In the spring of 2021, our three baby goats were turning into goat kids, and our adult dairy goat mama was in the full swing of our farm routine.

So what was the next thing on my agenda? Well, new baby chicks, of course. I went to one of my favorite, trusted hatcheries, and I ordered a menagerie of breeds. I chose the chicks by the types of eggs they’d lay. I chose green eggs, blue eggs, olive eggs, brown eggs, white eggs. All the egg colors would be mine.

There’s this breed of chicken called the Green Queen. I took one look at the photos this hatchery had on its website, and I simply had to have this bird. I was going to name her Queenie, and she would lay an egg in a beautiful hue of olive green. I am not joking when I say I based the entirety of my chick order off the hatch date of this particular girl.

The hatch date was April 19, 2021. Not long after I placed the order, Hubby came home, and I told him, “I did a thing.”

“Oh?? What thing did you do?”

“I ordered some chicks from the hatchery. Their hatch date is April 19.”

“How many chicks did you order?”

“Twenty.”

“You ordered twenty chicks? That’s going to double our chickens.”

“Yes. I have a plan.”

“We’re going to need another coop with that many chicks.”

“Yep. We talked about this. Remember?”

“Right. I just didn’t know you were ordering twenty chicks.”

“We have until probably the beginning of June before we have to have the second coop built. That’s plenty of time.”

He wasn’t so sure. But I had a plan. I knew that our current layers would be going into their first molt come fall and that their production would slow down over the winter months. I wanted to ensure we’d still have our usual number of eggs over the winter, and the new pullets would begin laying just about the time the older hens went into their winter break. Choosing chicks with a hatch date in April was deliberate, and the fact that the Green Queen was available when I needed her was icing on the cake. The timing worked out; the plan was perfect! Everything would fall into place!

We set out with our coop building plans, drawing sketches, determining the location, how many hens the coop would hold, etc… We just had to build it. No big deal.

April finally got here, and the chicks arrived! I picked them up at the local Post Office, and I was all abuzz with the excitement that spring brings: new life, cute baby chickens, the fun of watching them swirl and twitter around the brooder tub.

We worked on the coop, and once again my brother-in-law and sister came over to help us get it built. It wasn’t nearly as hot outside working on the coop build in April as it was in June the previous year. Much better planning on my part.

We got to a good point in the build, and the coop was almost in a livable state for the chickens. In general, the structure was complete. Hubby and I just had to add a sliding door and nesting boxes. But even if we didn’t get the nesting boxes built right away, the pullets wouldn’t be laying eggs for several months, so we really had until about September to finish that part. So just the sliding door had to get done.

We had plans for adding hinged windows for ventilation to the top of both the front and back of the coop, but that has yet to happen. We make grand plans, and then when something else comes up that takes precedence, we redirect. It can be frustrating to have our plans constantly upended by something else more pressing, but that’s kind of how things roll around here. In the end, those hinged windows would have been nice in the coop, and it would probably have made the coop easier to clean. However, we’re getting along just fine without them, and the chickens don’t know the difference.

We got to May, and I was also working on my garden. We had so much going on in 2021, trying to update an old farmhouse, fix a barn that had been neglected for years, prepare soil for gardening, start seeds, raise goats and chickens, build new infrastructure and housing for chickens and goat bucks, etc… The list of to-dos seemed to never end. It was exhausting, and we were working at a break-neck pace. We worked every single weekend and even after Hubby got home from work. We just had so many goals and projects.

I had started so many seeds in the early months of 2021, and I had little sprouts coming up in little pots. Everything was sitting under grow lights in the basement. Come May, I’d plant the started plants and directly sow others into the prepared garden beds.

And then the basement flooded and washed away every single plant I had started. I probably should have had the plants higher off the floor, but at this time I didn’t know the sump pump that came with the house was about to go out, causing rain water to leak into the bottom six inches of the basement. I lost every plant, and I had to start over. Nothing ever really recovered, and I consider the garden to be mostly unsuccessful, with the exception of the cucumbers and hot peppers. I harvested a basket of knowledge on what not to do, rather than the bushels of food I’d hoped for, in spite of my efforts. Sometimes the lesson is more valuable.

