My Gentle Barn (28 page)

Finally I entered the glorious second trimester. The nausea disappeared, my energy came back, and I could return to my old self—or at least pretend I was my old self. I got back in the saddle and we resumed our trail rides, and I fed the animals breakfast without feeling like I was going to lose my own.

In my third trimester, I continued to feel great. There was just this big belly in the way, making everything a little more awkward. But I still had a barnyard to run, so I chugged right along, acting like I wasn’t pregnant at all. I did all my chores, including shoveling horse and cow poop and toting heavy wheelbarrows across the uneven turf. Jay would catch sight of me moving a picnic table, and he’d rush over, calling, “Ellie, wait, let me do that.” Or he’d see me out the window as I lifted a large dog into the back of the SUV and he’d say, “You shouldn’t be doing that.”

“Oh, I’m fine,” I would say, and I’d hoist another dog in beside the first one.

All this time, as my belly grew, there were some other things brewing inside me too. I was attending a parenting class and was learning all about parent-child attachment. I was now seeing that some of the choices I’d made with Jesse had not been the best ones. Between the Mommy’s Helpers and preschool, Jesse had been handed off to a rotating collection of caregivers at such a tender age, and I had worried over the years about the toll it might have taken on him. I had seen our relationship shift over time, with a distance growing between us.
He seemed to get angry easily, for no apparent reason, and he had a harder and harder time looking me in the eye. Suddenly I understood why, and my heart ached to realize it had been my own actions that had hurt him. I had always been a firm believer that a woman could be both a mom and a career woman. This view was starting to change; I understood how critical it was that I be home with my child for the first few years of his or her life. I began working hard to make up for it with Jesse, learning how to be a better mom to him. And as the pregnancy progressed, my commitment to do things differently this time deepened. I had the chance with this new baby to do it right from the very beginning. But I knew that meant things were going to look different at the Gentle Barn for a while, and I did my best to prepare Jay for the shift—Jay, who was expecting “piece of cake.”

In late November, the day finally came. I went into labor—or so I thought. After examining me, our midwife told us these were false contractions; I was not dilated at all. We went home, but the contractions did not subside; neither did they build into true labor. They just dragged on … for a full week. We went back to the birthing center; I was still not dilated, and the baby had not dropped. The midwife suggested we go check things out with our backup doctor just to be safe.

“This duration and intensity of contractions can rupture your previous C-section,” the doctor said, “and if that happens, you could lose the baby.”

Two hours later I was being wheeled into the operating room for my second C-section. The midwife came to the hospital to support us through it, and she stuck around to make sure the baby was not taken away from us—which was the usual protocol at a C-section birth. Jay got to hold our beautiful new daughter, Cheyanne, while the surgeon sewed me up.

When we were all settled in our room, Molli and Jesse—who had been staying with my mom—got to meet their new little sister for
the first time. They even got to help the midwife give Cheyanne her first bath.

When we brought Cheyanne home from the hospital, I said to Jay, “The Gentle Barn is yours now.”

As much joy as Jay took in working by my side, he had always felt that it was
my
dream, that he was just my sidekick. No amount of reassurance had convinced him that the Gentle Barn was his, too.

“I’m serious,” I said. “Cheyanne is my priority now.” I was going to gaze into my daughter’s eyes for hours every day. I was not going to leave her with strangers, and her needs would come first before anything else—including the animals—as much as that decision would sometimes tear me apart. Jay was going to see how much this rescue operation was his because he was going to be running it more or less without me for a while. For the first couple of years of Cheyanne’s life, I would be staying in the background while Jay took the helm.

I would, of course, come down to visit the animals with Cheyanne, and if she was asleep, I would carry her in the baby sling on my hip as I fed the animals or led a tour. From the time she was a few months old, we’d sit in the barnyard for hours every day and watch the animals, listening to the chickens making their stream-of-consciousness peeping.
Oh, that was a good bit of grain. How about this one? No, that was a rock
. Cheyanne was as at home in the barnyard as she was in the house, and she was giving tummy rubs to the pigs before she could walk.

Jay learned fast that adding a new baby to the mix was not a piece of cake after all. My commitment to be there first and foremost for Cheyanne had landed him with a whole set of responsibilities that had always been shared by the two of us. It was a lot for one person to handle on his own—running all the groups, managing the office, doing all the fund-raising, and taking care of the animals. Before long, it became clear that Jay needed to hire someone to assist him in the office, and that we needed some additional help in the barnyard, too. As the Gentle Barn moved forward, finances became tighter
than ever, especially with a new baby in the house and hired help at the Barn. Although we were open on Sundays again—which was bringing in a trickle of money—and donations were slowly coming in, it wasn’t anywhere near enough yet. We were having trouble getting financial traction.

