Last night I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about things and couldn’t quiet my mind. Does that ever happen to you? You just lie there, thinking about all the things you’ve done wrong, the apologies you’ve left unsaid, the moments you could go back to and change so you’d have a different outcome. Wondering why things happen the way they do sometimes. My therapist once told me that I’m allowed to say, “It is what it is, but it’s not necessarily what I want it to be.” It’s about processing the event, accepting that it happened, and then figuring out and stating how you feel about that. That was where I was last night.

The rest of the house was sound asleep, and as memories returned, I once more began to process the grief that was before me. Sometimes things come in waves. Waves that you didn’t even know were out there, but then when they show up, you either have to jump them, or they knock you over. Sometimes I jump just right and scale a memory with ease. And just when I think I’ve got a handle on healing, something new comes along and knocks me over again. Certain anniversaries are like that, I think. Even where your mind wants to forget, your body remembers, and this one wave in particular last night wasn’t so easy to jump. I couldn’t sleep. Nope; this had to be dealt with.

There are some life events I’d rather not celebrate anniversaries for, and frankly, I’d much rather forget some all together. No one wants pain and loss. No one wants to be betrayed. No one wants to swim in a sea of grief, waiting to be knocked down once more by another unexpected wave. Wanda summed it up perfectly when she said that it was just going to drown her. I always found Vision’s response quite poignant: “What is grief, if not love persevering?” In a 2020 that was marked with sickness, death, loss, grief, and isolation, I think we can all appreciate this sentiment. We all want to lock the door on 2020 and never look back. It’s not a year where anything good happened, for so many.

As 2021 dawned, along with the rest of the world, I was hoping to leave 2020 behind, as though flipping a calendar page would suddenly undo all the conflict the previous year had wrought. The year is over, close the book on everything that happened, and it doesn’t matter if you’ve processed it, forgiven it, or released it; just leave it in the scrapbook of memories and never open it again. Forget. Move on.

Right.

That might work for yearbooks and photo albums, but grief doesn’t work that way. Not in my life. No; grief is a poison that clings to your soul and everything you do moving forward, if you don’t deal with it.

When it comes to the human condition, there’s no amount of goals or words of intent that are going to rid you of certain pains. And these pains aren’t confined to just the past 365 days; some of these aches have carried over and followed you year after year after year. They did for me, anyway. Some more fresh than others, but the burdens you carry from one year to the next are there, even after you turn the page from December 31 to January 1.

The memories of your father telling you that you’re baggage and not simple enough for his new life. Watching him walk away, and leaving you behind. Knowing he chose another family over you, your kids, your mom, your siblings. His own flesh and blood. That you aren’t good enough for him to stay. The lies you believe: “You are not enough, and yet you’re still too much at the same time. You’re too needy. You’re too loud. You’re too fat. You’re too _____. It doesn’t matter what you do; you will never be good enough for someone to call you their daughter. You have no value.”

Reminders that the Christian friends you trusted implicitly chose to believe the spun narrative and outright lies of a leader within the group who wanted to cover a wrongdoing and used you and your family as the scapegoat. And instead of those friends reaching out or giving you the benefit of the doubt, chose the security of the group over your friendship and cut you off. And then that one friend in the group who actually knew the whole truth but still chose the group and that leader over you, dodged you in Target, even though you knew she saw you, because you were walking straight for each other before she abruptly turned down an aisle to avoid crossing your path. The lies you believe: “You are a bad mom, a bad friend, a train wreck of a person, a liar, and untrustworthy. You are not worth giving up the comfort and security others feel to fight for you. You are not good enough to have anyone stand up for you. You are alone.”

Dwelling on being unceremoniously fired by a boss who, to your face, told you she didn’t have a position for you to continue working there next school year, because of enrollment numbers, but that she’d definitely call you if she had a spot for you, and then come to find out she did have a spot for that position, but she hired one of her personal friends for your job rather than keeping her word and giving it to you. And then finding out that she’d actually had an open position the whole time and did, in fact, hire that person before she ever fed you that lie. And this was at a private church school. The lies you believe: “You are incapable. You’re worthless. The work you bring to the table is of no value to your peers. No one likes you. You’re unpopular, and you have no friends. If you want to be valued, work harder, do more, and never say no.”

There are other events of the past that speak lies. Lies like, “You unworthy. You’re ugly. You are unloveable.” Someone I know, who is much younger than I am, said it best when she said, “It’s okay. Those people just aren’t my people.” How I wish I had the wisdom of that 10-year-old girl who said those words.

But rejection still hurts. Betrayal is painful. Especially when the pain you feel has been inflicted by someone you trusted blindly. I don’t wish that kind of grief on anyone.

