Donkeys love bread and whenever we go shopping our out to dinner, Maria looks for stale or left over bread to bring home to them, they are the sort of gummy things donkeys love to gnaw on. Maria often says she would not have been a good mother, and I think that anyone who knows her knows that this is not so, she would have been a wonderful mother.

For various reasons, having a child wasn’t something she chose to do, and while I am very grateful for my own daughter, I do sometimes regret that Maria and I didn’t meet earlier, could not have a child together. When we first got together, I told her I would love to have a child with her, but she is wiser than I am sometimes and I came to see it would not have been a good thing to try at my age.

When I see us caring for animals together – helping Minnie heal, working with Red, caring for the dogs and sheep and chickens, I sometimes wonder if this isn’t our way of having children together.  We have both struggled with family issues, and we seemto have constructed our own family together. Maria is patient, loving, nurturing, thoughtful, everyone one of our animals feels safe with her and attached with her. Me too.

Consciously, at least, I do not see these animals as my children – Emma is very different than a dog or a donkey, I am acutely aware of animal’s dependence on me, on their lack of conscience, vocabulary, a will to better their lives or improve themselves. Yet this nurturing, this way of living with animals,  is something Maria and I share, it is a connection between us, it is a mirror of what might have been had we found one another earlier. My daughter has turned out to be a wonderfully grounded, successful and loving person,  but her mother and I did not really see raising a child in the same way, we did not see too many things in the same way.

I suppose this estrangement was one reason I left my life to move to Bedlam Farm. These past two weeks, Maria and I have been confronted with a small yet revealing thing – caring for a barn cat who lost her leg after some kind of attack in the night. I was struck by how well we dealt with it together – the discussions about cost, the decision to operate, the daily choices one has to make about medicine, whether or not Minnie should get outside, when to stop the painkillers, how to get her to eliminate, gauging the pain she is in, sorting out the vet’s recommendations from our own instincts, wondering whether she should stay in the crate, be near the dogs, be free while Frieda was around, how to get her to use the litter box, the best way to pay for the operation, to need to ignore the many people telling us what to do, what would happen if their advice was not taken.

We worked through all of this in tandem, together, without, anger,  argument or resentment or annoyance. I see now how much these things had surrounded me in my other lives.

This process did not make me see Minnie as a child – she is not a child to us, and I would hate for my daughter to ever think she was – but it did make me see how together we are,  how well we talk things through, how carefully we listen to and respect one another, how much of a difference it makes when you have a partner with whom you do see things in the same way. Minnie has benefited from this calm and focused atmosphere, as a child might, and I see how healing nurturing and love is.

I see the impact our way has on the animals around us, they are loving, well-behaved, easy with people, sociable and trusting. It is our own version of the peaceable kingdom, even troubled animals who come here usually evolve into calm and affection creatures. Food and attention over time will do that, the donkey love their daily bread.

There is yoy, sadness, regret and acceptance in all of this – the sweet and hard stuff of life.  In our love for animals there is always loss and sadness as well as love and joy. The power of animals is that they help us be better and more insightful human beings if we pay attention to them, and listen to them, rather than tell them what they are thinking or believing that we know. I am grateful for the child that I have, sometimes deeply sorry that Maria and I will never have a child together – I think we would have been very good at it – and struck by the nurturing and loving world we are trying to build for ourselves. There was a time when I would have found it foolish to bring stale bread home to a donkey, and now it seems the most natural and sensible thing in the world to do.

This is their daily bread, it is ours.