But I didn’t know that at the time. After the basement flooded, I was still pretty dang determined to plant an enormous garden. I mean, enormous. It was too much. Especially for someone who had only gotten into gardening a year prior. It didn’t help that we had an endless supply of rain that I wished would just freaking stop. I was so done with the rain. Rain is good for a garden, but too much rain is a disaster. From my conversations with other farmers and gardeners, their fates were about the same as mine in that regard. So I guess at least I wasn’t the only one.

There are a lot of things I plan to do differently next time. Currently, it’s February 2022, and I haven’t even bought seeds yet. Actually, I think the answer is to not plant a garden this year at all. Something’s got to give.

In fact, I paused writing the rest of this post because we had a leak in one of our toilets and spent over an hour shutting off the water, assessing, and determining a course of action. There’s always something going on, including the surprise triplets my oldest doe threw two weeks ago. That’s a whole ‘nother post, but I now have five baby goats I’m raising until they can be sold. Life moves fast, and things change rapidly all the time. I make a plan, and then it changes.

So instead of adding one more thing this time of year, I’m going to allow myself (and my family) some margins. No garden this year; I’ll just buy fruits and veggies from the grocery store like a normal person. I’ll not stress about the watering schedule, planting seeds, and amending soil.

Instead, we’ll muck the barn (because it has to get done anyway), and we’ll add that to the garden area. We can let the ground rest. We can allow ourselves some rest.

Anyway, back to spring 2021.

I wanted to keep the dogs out of the garden. Our small rat terrier enjoys digging, and if you ask Hubby about the blueberry bushes she dug up and killed, he’s still not over it. So, we didn’t want our hard work in the garden to be lost because that little dog has an insatiable urge to dig.

We have pallets. So many pallets. Hubby has access to all the pallets he could ever want at his work, so he’s always bringing home a load in his truck bed. And even before that, we live close to a business that’s constantly throwing pallets out on the road. Our pallet cup runneth over.

So, because we had all these pallets and I wanted a fence, I went to the best Internet source for ideas: Pinterest. I found plan after plan for building fences from pallets. For building just about anything from pallets. I wanted a fence for the garden. We had pallets. Perfect.

Just to reiterate, at this point we had chicks in a brooder in the garage, an almost complete second chicken coop, a second attempt at started seeds under grow lights in the basement, goat kids in the pasture, a need to build a buck barn away from the lady goats, a garden to prepare, more seeds to directly sow, a garden fence to put up, house projects, school, and church activities. There was a lot going on.

Fast-forward to Mother’s Day 2021. We had spent the morning and early afternoon at church. Pictures were taken. Lunch was eaten. We were going to do whatever I wanted to do, because it was “my day.” I should have chosen to sit on the couch with my family, luxuriating in their affection for me. I should have just enjoyed the day and spent it resting. Lord knows I had been burning the candle at both ends for months.

But I wanted to work on the garden fence.

We had T-posts and a brand new T-post driver. We bought it after having to pound T-posts into the hard February ground during that ice storm a few months back, and this time we would do it right. The easy way.

We (and by we, I mean Hubby) drove post after post into the ground and would then slide the pallets over the T-posts, so that the pallets stood upright, and the posts were their supports. It looked really good. We had gotten to the second to last post, but then it was time to milk Killdeer. I said, “We should stop driving these posts and do the evening farm chores. We can finish the garden fence later.”

Hubby tends to be just as driven as I am, and he wanted to finish the fence. Sometimes our mutual drive for projects and improvements is a good thing; we spur each other on and lean on each other for support. And other times neither of us knows how to stop because we both just want to complete a task on the checklist. It’s a double edged sword.

He also wanted to make me happy, especially on Mother’s Day. He sent me into the milk room to milk the goat, and he was just going to finish up. I didn’t want to leave him to do the fence by himself, but he insisted he’d be fine. I should have stayed with him.

I hadn’t sat down to milk Killdeer for more than five minutes when I heard him scream out.

I stopped what I was doing. Just left Killdeer on the milk stand. Because when your husband screams the way that mine did, my blood seized in my veins. Abandon everything you’re doing. A wife (and a mom) just knows when the cry of her loved ones means, “I am not okay.”

I ran from the milk room, and thankfully, the garden isn’t that far from the barn, because I found my husband on the ground, slumped to his knees, holding his head, his hands covered in blood.

He had been driving a T-post with the driver, and inexplicably, it slipped from his hands. And it bounced. Right off the post, and up into his head. He’d had his head bent down, looking at the post that was shorter than he is, and it just hit in the right (wrong) way.

