Pennsylvania Dutch Country

A House Can Be Bought.
A Life Has to Be Built.

This is what people wanted.
A place to belong. Someone beside you.
Children to protect. Land to tend.
Work worth doing. Neighbors you could count on.
A life with some freedom in it.

Instead, we were taught how to become consumers.

Learn how things work. Keep what belongs to you. Learn how to build things that last.

Learn the Order Read the Book

What Happened

You got a bad bill of sale.

You weren’t taught the framework for anything that lasts and grows in value with time.

How to build is a skill — and you can learn it too.

Tammy at age five, wearing a straw hat and riding a hobby horse in the drying shed
Me at five, in the shed where we dried onions for winter.

About Tammy

I wanted to be a boy.

Boys seemed to have the freedom.

Freedom wasn’t based on your gender. It was something people either learned how to build and protect, or slowly gave away.

I was raised in Pennsylvania Dutch country. Both my grandparents and my parents made it to fifty years of marriage. As a child I was sent back and forth between my grandmother and my grandfather, carrying messages from one to the other. Long before I had language for it, I was learning how two different ways of seeing can belong in the same structure.

I’m not here to teach women how to defeat men. I’m not here to teach men how to manage women. I’m here to ease the load for everyone — by teaching what nobody taught us about building a life that works.

That’s the work I teach.

The Centerpiece

The Twelve Perfected Boundaries

A barn is too big for one family to build alone, so the whole community shows up. At the start there are twelve big beams, and each one has a single job. One holds the left wall. One the right. One carries the roof. One braces the door.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

A frame is raised from the ground up. Truth is the ground. Concordance is the ridge. Tap a number to learn its beam.

Not a single beam tries to hold up the whole thing alone. If it did, it would snap, and everything resting on it would come down with it. Why twelve, and not one
Get the Book

Both Sides of the Frame

Know how to hold yourself up.
Then find someone who works with you in the same way, not against you.

The Twelve make you strong, stable, and built to last — and they show you who else has done the same work. Men and women are different. Both need structure. Both need responsibility. Both need reciprocity. Both need integrity. The goal is not dominance. The goal is unity without self-abandonment.

For real men who

  • stand with women
  • protect children
  • take responsibility
  • can handle appropriately placed criticism
  • can correct without humiliating
  • don’t need to dominate to be strong
  • don’t explode when someone disagrees
  • understand that protecting the home includes protecting the relationship

And women who

  • want to be strong without doing everything
  • want a man they can trust
  • want to receive without being forced to surrender
  • want to make the relationship better without being controlling
  • want to soften without becoming powerless
  • want to bring their full sensual awareness into a relationship built on trust

Build Real Relationships That Last

Strong enough to stand.
Safe enough to build together.

Healthy relationships require two people who can each stand on their own feet.

Men can correct women without railroading them. Women can correct men without emasculating them. Men can protect without controlling. Women can receive without becoming greedy.

Both can carry responsibility. Both can receive criticism. Both can contribute. Both can protect the children. Both can tend the home. Both can build something worth handing down.

The relationship becomes a place where joy, ease and passion can emerge — rather than another job somebody has to perform.

One family cannot build the whole barn alone.

The Barn Raising

We were never meant to do everything ourselves.

When a community raises a barn, people bring timber, tools, food, labor, knowledge, transportation, childcare, skills, land and time. Someone knows how to raise the frame. Someone knows how to cut the joints. Someone feeds everyone. Someone watches the children. Someone brings the horses.

Everyone contributes something.

The same is true of a life. Sharing tools. Sharing childcare. Sharing food. Growing things. Repairing things. Preserving things. Making things. Trading locally. It isn’t nostalgia. It’s a practical way to build more freedom, resilience and interdependence.

Picking strawberries together in the field
Picking strawberries, together.
A summer harvest of zucchini, peppers and tomatoes on the kitchen table
The summer bounty, on the table.

These are the blessings the structure exists to protect.

Freedom isn’t doing everything yourself.

Freedom

Build a life that works for you.

Freedom isn’t having nobody to depend on. Freedom is having relationships you can depend on.

Freedom isn’t doing everything yourself. Freedom is knowing what is yours to carry, what belongs to someone else, and who you can trust to carry theirs.

Freedom isn’t isolation. It’s trustworthy interdependence.

Sound Familiar?

Where the structure is straining

Do you keep doing everything because nobody else seems to know how?

Do you resent what you’re carrying but don’t know how to put it down?

Do you avoid correcting someone because you know what happens when you try?

Do you feel responsible for things that aren’t actually yours?

Do you give far more than you receive?

Do you keep trying to make a relationship work without ever agreeing on what “working” actually means?

Do you have a house but not much sense of home?

Do you have people around you but still feel like you’re carrying life alone?

Maybe you don’t need another person telling you what’s wrong.
Maybe you need the tools nobody taught you.

The First Stone

You don’t have to solve everything.
You have to find the first stone.

When forty-seven things feel wrong at once, one of them is usually governing the other forty-six. Find that one, and you know where to put your hands first.

See what is actually happening.

Own your part.

Tell the truth.

Do what is yours to do.

Don’t make it worse.

Repair what can be repaired.

Leave something better behind.

The Books

Start building.

You don’t need to fix your whole life today. Pick up one beam. Start there. The book explains the beams. The workbook helps you practice them.

The Twelve Perfected Boundaries ebook cover The Twelve Perfected Boundaries
Kindle ebook $6.99 The map. Read it tonight, start tomorrow. Get the ebook
The Twelve Perfected Boundaries paperback cover The Twelve Perfected Boundaries
Paperback $10.99 The PA Dutch way of living & loving, on paper you can hold. Get the paperback
The Twelve Perfected Boundaries Workbook cover The Workbook $19.99 Large 8.5 × 11 write-in workbook. Practice the beams with your own hands. Get the Workbook
Revelation book cover

The Hearth

How the Women Kept the Home & the Men’s Hearts Warm

Structure without warmth is a shed. Warmth without structure is a fire in a field.

For the men: a man who gets his beams straight doesn’t need a weaker partner. He needs a trustworthy one — a woman with her own twelve in place. She’s the one who fills the hearth with heart.

Revelation — A Nightstand Guide to a Woman’s Embodied Wholeness. The Twelve help build the structure outward. Revelation is the inward turn: what happens when a woman becomes congruent within herself and can finally live from that wholeness.

Paperback · $13.13 Kindle · $7.77

· · ·

The Newsletter

Broad Daylight

Short pieces on the Twelve boundaries, living and loving, and the life I grew up in. Plain speak. No countdown clocks. No constant selling. A letter from me, once a week.

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For the people who learned how to hold it all together - and who want to return to real - but only after verifying, then finding something tried and true this time. We want to be sure what we build lasts and we also get to benefit from it. Delivered Weekly. By Tammy Leitzel.

Tammy Leitzel

— Tammy

Tammy Leitzel · Femme Essence, Inc.