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I had promised my husband that I’d bring home some goat’s milk.
That was before the two goats arrived at the Farminary at Princeton Seminary, where I was studying theology and working as a farmhand. Maybe, I told him, we could even make cheese.
When it was my turn to milk the goats, I wrestled Daisy onto the milking stand, put a bucket under her, and reached for a teat. She responded with a sideways kick. I tried again; she tried again. Within minutes, I was sopping and sweaty. Most days, I got no more than a couple of tablespoons, which included whatever was in the bucket when Daisy inevitably kicked it over. That morning, I got enough, maybe, to fill a shot glass, and it turned out to be the high-milk mark of my time with the goats.
Daisy and her kid, August, were essentially visiting teaching assistants, borrowed for six weeks for a class on the society of ancient Israel. The idea was that the students might get a sense of life in a bygone pastoral culture by tending to them.
I wasn’t enrolled in that class, though I was at the farm almost every day doing other chores. During those weeks, August became one of my greatest teachers. She helped me heal long-standing shame about my body and then showed me, in her goatliness, exactly how to love it again.
The farm often reminded me of my physical shortcomings. I blacked out while weeding. I was useless at splitting wood. I struggled to close a particularly unwieldy barn door.
Every failure resurrected the hot humiliation I learned to have about my body as a kid. I hated its shortness and its weakness and its lack of coordination. I hated my slanty eyes and my coarse hair — reminders of my difference — and my tricky elbow, damaged forever by a Chinese-American childhood spent playing the violin.
Most of all, I hated the invisible scars I carried from when I was raped. I was 15 years old, but it feels like the attack has replayed interminably ever since; what happened in a matter of minutes metastasizing throughout my life, my body, my spirit, my soul.
