indiana miss her sisters? Absolutely, she asks about them all the time and would love to see them. And I tell her that hopefully soon, we’ll all be back together, and she’ll get to talk to and see them again. I do look forward to that day almost as much as Indy does.
Why can’t Indiana see or talk to her sisters?
The answer to that is that she can. Or at least she could, anytime. I just wouldn’t let her spend the night with them anymore. And that is where the trouble, or at least all this ‘worried about Indy’s safety’ started. Every couple of months, I used to let Indiana spend a night or two with her big sisters in Alabama, but about a year ago, I stopped allowing that. Mostly because they refused to respect my wishes when she was there, which I will try to explain.
I still let Indy call them, and them call her, even through this past spring when the sheriff showed up at my door with a summons saying that I was being sued by Heidi and Hopie, and I had to hire a lawyer to defend myself and my little one.
But soon after, when Child Protective Services called me out of nowhere, saying that it had been reported that Indiana was being neglected, along with other accusations, Heidi and Hopie forfeited their right to speak to their little sister. The situation had escalated to them taping the conversations they were having with her and leading her on so they could find ammunition to use against me, and it had become clear that Heidi wasn’t looking out for Indiana’s best interest—she was looking for revenge and a way to hurt me, no matter the cost, and I was no longer going to let Indiana be a part of it.
Our beliefs and worldviews are different.
COVID was hard on our family, as I’m sure it was for many families. Not so much because we lost a beloved family member due to death, but because it revealed a distance and difference that had been growing in my relationship with our older girls for a long time.
As 2020 came and went, it became clear that my value systems and theirs were a worldview apart. I am a conservative Christian and believe the Bible is the inspired word of God and a blueprint for how we should live our lives, so I make my choices accordingly. Heidi believes something completely different, which I’m okay with. They are welcome to have their viewpoint and make their choices as they see fit. It’s their life, and they have every right to live it as they wish.
But accepting that another person has a different worldview doesn’t mean that I have to believe in or champion it in the same way that I wouldn’t expect them to champion what I believe if it’s not truly what’s in their hearts.
And so, if someone with a different worldview wants my little girl to come visit and spend time with them, they are going to have to understand what matters to me and abide by my wishes. And the best I can tell, that is where all of this began to snowball. Heidi doesn’t think she has to respect my wishes when it comes to her little sister. They want Indy to watch the movies they want to play for her, listen to the songs they want her to hear, and be exposed to the things they want to expose her to. But Indiana is my daughter, and I know what Joey would want, and I am standing firmly on not compromising the values and principles that are important to me to raise Indy with. When, and if, Heidi ever has her own children, she will get to make the rules for how she raises her child. And, like it or not, I’ll have to respect them if I want to spend time with them.
I welcome that problem and that time if it comes.
Have we joined a cult?
Although that’s not what the accusations are exactly, that’s what is implied. And the answer is that if you call “following a man who lived two thousand years ago who said he was the Savior of the world” being in a cult… then every Christian you know or have ever met is part of a cult. I have given my life to Christ and am, for the first time, doing my best to pick up my cross daily and carry it, even if it costs me everything.
Now, if you’re asking if Homestead Heritage or Greycliff is a cult, the answer is no. Those folks are just living in a way that other people don’t like or understand, and it’s a whole lot easier to call something a cult and dismiss it than it is to look deeper into and actually find out what it is they are doing and why they’re doing it.
Joey and I first met some of the folks at Homestead Heritage in Texas ten years ago, right when Indiana was born. Joey began getting essential oils from a family there who had a ten-year-old little girl with Down syndrome, and later that year, they came and visited us, as did another family on their way to a family trip to Virginia.
Joey and I had read some magazine articles about their agrarian lifestyle and what skilled craftsmen they are, and had wanted to make a trip there to visit them and learn more about what they’re doing. But that didn’t happen until a few years after Joey passed away when Indy and I finally got the chance to travel there and spend a few days with the family who first came to see us. Over the next few years, we visited a couple of other times and little by little became close friends with some of the families who lived there. When Brian and Eliza Brandstadt and their kids moved to Montana to be part of a smaller community of folks, we were already spending a good bit of time in Montana each summer, and our friendship and our time together with them and other folks there just continued to grow while we were out there. And with our friendship, my faith and walk with Christ have continued to grow, too.
None of this should be a shock to anyone. We have been living on a farm for 25 years now and grow much of our own food. Indy was a home birth, and she has been home-educated her whole life. We have been little by little pulling out of the consumer culture for years and striving to become producers… heck, we even host a homestead festival here at our farm every June, where we encourage thousands of people who attend to consider doing much of the same things in their own lives.
