Let me tell you a story about a heifer named Sassafras.
I was doing chores one summer morning when I found her shaking in the corner of one of our sheds with her head covered in blood and gore. I noticed a hole in the wall. She had stuck her head through it, and as she pulled her head out she managed to scalp herself on a jagged piece of tin.
I immediately called my husband, who then called our veterinarian. We got Sassafras moved into a makeshift pen and our vet assessed her. Because Sassafras’s skin was torn up so badly and so far apart, there was no stitching it back together, and we had two options: butcher her immediately or irrigate the wound with saline several times a day for the next couple of months until the wound healed on its own.
You never know if you don’t try, right? We chose the latter, and with lots of TLC, Sassafras healed. She’s in the milking string now and, despite a goofy-looking back of the head, gets along just fine with the rest of the herd.
Not long after Sassafras was injured, I was discussing what had happened with my therapist. She then shared something with me that changed my outlook, not just on farming but life in general.
She said, “Full responsibility is not the same as full control.”
After a lifetime of being extremely harsh on myself, those words didn’t compute right away for me. I remember being taken aback before I applied it to Sassafras’s injury. “So,” I said, “full responsibility would have looked like patching the hole as soon as we noticed it, but full control would have looked like Sassafras not putting her head through the hole in the first place.”
“Exactly,” my therapist said with a chuckle.
In the past, a freak accident with any one of our animals would have sent me down a spiral into a very dark place beforehand. I would beat myself up wondering what I could have and should have done to prevent such an unfortunate event.
However, learning that there is a difference between responsibility and control puts the good and the bad of farming in a wholly new light.
Even a quick search online reveals the difference between responsibility and control. Responsibility is defined as “the state or fact of being responsible, answerable or accountable for something within one's power, control or management,” while control is defined as “to exercise restraint or direction over; dominate; command.”
The difference there lies within one’s power. We can’t exercise restraint, direction or command over what lies outside our control, like the weather or markets.
Besides, cattle are not rational creatures. As the saying goes, when you have livestock, you have deadstock.
We can make sure all their needs are met and things will still go awry, not because of anything we did or didn’t do, but because cattle aren’t always very bright.
Even so, bad things happen even when we have the very best of intentions, not because of anything we did or didn’t do, but because life is unfair and not everything happens for a reason. Matthew 5:45 says, "He makes his sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and unrighteous."
As farmers, we are responsible for the animals in our care and making sure their needs are met day and night. When we work with animals every day, we get attached to them, so when one of them gets sick or hurt or even dies, it’s hard not to take it personally.
Of course, we’re also human, and we’re bound to make mistakes from time to time because none of us are perfect.
For entirely too long, though, I blamed everything that went wrong on myself instead of accepting that what happened was not my fault. To me, taking the blame for something I didn’t necessarily do wrong felt easier than accepting I had no control over the outcome.
To take that a step further, we are so used to shouldering heavy loads and carrying burdens that not carrying one feels unsafe, like we aren’t pulling our weight or we aren’t doing enough.
Those nine words, though, full responsibility is not the same as full control, helped me to let go of some of the guilt and shame I would feel anytime something bad happened or something didn’t go according to plan.
Even though we are dairy farmers with a lot of responsibilities, we’re only human at the end of the day. If there’s a burden you’re carrying, I hope those words can help you feel a little lighter, too.
