Change is the only constant in life. It sounds so cliché but it’s true. Every single thing changes, for better or for worse.

Sullivan became the second greatest blessing of my life when I gave birth to him in January 2018. Shit hit the fan hard after his arrival, however.

Sullivan struggled with major health issues related to constipation and failure to gain weight for months following his birth. We had a knowledgeable pediatric naturopath but he had exhausted all ideas and referred us elsewhere. Specialist after specialist suggested that I just supplement Sullivan’s feed. I was told that Sullivan looked like a person from a German concentration camp by the cardiologist, who found nothing wrong but an insignificant heart murmur. I was told by the gastroenterologist that he was required to report intent to harm should I not follow his suggestions for Sullivan. He threatened to take my baby away! I felt that Sully was just too constipated to absorb the nutrients he was getting but not a single specialist would listen to me.

We frequented a fantastic chiropractor who adjusted Sullivan weekly and that helped relieve the intensity of his ailments of vomiting and constipation. We hired a lactation consultant who confirmed that my breast milk supply was fine and Sullivan was eating well (and a lot). We had a rock solid team of people caring for our little man. Our lactation consultant and midwife became like family. They suggested we ask for a referral to a geneticist to rule out a syndrome which could be causing Sullivan’s issues and his hyper-mobile joints.

The geneticist said that Sullivan was too young to accurately diagnose but Mallory was not. Given her history and Mark’s history as a child, it was determined that Mallory has Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome type III (hEDS) – an inherited connective tissue disorder. This explained Mallory’s ability to bend in some funky positions, and her joint pain and subluxations during sports. This explained the dizziness she feels upon positional changes. This explained her velvety soft skin, stretch marks (striae) which seemed to literally develop overnight, easy bruising/bleeding, and odd scarring patterns. This explained her chronic constipation and need for laxatives for years through infancy and early childhood. This explained her high, narrow palate and need for an orthodontic palate widening appliance so she could properly chew her food as a youngster. This explained so much for Mallory, and also gave the geneticist the clues she needed to tell us that the differential diagnosis for Sullivan was also EDS. They would continue to follow him throughout childhood and could better tell us which of the thirteen classifications of EDS he fit into, given his symptoms, as he ages.
As it turns out, Sullivan’s symptoms are intense and variable. He gagged on nearly everything. He choked on his own spit. His heart murmur’s severity increased for a short while. He struggled with reflux. He has trouble regulating body temperature. He has very hyper-mobile joints which affected his ability to crawl, pull himself up, and toddle. He has joint subluxations. He showed signs of joint pain by grabbing his wrists and ankles after a particularly active days last year. Now, at least, he can tell us when something hurts. Sully has to be on mega doses of laxatives to be able to defecate. He is now gaining weight though.

We have been working with therapists for several months and making positive strides. We see occupational therapy twice a week to work on Sully’s sensory processing so he can eat more foods than just puree, and hand coordination and strengthening to facilitate self-feeding. We visit physical therapy weekly for core strengthening and balance exercises. Most recently Sully is showing lots of weakness in his ankles and will be fitted for braces to help combat this so he can continue to walk without causing a chain reaction of disabilities through his knees and hips and back. We are also going to implement aquatic therapy as an adjunct to current procedures.

Adding another child to our family changed us for the better, but adding one with so many unforeseen health complications has been excruciatingly hard at times.

We nearly changed course this fall when Mallory took a gander at public school. She, once again, decided that it didn’t align with her needs and so we’ve begun homeschooling high-school. This requires keeping a transcript so that if she should decide to join public education, either at a high-school level or college, that we have proof of everything she’s learned.

Mallory is still involved with basketball and a new season is upon us. Upper level sports require a greater commitment of time, and until she has a driver’s license – which is still at least a year off, which means a greater dedication to transportation from us. We are talking hours upon hours of practice and games, at inconsistent changing times, six days a week. “Basketball Mom,” isn’t a title for the faint of heart, and I had little desire to become a chauffeur when I became a mom, though I do so love to watch her play.

Did you know that scientists believe our body’s cells completely change every seven to ten years? Mallory recently had food allergy testing and it was determined that the list of things with the biggest immune responses is extensive. We knew she was sensitive to cow dairy and wheat gluten, though the test confirmed them. It also offered so much more information including sensitivities to: chicken eggs, beef, pork, lamb, coffee bean, banana, blueberry, pineapple, peanut, sesame seed, spelt, wheat gliadin, soy, whole wheat, and GOAT MILK. Gasp! This left us with few options for protein rich, nutrient dense, sustainable, local, organic options. A few weeks ago we began an elimination diet. It’s proving challenging to find things that fit all criteria but this change has resulted in less nagging symptoms in such a short amount of time that she feels motivated to continue and see where it leads.
 