This is just a snippet of the baggage I was carrying into 2021. Not to mention the pandemic, the isolation, the social unrest, the political climate, the world at large seemingly burning before our very eyes. Helpless. In need of rescue. Can you relate?

Had I known that all of these, and other, emotional scars were going to come to a head in the bleak midwinter of 2021, I probably never would have bought a farm. I wouldn’t have put a deposit down on goat kids the past November. I might not have ordered twenty chicks with a hatch date in April. I wouldn’t have done a lot of things.

If we knew that eventually all the pain we’d been running from for years would finally come to a boiling point, would we deal with those issues at the point they happened? Or would we keep putting it all on the back burner, hoping it would just fizzle out? Hoping we can forever compartmentalize the burdens and scars this life inflicts? Turn the calendar page and move on?

Maybe. I guess that would depend on how emotionally healthy you are. It would probably depend a lot on how you were raised. Come to find out later in therapy, I grew up with a narcissistic father, who has what’s probably undiagnosed antisocial personality disorder. I’m not a professional, and that’s a difficult diagnosis to make, according to my therapist.

Regardless, I was raised by an emotional abuser. That does a certain amount of damage to a person’s psyche and ability to cope with future problems. Defense mechanisms learned in childhood are difficult to overcome, especially when you’re unaware that a problem even exists. I didn’t know any of this at the time, so my coping mechanism was tabling my own problems and throwing myself headlong into helping everyone else with theirs. I didn’t have any self-worth, and I certainly didn’t believe on a soul-level that I had any value to God either. It was all merit-based attention and a version of love I could only earn if I were exceptional. And to my father, I was anything other than exceptional. “Work harder. Do more. Be better. Carry the burdens of everyone else and forget that you matter, because you certainly don’t matter to me.” That became my heart’s mission. And if your earthly father is a testament to your Heavenly Father, I had work to do.

All of this was happening on a subconscious level, something so ingrained in me from the time I was a child, I didn’t even recognize it as anything but normal. I knew God loved the world, and He loved me, sent His Son, etc… I’d been baptized. I believed it. But did I?

There’s that head level of knowledge – what I call a Sunday school answer – it’s true for everyone else, but not for me. Not really. I believed it, but I didn’t live like I did. And if you don’t live it, do you really believe it?

I walked into 2021 with all the burdens I’d been carrying for thirty-six years, never having really lain any of them down, somehow believing I could just keep pushing, be better, make do. The margins of my life were getting smaller and smaller. There was nowhere else to push the boundaries of my emotional bandwidth.

So we bought a farm and a fixer upper farmhouse, put deposits down on goats, built barns and saved freezing chickens, brought goats home, ordered more chicks, were living the farm life, making plans, and I kept telling myself I was fine.

I was far from fine.

And God knew it. Being the patient, loving, compassionate God I now know Him to be, this was all part of letting me run to the end of my rope. Sometimes the making of a person is their breaking. And I was headed straight for it.

Had I known going into it, this would not have been what I’d have thrown myself into. I’d have stayed at my old house, safe and comfortable on my couch. No farm. No chickens. No goats. But when God calls you to something, you just can’t rest until you do it. At least I can’t.

Looking back on it today, I know it was all part of the plan that would lead to my eventual freedom, though the path was dark and unknown.

The path was a little goat named T-Shirt.

T-Shirt was the surprise third goat kid that Killdeer threw Valentine’s Day weekend in 2021, just a few weeks prior. He was tiny, weak, and not a good suckler. He couldn’t maintain his body temperature very well, so the breeder had brought him into the house to live with her, and she had put him in a little dog t-shirt. She joked that that’s what she’d been calling him: T-Shirt. We never intended to continue calling him that once we brought him home, but the name just sort of stuck.

The breeder wasn’t too optimistic about his chances, looking back on it, but she gave us all the information up front, and I guess it was the starry-eyed naïveté that just kind of ignored that truth. We still wanted to give him a home with his mom and siblings. He really was too small for the breeder to sell, and if anyone was going to give him a good home and the best life possible, it was going to be us. The breeder told us he could live in the barn and outside with the rest of the goats, and we were determined to raise him up and probably sell his bigger, stronger brother. T-Shirt was to become our wether and be a friend for Wesley in the buck pen.

Within the first week of bringing home the goats, T-Shirt, whose original chosen name was planned to have been Denny Chimes, got injured. It couldn’t have been foreseen, because if it had, I’d have tried to make him our house goat from the get-go. But goats are meant to live outside in the sunshine, eating hay and brush, living their best goat lives with other goats. They’re not meant to live in cages in the den. But that’s where he ended up. I still don’t know exactly how he injured himself. I learned the hard way that goats are fragile and accident prone; they’re always finding new ways to hurt themselves or get themselves stuck somewhere they ought not to be. And being that T-Shirt was the smallest, it makes sense that he might have been hiding from everything outside on the farm.

