My grandmother was famous for saying (or at least my mother was famous for saying that my grandmother was famous for saying!) “if everyone threw their troubles into a pile on the table and had to pick one, they’d take their own back.”
The older I get, the more I understand this. And with all that’s going on in the world right now—economic hardship, disease, children losing their way—I consider myself a very lucky person. So when things are troublesome on the farm, I feel pain but quickly try to put it in perspective and try to make the best of things and move on.
Relative to today’s burdens, farm issues seem trivial. Losing a goat doesn’t seem like a big deal when you consider the hands others are dealt—but a loss is a loss and when it’s one of my original girls and having battled hard over the last several weeks to keep her alive and make her better, rushing Jewel in to the vet’s today for an emergency c-section which resulted in her demise and that of her three kids, was no picnic.
Hard to believe—almost seven years ago, Jewel, the goat I spent hours looking over for confirmation only to realize her name was the key factor in choosing her, joined our herd. She taught me a lot. She gave birth to triplets each year, including Fiona, a doe I’m very partial to.
But most importantly, she epitomized mothers—gave everything of herself to her kids—literally, as this season’s pregnancy sucked the lifeblood out of her. She held on and worked with us as we tried one idea after another to build up her strength and get her closer to term.
But this morning it was obvious she was struggling so we rushed off to get the kids out—and failed. Failure. Second guessing. A terrible trait. Did we keep her alive for the wrong reasons? Should we have euthanized her weeks ago? If we had taken the kids early, knowing we’d lose them, would Jewel have lived? Was the $1,000 out of pocket and countless man hours justified? What would another farmer have done? The list of questions is endless and the self-doubt has stirred up bile.
I need to let go of this. It comes at a terrible time. The beginning of kidding season, which usually has me jazzed, invariably has me nervous as I question my skill set. I hope and pray that I’ve got what I need on hand and have the presence of mind to find the balance between intervention and restraint. Just as I muster up the confidence and bring on interns to witness the glories of spring, I fail.
Attending to Jewel these last few weeks has required late night barn checks. Under beautifully starry skies but frigid temps, I walked into the barn each night and absorbed the smell of urine and hay into my clothes and hair. I ministered to her under the watchful eye of the barn cam and many followed Jewel’s odyssey on line with me. We all prayed for her but it wasn’t enough. She went from a weakened condition to going off feed to needing fluids to propping up her calcium and glucose levels before calling it quits.
So did I at least learn from this? I mastered blood drawing on her dime; learned what I need to have on hand, maybe even to be more aggressive earlier when does go off feed; realized that I can’t crawl back into bed at night after coming from the barn unless I shower first…
Or maybe I learned what the Japanese knew all along when they say ‘shoganai’—it’s just the way—a common expression that is used when there is nothing that can be done about something and that one should just accept what is.
Quoting JunkoOgawa.com “Shoganai, yes, we Japanese say it a lot. It’s translated as 'no help' but also used as 'it's meant to be', because 'things happen where you have no control over them' is one of the Japanese ways of seeing life. It seems very subservient, however, this is also a concept that means that everything in this world has souls, consciousness and meanings of existence. Even if you are feeling helpless, you are still playing your role that is necessary in the world around you. So I think 'shoganai' is a beautiful word to lead you to the next step.”
If not for shoganai, then my not being able to make sense from all this would lead me down a path really I don’t want to travel…
-Lisa
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