Somehow, in between our enormous amounts of time in the vehicle, we managed to raise healthy chickens, turkeys, and pigs this year. We feel honored that so much of our organically fed and pasture raised poultry and pork are gracing tables and filling bellies all over the state.

Our goat herd shrunk tremendously last year following Mark’s ladder accident and subsequent surgery. We went into winter with four does. Four! Lady suffered periparturient paresis from hypocalcemia but we were able to save her and her twins thanks to a caring friend with small hands, a knowledgeable veterinarian, and a miracle-working chiropractor. Our two yearlings, Sequoia and Leigh, both delivered beautiful twins unassisted. Sugar threatened miscarriage multiples times over the final two months of her pregnancy but through consistent round the clock administration of herbs we were able to help her hold her pregnancy to term. We knew she looked larger than another other pregnancy but had no idea how large until she delivered triplets. The smile on her face after birthing her babies is something spectacular.

Earlier this year we ran a goat milk fudge give-away contest and that is how I connected with Lacey Hughett, owner of Hughett Heritage Farm, when she won a box of our fudge. Incidentally Lacey is also a writer for Goat Journal, one of the most well known and widely circulated publications in the goat world. She loved our fudge and asked if I would share our recipe for an upcoming holiday issue. I searched my soul for weeks and couldn’t make a definitive decision. It seemed like a spectacular publicity opportunity for our little farm, but it also felt like I was selling my soul by giving up our recipe, even the most basic version. I spent months developing my recipe. Fudge is finicky. There is little room for error or improvisation in the chemistry of it. After all the work I’d done, I wasn’t sure I wanted to just give it away. Lacey understood my quandary and gave me space.
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During that time is when Sugar got sick and died. Shortly after birthing her babies, Sugar began to decline rapidly. Supplementing her babies didn’t help with her weight loss. Her milk supply disappeared. Her appetite diminished to only Maple leaves and then became full anorexia. She began having nasal discharge and we were fighting to prevent aspiration pneumonia. After weeks of treatments with our veterinarian, both holistic and conventional, it was determined that she was likely afflicted with cancer of some sort. We made the very tough decision to euthanize her. Before the veterinarian arrived, Sugar found a warm pile of hay in the sun and lay down with an exaggerated sigh. She closed her eyes and rested. Her doelings bounded from place to place around her with eagerness, incoherent of the event about to unfold. I went to be with them. Sugar opened her eyes briefly, watching me with her babies. I told her I would take care of them, and then she let her lids fall and rested her head in the hay. The vet arrived a short time later and we gave her the only mercy we could offer her: a kind departure from this world.  I don’t know when, exactly, I expected I would have to say goodbye to her, but I didn’t expect it to be when she was merely 10 years old. Death paints a terrible picture, sometimes. The image of Sugar’s emaciated body curled up in that pile of hay was etched in my mind and haunted me constantly.

One day I decided that as a final tribute to Sugar, I would share our goat milk fudge recipe. After all, we only got into the fudge business because of Sugar’s delicious milk six years prior. I contacted Lacey with my decision, she interviewed me, and I happily inundated her with gobs of photos of our farm; goats to fudge and everything in between. I was so pleasantly surprised when the issue of Dairy Goat Journal arrived in my mailbox. It wasn’t just our shared recipe. Lacey wrote a beautiful article about our journey into goats and Sugar’s beautiful photo was top and center. Oddly, I rarely think of the day of Sugar’s death anymore. I miss her like mad, and the entire herd dynamics have changed, but I am allowing myself to think of her as her photo in the magazine depicts: a queen with incredible strength and beauty; one we were lucky enough to share our lives with.

2018 nearly totaled us; figuratively and literally, emotionally and financially. We didn’t succumb to the icy cold waters pulling us down. We resurfaced in 2019. There have been some hobbling events this year too, but none that put us at risk of losing the roof over our heads and for that I am thankful. Hitting rock bottom though, and then being crippled by the significant loss of Sugar, has altered my sense of direction and desire. Because of the immense amount of time dedicated to our children’s health and education commitments, I’ve determined that I want to explore where the paths of necessity take me. I want to see if the winds of inspiration spark something that sets my soul on fire again. Decidedly, my future is not goat milk fudge.

As the final days of this decade wind down it's important to acknowledge the changes. Time is one of the only things we cannot beg, borrow, steal or buy. Our children will only be children so long and I want to invest my time with them. We may always have goats on our farm, but we will never have another Sugar. The legacy she left won't soon be forgotten, and who knows... maybe we'll make a batch of goat milk fudge to honor her from time to time. 

​This afternoon Mallory asked me if I enjoyed making fudge. I pondered her question for a little bit before replying. I said, “I enjoy that we have created a unique product with our goat milk. I enjoy making money to help contribute to this family’s finances. And I enjoy the goat project because it’s something we can do together. But, I don’t enjoy making fudge per se. Why?” Mallory said, “Because I would only make stuff to sell that I actually enjoyed making.” The innocence and honesty and wisdom of a 12 year old child are refreshing. Nevertheless, I began measuring ingredients to start my first batch of fudge this week in preparation for our biggest craft fair of the season on Saturday.