On the day we discovered his injury, we found him hiding behind a wooden board that had been leaned up against the side of the fence. And upon inspection of his body, he seemed to have cut the back of his leg somehow. It could have been an old, rusty nail he scraped as he walked. We thought it possibly could have been a bite from the puppy if maybe she had been playing too rough with the goats, but it was a single scratch that wrapped around his entire back thigh and hock area. It didn’t seem like an injury a dog was capable of; there were no teeth or bite marks. Either way, T-Shirt was in trouble. We rushed him off to the vet.

At the vet, his wound was dressed, and he was given antibiotics. He also received a tetanus shot as a precaution for what we still believe to be a scratch from a rusty piece of metal or a nail. We moved T-Shirt into the house, and he became our house goat. He was sort of like a little dog that followed us around everywhere we went, though he was not the type of dog that could be potty trained. On warm days leading into spring, we would let him walk around the backyard. There, he could walk up to the pasture fence to see his mom and siblings, and he would sit outside the chicken run and watch his bird friends. He was gentle, sweet, and loved to nuzzle anyone willing to hold him. We all fell in love with him.

We bottle fed him three times a day, we held him, we treated him like he was our baby, and we all grew evermore attached to this little goat. There were times we tried to put him back into the pasture to see if he was ready to go back outside, because he seemed to be improved enough, but every time we did, it was apparent that he just wasn’t like the other goats. He wouldn’t run. He wouldn’t play. He wouldn’t frolick around the yard with the other goat kids. He would just run under a piece of shelter he found and would hide. Everything in the world frightened him. And we would end up bringing him back into the house.

I was at my wit’s end with how to help him. I wanted him to get better, and I wanted him to live outside the way he was supposed to. I was growing impatient with him and my inability to make him better. I’m ashamed of my attitude at times with wanting him to no longer be a burden who lived in a crate in my house.

All my feelings of inadequacy, or ability, were now tied to T-Shirt. If I couldn’t even nurse a baby goat back to health and get him to live outside the way God intended, then what kind of farmer was I? What kind of mom was I? What kind of wife was I? What kind of person was I? Everything my father said about me was correct. I wasn’t good enough. I never would be. What was I even doing here?

There came a point, where after a month of living in the house, T-Shirt just wasn’t thriving. He had never eaten well to begin with, and I don’t know if it was the injury (because he had pretty much recovered from that and was walking better) or if it was just nature slowly taking its course, but that little goat wasn’t doing so hot. I took him back to the vet, and she didn’t give me much hope. She checked his vitals and his reflexes, and she knew before I did that he wasn’t long for this world. Being that I was still in denial and very much determined to prove my value to my father, though he wasn’t around to see it, I wanted to keep trying to save T-Shirt. The vet told me if I could get him to eat, or at least drink, something, he might bounce back. That would at least be cause for hope.

We went home, where I gave him a bath to bring up his body temperature, and I bought a hair dryer to blow warm air on him as well. We wrapped him in blankets, held him, and tried to give him warm milk to drink. Even with all of these efforts, we spent what would be our last night with T-Shirt.

I made him a bed with towels and blankets on the ottoman in the living room, next to the couch, and I camped out there next to that sweet baby goat all night. I didn’t want him to be alone. No one should die alone.

One of the vets at the practice told me that I’d need to develop a much tougher skin if I were going to be a farmer, and he is probably right, but I’m still a little soft. I still cry when I think about that goat. I’m crying as I write this now. T-Shirt touched my heart in such a way that he has left his hoof prints there forever. There will never be another goat like him.

I know how silly that sounds, and I suppose I am the worst farmer because of that, but I tried to put on a glassy exterior at the beginning of discovering T-Shirt’s injury, and in some ways I am still angry at myself for trying to be something I’m not with that. I’m not callus enough for that type of attitude, and it felt wrong when I tried it on. I’m always going to be tender when it comes to my animals, because they just get under my skin and into my heart, and they have a way of teaching me things I didn’t know I needed to learn. And sometimes I don’t even realize the lesson until I look back on it a year out, the way I’m doing now.

Sometimes it’s the smallest things that take up the most room in your heart. I think Winnie the Pooh, or maybe Piglet, said that. I’m sure I’ve read it to my own kids at some point.

