Weaning Time

This time of year, a lot of outfits across the West start pulling calves off their mothers.

If you have never been near a ranch on weaning day, here is what it sounds like: loud. The calves get sorted into one pen and the cows into the other, and for two or three days both sides holler across the fence like the world is ending. The calves have never eaten a meal that did not come from their mother. The cows have not spent a morning without that calf since it was born. Nobody asked either one of them. It is a change that hurts on both sides of the wire, and there is no way to explain it to them.

Then, somewhere around the third day, it goes quiet. The calves find the hay and the water. The cows drift back to grazing. A week later the calves are standing on their own four feet in a way they never quite were before.

We have been thinking about that this week, mostly because a lot of us are living some version of it right now. September does that. A kid moves out or starts school. A season on the job ends. A friendship changes shape. Something you leaned on — a routine, a person, a way things used to be — gets sorted into the other pen, and you find yourself standing at the fence, hollering.

The verse about the weaned child

There is a short psalm, three verses long, that we have been carrying around this week, and the middle of it reads like it was written by somebody who has stood at that fence:

“Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child.” — Psalm 131:2

Notice what the writer does not say. He does not say the weaning never happened, or that it did not hurt, or that somebody explained it to his satisfaction. He says he quieted himself. Like a weaned child. The picture is not the calf bawling at the wire. It is the calf on day four — standing easy, still in the same pasture as its mother, still fed and watered, just not the way it used to be fed. The child in the verse is not abandoned. He is content. He has stopped demanding and started trusting that he is still looked after.

That is the part we keep chewing on. The bawling is not wrong. It is what a creature does when something it needed gets taken away and nobody consulted it. But the psalm says there is a second stage on the other side of the noise, and you can get there — not by pretending the loss did not happen, but by settling into the fact that you are still in good hands.

The line right before this one is the writer admitting he does not try to sort out matters that are over his head. We like that. There are things in a year we are not going to understand from inside the pen. The calf does not know what the weaning is for. Neither do we, half the time.

Quiet is something you do

Here is what surprised us about the verse: “quieted myself” is active. It is a chore. Not a feeling that shows up on its own, but something the writer did, on purpose, the way you would check a water tank or throw a flake of hay. Quiet is work — the same way rest turned out to be work when we talked about the seventh day.

Most of us have the opposite habit. We keep bawling at the fence long past day three. We text the person who is not texting back. We refresh the thing we cannot control. We rehearse the argument we lost, or the plan that fell through, until the noise in our own heads is the loudest thing in the county. And the whole time, the hay and the water are right there.

So here is the small try for the week. Pick the one thing you are hollering about right now — the change you did not ask for, the answer that is not coming the way you wanted it. Give it three days of quiet. Not three days of pretending it is fine. Three days of not forcing it, not fixing it, not picking it up every hour to see whether it has changed. Eat what is in front of you. Do the chores that are actually yours. See what the quiet does.

If faith sits at the center of your life, you already know what the weaned child is leaning on, and you know the mother in the psalm never left the pasture. If you are just here for the ranch stories, you can still try the smaller version: stop bawling at the wire for three days and notice that you are still standing, still fed, and a little steadier than you were.

We are learning this one right alongside you. September is loud at our place too.

Whether you keep a pew or a porch, thanks for sitting a while this morning. Same time next Sunday.

— The Sackett Ranch Family