Over the years I’ve learned some extremely important things about confection making, usually by trial and error followed by lots of graphic phrases. It’s made the homeschooling lessons colorful to say the least. Candy making is actually a science. For example, atmospheric pressure affects the boiling point of water. It’s important to calibrate your candy thermometer in a pot of boiling water before beginning any fudge making. Water doesn’t always boil at 212 degrees Fahrenheit. If your boiling point of water is higher, then your soft-ball stage, the point at which you take your confection off the stove, will also be higher.

I feel like we’ve perfected the science of goat milk fudge making pretty darn well. It’s evident when someone who initially turns up their nose at the sound of goat milk because of associated stigmas closes their eyes and a broad smile spreads across their face after Mallory convinces them to try a free sample. We’ve won awards for our fudge. We are proud of what this homeschooling adventure has blossomed into. It’s because of these reasons that days like today royally rot!

Four failed batches of fudge. Four! No rhyme, no reason. We changed variables such as milk from a different goat, hoping for a glimmer of an explanation, and still ended up with a sticky, curdled mess. It’s frustrating!

And it brings me back to Mallory’s question before I even began making fudge today. Do I enjoy making fudge? As tears slip down my cheeks I realize that I don’t enjoy making fudge. I don’t enjoy wasting 12 cups of expensive organic sugar.  I have carpal tunnel syndrome and it’s excruciating to hand milk our does, but I do it so that Mallory can drink raw goat milk and so that we can make and sell goat milk fudge. I don’t enjoy wasting 6 cups of milk from goats that we pour every cent into to feed organically and managed holistically, and that I expend all my hand strength to milk. Failure is humbling.  I don’t like the disappointment of floundering in fudge, but if I am to be honest with myself I don’t really like making fudge. Honesty is noble, right?!

​As I am sitting here wallowing in self pity that is sometimes bubbling at the surface of motherhood I realize that there are things I do enjoy and maybe I should spend more time concentrating my efforts on those things. I enjoy homeschooling Mallory. The biggest lesson I think I can give her is to be honest with herself, though in today’s case I guess she schooled me on the importance of that.

On a recent sweltering day in August, I was cleaning out my goats’ stalls; yes, stalls. You see, the barn was originally built for horses. It was a painstaking labor of love from my husband for our equine pals. When the last horse passed on we were just “getting into goats” and figured that the barn would serve the sheltering purpose albeit overkill for these cloven hoofed creatures.

Goats prefer to come and go as they please. They don’t want to be stalled in pairs or quads, even if it means protecting them from inclement weather. They want to be able to choose where they go and when, not just in terms of geographical location but also in terms of manure. There are pluses and minuses to that. The positive is that goat manure is ready to use as fertilizer the moment it exits the goat’s body; no composting needed. The minus is that it’s too small to be effectively scooped up with a typical dung fork. It’s an all or nothing sort of clean up that’s required for goats. No bedding means that the manure pellets can be swept or raked up.  Too much bedding and you just have to shovel it all out, which can get expensive.

We found a system that seems to work for us.  I usually clean our stalls once a week which seems adequate considering they spend less than 12 hours a day inside. I bed with premium kiln dried shavings. The goats add hay droppings to this bedding with the exorbitant amount they waste when choosing the perfect stems for eating from their hay racks. It’s impossible to scoop poops per say, but the shavings absorb the urine.  We use lots of lime to neutralize the acidity. We also use diatomaceous earth to help combat creepy crawlies. I generally feel like I do a good job keeping the stalls in order. We want the freshest tasting milk that isn’t tainted by odor, and this seems to work. It’s definitely far from a manure pack system, but on this particular hot day it certainly smelled like it as I picked up the first fork full and set it into the wheelbarrow with more of a thud than I’d intended.

These stalls hadn’t been cleaned in a few weeks. I was far behind.  I had still been suffering with post-concussive syndrome from an automobile accident that occurred in December 2014. The month before, I went in for a spinal tap alleviating the excess fluid around my brain and returning my cerebrospinal fluid pressure to a normal range.  I’d been flat out with a spinal headache for the week following that procedure. My husband and daughter became the lifeline for the animals on our farm, which required quite a bit of physical labor considering the seasonal meat-producing animals (pigs, chickens, and turkeys) were still here, consuming more time than seems tangible. But, oh, the sweetness of satisfaction in tasting the sustenance they provide us after all our nurturing was something we were all looking forward to.  Despite my incapacitation, the animals got fed and watered thanks to my family. I instructed them not to worry about cleaning the goat stalls. I wanted to clean them when I felt well enough. Somehow I find it relaxing; a chance for meditation.