I wanted to panic.

Everything inside of me was screaming to lose it.

But I couldn’t. I had to keep calm. I had to keep him calm. Our middle daughter was not too far away from the whole incident when it happened, so she was able to run into the house for a towel.

I grabbed my phone, and I immediately called my mom. She heard the sound of my voice, and because she’s a mom who also knows the tone of her child in crisis, she knew she had to get to us fast.

I made sure the kids were with their daddy, helping him to hold the towel to his head, keeping him talking, keeping him conscious.

I ran to the neighbors across the street. I am so thankful for them. I banged on their door, and I’m sure I was talking so fast it was barely possible to understand me. But my neighbor and friend, also a mom, just knew it was important. So she came.

She told us to leave the kids with her and to just go to the hospital. My mom was on her way, and she’d be there soon. The kids were in safe hands, so I could go where I needed to go and be where I needed to be.

We got Hubby into the van, and we went to the ER. It was surreal. I kept thinking this could be it. I could lose him. I wasn’t sure the extent of the damage. We didn’t know if he had gone all the way through his skin and skull, and if what we were seeing was soft tissue. We couldn’t see through all the blood. And regardless, with a head injury, there’s always so much more going on inside than what the outside shows. I knew it was bad. He was starting to slur his words. He was going into shock. I really thought it was possible I might not bring him home.

I told him all the things you’d say to someone you might be about to lose. All the things you’d regret not saying. But mostly, “I love you” and “Please stay with me.”

It was the longest drive of my life. And I’ve driven across the country from Alabama to Utah and then from Utah to Washington state, and then back again to Alabama. My family drove from Alaska to Virginia when I was a kid. I’ve traveled all across this country following my husband to Basic Training graduation in Oklahoma and EOD schools in Virginia and Florida. But this? This was longer.

By some miracle, there was no one in the waiting room of the ER. They got him right back, and I insisted on a head CT. Not that the staff was against that, but I was prepared to fight for it if I had to. I watched McDreamy die on Grey’s, and I knew about Natasha Richardson dying after her seemingly minor skiing accident. Head injuries are no joke, and my husband was not going to die for the lack of a CT.

They kept us in the ER for observation for hours. I was thankful for that. The color started to come back into his face. He didn’t say much, other than he had a really bad headache. The shock had warn off. He wasn’t slurring his words so much. He was just really quiet. And tired.

His CT came back normal, and his official diagnosis was a bad concussion. The doctor said that he “rang his bell pretty good.” He got seven staples in his head, and it turns out he didn’t crack his skull wide open, which was a relief. I had played out all the worst case scenarios of emergency surgery, brain swelling, comas… It could have been so much worse. I am so thankful. He has a little bald spot where the hair has never grown back. But he’s alive.

In the weeks and months to follow, we had to figure out a new plan. Not just for our farm, but for our life. We’d been a couple for over two decades. You get to know a person very specifically, and then this detour sign had been put up for us, and rather than stay the course we knew, we were now winding down dark, unfamiliar roads, just trying to get back to the highway.

He was frustrated with his seeming lack of physical ability, stamina, and strength – that he didn’t bounce back as quickly as he would have liked. His memory, language skills, and even his emotions to some extent took damage. It turns out, that T-post driver had hit him in the part of his skull where the frontal lobe meets the parietal lobe. The frontal lobe, responsible for reasoning, motor control, emotion, and language took the biggest hit, and the second area of damage was in his sensory processing.

He would forget words. He would know what he wanted to say, but the distance between his brain and his mouth would mix it up, and the word frolic would come out as “frowaloa.” It’s not easy to watch someone capable of doing so much, physically and mentally, be reduced to anger and frustration because he can’t say the words he wants to say because he can’t make his brain tell his tongue to say them.

I’ve always been good with words. I majored in English and creative writing, and I’ve always wanted to write. Grammar is a love language for me. Watching my already-dyslexic husband, who admittedly wasn’t good with words before the head injury, struggle even more with speech and communication was heartbreakingly maddening.

To witness his frustration over not being able to process things in a way that would allow him to work through emotions and then find the words to express himself, was emotionally draining. For both of us.

