Goat Musings

Part 1

My son left home one night because I insisted he had to milk the goats the next day, just a chore he had to accept with the rest of us, I told him, or he would have to live somewhere else. I actually said that.

He chose the second option, deciding to live with his friend who lived down the street and around the corner, which is where I thought he might go but didn’t know for sure.

That was a long night for me. I didn’t sleep, just sat up in the living room and worried about him and our relationship and about what the parents of his friend would think (yes, I'm ashamed to say I worried about that) and about the possibility that he could just head south to Salt Lake, although I didn’t know how he would get there. He finally came home at midnight, having changed his mind about living somewhere else.

It was probably a long night for him and a hard one. I can't know for sure, though, because he was never the one to talk about things much, especially when the things involved his feelings.

It wasn’t the first time—for the milking. The goats weren’t new. But it was the first time my brown-haired boy got up his guts and called his mother’s bluff. This happened in 1980 when he was 15, had not yet achieved his full stature, and was still a "little brother," sort of living under the shadow of his older brother, who milked the goats, too. We all milked the goats, except our youngest, and she wasn’t a year old yet. Why he picked that night, that moment to rebel I don’t know, but clearly he thought he’d had enough.

I have said we all milked the goats, and I would like to say that all the older children took their turns and the milking chore was spread evenly among them, but I don’t think it’s true. They took turns, but sometimes the older brother didn’t get home from school in time for the evening milking, and he was harder to roust out of bed in the early morning.

It’s possible that this 15-year-old of mine milked more than anyone except his dad and me, and I had fallen and broken my wrist and pelvis a couple of months before this incident, so my milking activities had stopped. I guess he picked up the slack.

Maybe he thought if he quit, we’d get his big brother to do more. Resentment can build up in a person, you know. Or maybe he thought we’d get rid of the goats. He had recently begun saying he didn’t like the milk.