Little did I know that I’d be dealt another blow.  My health took a horrible turn for the worse. My vitality was compounded due to anemia from hemorrhaging. Pretty invasive testing had to be done, and the results hung somewhere between tissue in a jar of formalin and a cytology report. Mentally, I was wasted. Positive affirmations weren’t any comfort.  I just wanted to have energy enough to work in my garden with golden sunshine warming my face. I had started a new regime of blood building herbal concoctions, as well as some natural progesterone cream.  It was appearing to work, but I knew it would be a slow process for my body to heal. Regardless, the stalls needed to be cleaned. I knew the animals weren’t living in squalor, thanks to many more bags of kiln dried shavings being piled on top of soiled bedding, but the cleanliness of my barn and the health of my animals have always been paramount.

I was still was weak. My arms felt like jelly worms and the dung fork like a lead weight. I could do this. It’s only three stalls. I was out of practice, but I’m inherently strong and even more strong-willed. Plus, this smell was pungent and I vowed to not yield until the work was finished. I set my phone on the ladder to the hay loft after spending a few minutes determining where our wireless internet reached so I could still hear my music.

Thompson Square started playing from my phone.
“We may shine, we may shatter,
We may be picking up the pieces here on after,
We are fragile, we are human,
We are shaped by the light we let through us”

I paused long enough to think about these lyrics, grabbed the dung fork again, and began shoveling into the wheelbarrow. Hot. It was so hot. The air was acrid. The flies were relentless. I swear my sweat was sweating. I had just loaded an entire wheelbarrow full in just 5 forkfuls. This was going to take all freaking afternoon! I took hold of the barrow’s wooden handles and lifted. Surprised by the once familiar weight, I awkwardly rolled it out of the barn. The incessant wind hit my face, cooling the sweat and even making goose bumps stand up on my arms. The manure pile seemed so far away. Why did we move it out behind the buck shed anyway? Too bad it’s not winter. I could just dump it here and plow it down to the pile with the truck. Damn stinky buck is heading into rut already too. Great! Load one was barely dumped and our flock of free ranging chickens attacked it like little velociraptors, consuming any maggots and scratching for any sunflower seeds the goats might have dropped into their bedding, happy for any discarded waste.

Back in the barn Gary Allan’s voice filled the air.
“But the struggles make you stronger
And the changes make you wise
And happiness has its own way
Of taking its own sweet time.
No, life ain't always beautiful
Tears will fall sometimes
Life ain't always beautiful
But it's a beautiful ride.”

His words were true. I wished happiness, and healthiness, would hurry the hell up though. Surely, mucking manure was not beautiful, but I was back in my barn. Only about a gazillion more burdening trips to the pile with dung, I thought.

I kept shoveling. I found myself singing along to the lyrics and realized that the sweat and the flies weren’t bothering me anymore, and the smell was subsiding as the barn became emptier. I was nearly finished before I knew it. Literally, two forkfuls of shit were all that remained in the last stall and the wheelbarrow could not hold anymore.  I had to go back to the manure pile with a 16th, near empty, load. It was as if life was saying one more ‘screw you’.

I checked my phone for the time and quickly did the math. I’d really finished three stalls that had piled up for three weeks in just 48 minutes. Really?! With a burst of pride, I set to sprinkling the stalls with pulverized lime and diatomaceous earth. I zipped open the plastic bags of shavings with my utility knife, and shook their contents into each stall with the greatest of abandon. I felt rejuvenated. Taking a deep breath, pine phenols filled my nostrils. I spread the shavings level with the pressure-treated wooden ledge of the barn frame with the fork. Everything looked refreshed, and I was gratified. I shut the music off and checked the time. Elated, I sent a text to my husband: I’m baaa-aaack! 1 hour to do all the stalls.

I walked down to the spot in the pasture where the goats were browsing on lush green. Sitting down, I noticed the wind had either died down or I was close enough to the trees in the stone wall that I was sheltered from it a little. Still sweat drenched but happy, I watched the goats take mouthful after nourishing mouthful. I listened to them chewing, swallowing, bringing up their cud, chewing some more, and swallowing again. I heard the Hairy Woodpecker tapping the maple tree behind me. The sun was sinking lower and I could begin to feel the oppressive heat dissipate. The ground was cool but hard and strong. For the first time in over a year and a half, I felt like I was on solid ground.

I thought about my life; its healthy direction forward. I thought about the goats; the pleasure their company provides. I thought about my daughter; the way she lights up my life and how important our farm is to her. I thought about the hard work of cleaning the barn, and I realized that life is a little bit like the dung fork and the wheelbarrow. Sometimes you have to shovel through more shit than you’d like. Sometimes you can only bear so much weight. Eventually though, the burden is gone. Relaxation, beauty, satisfaction and peace fill the empty space. It feels damn good.