The next morning, we took T-Shirt back to the vet. He was barely breathing, his vitals were weak, and I don’t even know how he was able to hold on so long. I think maybe it was for me. He still had something to teach me, and it was about letting go. I had done all I could for him, and it was time to let him be at peace. He was ready. He had fought long and hard, but he just wasn’t strong enough. I said my goodbyes and gave T-Shirt all the hugs and kisses I could. And then the vet put him to sleep. We all cried. The vet. Every vet tech that was in the room that day. I know their heats were broken, but I was shattered.

Every lie I believed about myself was confirmed in that goat’s death. I couldn’t do this. I wasn’t a farmer. I was a bad mom. How could a good mom put her kids through such hard things like caring for animals and watching them die? I was a bad wife for dragging my husband into this misadventure. I wasn’t good enough. I would never be enough. I was ready to give up this farm thing. But I couldn’t give up, and I knew that. I had to keep going. We had started this thing, and we had to see it through. Just because it’s rough doesn’t mean you can give up. I still felt called to farming and homesteading. I felt there was still purpose in it, even if I couldn’t see it, and even if I didn’t fully believe it.

I sunk into a functional depression after this. I say functional, because, well, I was still doing everything I needed to do. I was still doing the farm chores, making three meals a day, raising my kids, homemaking, doing all the things moms and wives do, spending time with family and friends, singing with my various musical groups at church, etc… I just wasn’t joyful about it. I was wearing a type of mask, hoping to hide everything that was inside, because compartmentalization and stuffing was the status quo. Just keep going. No matter what, as though the grief of 2020 didn’t exist, or that of 2019, or 2018, or 2017…

It comes in all forms. And I had been running from mine for far too long. I had run out of margins. There was no white space in my life. My grief had pushed me to the uttermost limits of my coping abilities, and there’s nothing quite like being slapped in the face with it like thinking you’re dying and it’s literally just a panic attack. And God let me go there. He had to. I wouldn’t let Him in any other way.

I ended up in the emergency room with a full-blown panic attack I believed to be a heart attack. I thought I was dying. Grief. It’s a real… well, you know.

In spite of my best efforts to cope on my own, hide my problems, wear a smile, and play the part of good church girl, I crumbled. T-Shirt’s death was the linchpin. My doctor and I had a good conversation about stress, grief, and finding ways to rest, before I went home that night, and I was prescribed some depression and anxiety medications, because when you end up in the hospital thinking you’re having a heart attack, and it ends up being a panic attack brought on by grief and stress instead, something’s got to give. It was the wake-up call I needed, and I’m thankful for it.

I wanted to live my life well and live it with abandon, and if I were just going through the motions, full of emotional pain and bitterness, that really wasn’t going to cut it. I was going to have to finally deal with all the stuff from the past if I were ever going to move forward. It’s hard to run free when you’re held down by the weight of all your mistakes, regret, and pain. No more pretending it didn’t exist, no more pretending a flip of a page could change my past and rewrite my story.

Those were the beginnings of coming out of the fog of lies I’d been walking through my entire life.

Thank God for the team of support I have in my husband. In my family. In the friends I have found since that time in my life. In the doctors who saw me as a person rather than a case study, and helped me. In the therapy.

Actually, therapy was still a few months away at this point, but it was a start. A way to begin.

It’s not easy to be thankful for something that broke you. I still miss T-Shirt. He’s buried under a tree in our front yard, and sometimes I sit in the swing by that tree, just to take a moment of rest, and to remember him. It still hurts. And I’ve been avoiding this story for as long as I could possibly put it off. It’s been nearly a year, and looking back now is its own form of therapy. Of processing the pain. Of forgiving it. Of forgiving myself. Of letting it go. Of moving forward.

I think I will always miss that sweet goat. But over time, the memories have become more sweet than bitter. We only had him for a short time, but the lessons I learned through his life and death are ultimately what launched my journey into healing and freedom. Without T-Shirt, I don’t know that I’d be where I am today. God brought that goat into my life at the time He did, knowing the pain I’d feel, but knowing that once I walked through it, I would find healing, freedom, and joy on the other side. Isn’t that tragic irony? Isn’t that so unfair?

From my limited human perspective, it is. I wouldn’t have chosen it, and I wish it could be different, but without it, I wouldn’t be set free. The parallels I find between this goat story and the story of Jesus’ sacrifice are tightly knit, and it only dawned on me last night. Maybe that was why I was awake so long, unable to sleep. I needed to see this. It still hurts, but at least in this I know the why.

And though this event slayed me, yet will I praise my God and Savior, because it was eventually what brought me out of the night.

For that, I will always be grateful that I was able to spend any amount of time with that little goat. He didn’t know it, but he held a key to the uncaging of my soul.