We couldn’t accomplish as much as we wanted to anymore. Building projects took longer because he would tire so much faster than he ever used to. And he still had his regular work, which was very mentally draining. He would get to the end of a work day, and where we’d normally go outside to build something or work on a project, he just couldn’t anymore. And when we did work on weekends, we were taking more breaks than ever before.

I wish I could say that while we walked this road, I was the epitome of love and patience, but that would be a lie. It’s not easy to change pace that way, so suddenly. When you’re used to a certain status quo, and then something like this knocks you off course, it changes the entire dynamic of your relationship. Plans change. Projects get postponed. Some things get lost entirely.

He needed time to heal. And I needed to learn how to be a wife in both health and in sickness. Navigating life post head injury was us having to learn each other all over again. Rather, we were both learning what his new normal would look like. And finding acceptance in that was rough.

Over the course of several months, Hubby and I found a new normal. We backed off the break-neck pace we’d been setting before. We’ve stopped being so obsessive over checking off the boxes. We’ve got an actual life to live, too, and it can’t all be about work, work, work.

I wish I could say I’ve entirely learned my lesson in slowing down and finding an easier pace in life, but I am better now at recognizing when I’m headed toward burnout. I can see when the margins are closing in, when I choose too much – when I say yes to too many things I can’t possibly emotionally and physically juggle.

I’ve recently been making soap, bath products, and lip balm like a madwoman. I love making soap, but I can tend to be a bit overzealous at times. In fact, I stayed up until 2 am this past weekend because I started making whipped body butter and lip balm much too late in the day, and I severely underestimated the amount of time it was going to take. I get excited, and I tend to take really big bites. That passion can get me into trouble.

This time it caused me to stay up way too late, falling asleep in the chair in the living room while waiting for oils to chill, and I’m still exhausted days later. I need to take smaller bites and slow things down. I don’t need to rush forward, doing everything that I think needs to be done, and that it all has to be done right now. There has to be a balance.

Some things can wait. There are a lot of important things, but a lot of times, there’s only one thing that really matters in the moment.

Like taking time to rest. Watching a movie with your kids. Family game night. A date night. Dinner with friends. There is more to life than just work.

We’ve got to create margins for ourselves. At least I do. I think about Mary and Martha and how different those two sisters behaved when their friend Jesus visited their home. There’s Martha: a servant, wanting to make sure everyone was comfortable, cooking the meal, cleaning the house, running around with a frenzied and anxious agenda. And then here’s Mary, sitting at the feet of Jesus, not doing anything. I have always felt bad for Martha; she was doing everything, and her lazy bum sister wasn’t doing anything but socializing. Didn’t she need to help her sister? And then to read that Jesus chided Martha and said that what Mary was doing was the better thing. Nope, that never really sat well with me.

Why would sitting and doing nothing be the better thing?

I think it was more about the posture of the sisters’ hearts than where they were physically standing in the house.

I am such a Martha. I want to be like Mary. And I think that’s why I’ve always read that story and taken such offense. I’m the oldest of three siblings, so I just feel like I understand the Martha perspective. She was responsible. She had a sense of duty. She had the heart of a servant. She loved people fully and wanted to take care of them. Maybe her love language was acts of service. I know mine is.

Her intent was good. But maybe there was something lacking in her focus. Maybe over time it had all become her job and duty rather than something she did with joy. Maybe she was tired and wanted a break, but she didn’t know how to ask for it. Maybe she didn’t think she could even ask for a break. Maybe she had run out of margins in her life, and she knew she needed to let some things go, and she was just struggling to keep everything going, and she didn’t know how much longer she could hold on. But she wanted to look like she had it all together, that she was not a hot mess, and that she could handle a dinner party, and all her other daily tasks, and the leaking toilets, and the barns that needed building, and the gardens that needed planting, and the goat kids that needed feeding, and the chicks that needed a coop. And, and, and…

Maybe Jesus telling her that Mary was doing the better thing was entirely for Martha’s benefit, rather than a chastisement. In the context of my childhood and upbringing, I always saw His words as condemnation and annoyance. But now, I see it as loving, gentle, and tender. That He was assuring her, rather than annoyed by her.

Maybe He was saying, “You don’t have to shoulder this all on your own. You can sit. You’re allowed to rest. Spend some time with me instead. I don’t care if the soup has enough salt. I just want to spend time with you.” Maybe He was giving her the permission she needed to rest. Maybe He’s saying to me, “You don’t have to plant a garden this year. I will take care of you. Birds don’t plant or reap, and yet they always have enough. You can rest.”