We have been trying to better understand what true community looks like, seeking a more sustainable life for years. It’s why a lot of my family lives here on the farm with us or close by. They, like me, are trying to learn how to love each other and serve each other better… and how to be a better, closer family. And though we still have a long way to go, we are making headway. But if you visit Homestead Heritage in Texas or Greycliff in Montana, or the folks in Idaho or any of the small communities that are popping up, what you’re going to find is a bunch of people who have learned how to truly love each other in community. To die to themselves and to put God first, and the fruit of it is everywhere you look. It’s especially visible in everyone you meet. Exactly the opposite of what some of these silly, salacious online reports are saying.
That being said, there are always going to be bad apples. You’ll find them in every town, every community, every church, and every family. If most of us are honest, our family trees are filled with them. But we should be a culture of redeeming people, not of canceling them. I don’t think it’s fair to just accuse people of things without even asking them or seeking the answers for yourself.
Did I leave Indiana with child molesters while we went on our honeymoon?
I am not a perfect father, but I’m also not an idiot. While Rebecca and I were on our honeymoon, spending a few days in Glacier, Montana, Indiana stayed with two families, both of who have little ones that Indy is very close to. One is our next-door neighbors here at the farm, who were out there in Montana for our wedding, and they kept Indiana with them for the first two nights. Indy had a ball, going hiking and doing lots of fun things with their daughter, who has gone to the schoolhouse with Indy for the last couple of years. The other family are some of our closest friends who live in Greycliff. Their littlest one and Indy are especially close. Brian and Eliza are two of the kindest, most beautiful people I’ve ever met in my life. We have stayed with them at their house as a family lots of times and know them, along with a lot of the other folks who live in Greycliff, very well. They don’t scare me or Rebecca; they inspire us. They show us that real love and a better life are possible in a world that is becoming filled with more hatred and self-centeredness every day.
What saddens me about the accusations against them the most is that no one reached out to me to ask about them or anyone else. They just looked online, found people saying bad things that frustrated ex-members and strangers have said through the years, and ran with it as truth.
Rebecca and Indy and I love the people we’ve met, and whatever they’re doing, our hope is to be more like them.
How in the world did we get here?
All this to say that I know that this has not been an easy life for Heidi and Hopie.
Most of the first fifteen years of their lives were without a mother and the one that they did get to finally have passed away young, just when they started to all become really close. And though they’ve recently reconnected with their birth mother, which I’m so glad to hear, it sounds like she has a whole other side of the story that she’s shared with them, saying that I kept them from being with her all those years. I hope someday they give me the opportunity to share my side of the twenty years that I raised them on my own, rather than just accuse me of something without any chance to respond.
And to add to all that, having a stepmom who died young, a little sister that the whole world adores, and whatever amount of fame and fortune that Joey and I have been part of the last fifteen years… these are things that have only made being a family harder. And when your life is very public like ours has been, it adds an extra layer of complications, that none of us are trained or know how to maneuver our way through perfectly.
Joey and I tried our hardest to balance ‘helping’ our older girls, but not ‘hurting’ them by being too helpful. But as hard as we tried, I think we failed. If you asked, most of our family and closest friends would probably say that we, mostly I, helped my older girls too much, and that is what has led us here. I’m sure if you asked Heidi and Hopie, they would say I didn’t help them enough.
I will readily admit that I wasn’t a perfect father when they were young, but I tried to be a good one. And I continue every single day to do my very best for Indiana.
And though they do not see it or believe it right now, I am trying to be a good father to my almost thirty-six and thirty-eight-year-old daughters right now by telling them, “No, it’s not okay to hurt others just because you’re angry.
Who’s right and who’s wrong?
I’m sorry to be so long-winded. I have probably said too much, and then again, I doubt I really even scratched the surface of what I probably should have said to try to explain things. But if you made it all the way through this, thank you. Thank you for taking the time to let me share my heart and try to answer why I’ve not responded online before this. But if you would, rather than at this point making a decision about who’s right or who’s wrong in this battle, please do me a favor, and instead…
Pray for us. Pray that we will put our selfishness aside and choose to love each other. Pray that we will put our devices and our accusations down, swallow our pride, and get in the same room, without legal counsel or mediators, and begin talking and listening to each other, even if it’s hard and uncomfortable.
Please pray that one day soon, we will all be gathered around a meal at the same table again, holding hands with our heads bowed… Indiana, Heidi, Hopie, Dillon, Rebecca, and I.
And I will pray that none of you ever have to go through something like this with your children or your parents.
Lastly, although it might not look like it right now, I believe - no I know - that God can, and will in the end, use this for His good.
Blessings to you all,
- rory