I’m not trying to put words into Jesus’ mouth or read more into the story than I should, or alter anything in the story either. But sometimes I do like to think about context and make the story personal for myself. I see myself as a Martha, and I’ve always resented Mary and her position within this story. But maybe it’s always been my limited, past abused self perspective seeing it entirely wrong. Maybe it was simply jealousy over feeling like I was never good enough to just be in the presence of my Lord. That I had to come with a tangible offering, something that would prove my value and my worth. Only when all the work was complete would I have earned the opportunity to rest before the King. And I was never good enough for that. Or so I thought.

Thankfully, I’ve been set free of that negative line of thinking. I know my worth and my value, and I don’t have to bring anything to the table to prove that. I can just sit at Jesus’ feet and bask in His presence because I am His. And that’s enough. But I bring something to the table because I do know my value and my worth, and I bring it out of an abundance of praise for the freedom I possess.

I don’t have to run toward every project with such zeal and passion that I abandon the other good things (and people) in my life. There is a time and place for everything, and learning to discern those things is more difficult than I’d like to admit. But at least I am learning to recognize when I should say yes, and when I should say no. Boundaries are necessary. Margins are vital.

Having a farm is wonderful, and it’s worth the effort. Raising chickens and goats is rewarding and fun, even in the hard parts. Our chickens bring us so much joy, and the eggs are great. Building projects are necessary. Fixing toilets is imperative. There are always things that must be done. But I’ve also got to carve out margins for people and for rest, or else I’ll be reduced to a stressed, nagging, overwhelmed wife, mother, farm girl, and woman in general. That’s just not the kind of person I want to be.

I’ve got to create margins. I’ve got to have enough white space in the corners of my life so that my life is enjoyable. So that I don’t suck the joy out of everything and everyone around me.

My husband’s head injury forced us to slow down for a while, and somewhere along his recovery, I forgot the lesson and started doing too much again. I didn’t realize this until late last night when I noticed the leaking toilet, and all the goat kids were wanting milk at the same time, and I was tired from staying up too late to make whipped body butter, and add all the things of life that just tend to pile up, and I was reduced to a frazzled mess.

Nope! Something has got to give.

I won’t be adding any more chickens to the flock at this time. I’ve put a pin in the kunekune pigs… and the honeybees. I’ve shelved the idea of a garden in 2022. And though I was tempted to keep one of the goat kids that Killdeer just threw, I know it’s better to sell them all. They’re very cute, but as far as my margins go, I’ve got to give myself and my family some space.

I don’t regret buying another twenty chicks last spring, because it has given us fresh eggs all winter long. I don’t regret choosing every other breed based off the one Green Queen I wanted with a hatch date of April 19. Or that we had to build a second coop. Or that we had to build a buck barn. We did eventually get it built. It took longer than we planned, but it did get finished. It all got done in its own time.

So this spring, in 2022, we’re keeping it simple. We’re keeping our margins clear. Our sanity and our peace depend on it. Our ability to sit still at the feet of Jesus depends on it.

My hubby is doing a lot better these days. He’s almost back to where he was before the head injury, and I’m thankful for that. Maybe he’d say he’s got a long way to go, or that he’s not as strong as he was before. But I don’t see that. I just see my best friend, and I’m so thankful that he’s still here with me. To grow old together, to make plans together, to laugh together, and to dream together.

Oh, and that Green Queen I ordered? The one I based my entire twenty-chick order on?

Turns out, the hatchery sent me an Egyptian Fayoumis by mistake.

You just gotta laugh. And let it go. Because, margins.

*UPDATE: Not too long after I wrote this post originally, some things changed globally, causing supply chain issues and inflation for basically everything. So we decided that our margins would have to close in a little in order to plant a garden. We have kept it smaller than the 2021 garden, and I’ve opted for container gardening this time around, which still allows us to “overwinter” our larger garden space over the summer, fall, and winter months. We are slowly but surely mucking the barns and adding fertilizer and compost to the existing large in-ground garden space, but we’re not breaking our backs over it. Container gardening allows us enough margin that we are comfortable, while still offering us some food security. Just in case. I have also traded the idea of kunekune pigs in favor of rabbits. We now have four Flemish Giants (and Flemish Giant/New Zealand mixes) on our farm, which we will begin breeding down the road. *