We’d refinanced our home twice already to keep the Gentle Barn going, and together we decided to do it one more time. This would tide us over until I was fully back on the job and we had built up our corps of volunteers—or so we thought. Before Cheyanne was a year old, we had to do yet another refi—four in all. Slowly we were draining all the equity out of our home. But our accountant assured us that once the Gentle Barn was back on its feet, our organization would be able to pay all the money back to us. Yet, with all these refis, we still couldn’t get a leg up on either our personal finances or those of the Gentle Barn. The mortgage company began threatening to take our house and our land. Every letter was a bill, and every phone call was a creditor.

One night at the end of summer, when Cheyanne was not quite a year old and still sleeping in our bed, my eyes snapped open in the dark. It was the sound of dogs barking that woke me, but then I heard something else, out on the gravel driveway.
Wheels
, I thought, and pulled Cheyanne close. “Jay?” I said. “Somebody’s here.”

“Huh?” he grunted, but he didn’t move. He was a heavy sleeper.

I grabbed his shoulder. “Jay, honey, wake up.”

He rolled over, and I could see the faint glint of his eyes in the dark.

“Do you hear that?”

“Dogs,” he said.

“No, but listen. There’s a car.”

Jay sat up. “Oh shit!” Now he was awake.

In less than a minute he had his pants on and was running down the stairs. I made sure Cheyanne was still sound asleep, turned on the baby monitor, and took the speaker with me as I followed after Jay.

Outside in the dark, Jay was pleading with a huge guy dressed
in black. “We have three kids,” he was saying. “We run a nonprofit. Please, just give us a little more time.”

Then I saw there was another guy, sitting behind the wheel of a truck. A tow truck.

“I’ve got to drive my kids to school in the morning,” Jay pleaded. “We have to go buy food.” I glanced up at Jesse’s and Molli’s bedroom windows, hoping they wouldn’t be woken by this.

“Sorry,” the guy said. “I gotta take it. It’s my job.”

We were going to be stranded, with three children and eighty animals. I joined Jay in pleading with the man, tears now streaking down my cheeks.

The big guy shook his head. “Sorry, man.” Then he motioned to the other guy to back up the truck.

Jay stepped in front of our car and planted his feet in the ground, as though he could stop a moving tow truck with his body, and I opened the car door and frantically began gathering our things—my purse, the car seat, toys, and sweaters. The truck was making that
beep beep beep
sound of backing up. And then I heard Jay yell, “Just stop a minute!” To my amazement and relief the beeping stopped. I pulled my head out of the car and saw Jay dig into the pocket of his pants. He held something out in the direction of the guy in black and said, “Just give us one more day. Please.”

The guy hesitated, but then stepped forward and took Jay’s offering. He pocketed it without a word and got in the truck.

Jay wrapped his arm around me. I was still crying and I could feel Jay’s body shaking. He guided me back inside and said, “Well, that’s this week’s groceries.”

He had bought us a day from the repo men for $300.

Was it possible our parents had been right all along, that we were being irresponsible and throwing our money—and some of theirs—
into a sinking ship? Were we being selfish putting our kids through all this uncertainty? Had that deep, inner guidance I’d gotten to move to a larger property been false—my own willful thinking, and not the universe talking to me after all? I couldn’t believe that tossing away my dream could possibly be the right decision when it would cause so many animals and kids to lose out on the healing they needed. And yet we couldn’t keep doing what we were doing. The strain was too much. Something had to give.

Jay and I went over and over the choices—every one of which felt like a dead end. After much discussion and soul searching, we finally knew we had to face the truth; despite all we had poured into this endeavor and our very best efforts to make it work, we had simply failed. As excruciating as it was, it was time to say uncle.

We agreed that we would not give up the animals we’d already rescued, but the Gentle Barn would have to shut its doors. No more rescues, no more at-risk youth programs, no more Sundays open to the public. We would both get jobs and find a smaller property in a cheaper area and sell our piece of paradise.

We hired a real estate agent who specialized in ranches and equine properties in the area to see if she could find us something inexpensive with a habitable house and enough land for our animals. After three weeks of seeing condemned shacks on ragged, desolate land, we finally found a five-acre, fenced lot in Lancaster—about thirty miles from our current place. There was space for all of our animals, and at the front of the plot sat a small modular home with wall-to-wall green shag carpet. But it wasn’t boarded up and it had indoor toilets. We’d make do.

The agent, Maurine, came to us in Santa Clarita to have us sign the paperwork. She was a warm, lovely woman in her late fifties with flaming-red hair, and she always said hello to our kids. When she finished oohing and aahing over Cheyanne, she set the papers on the dining-room table.

“What you’re signing here is simply permission for me to sell this
property. I’ll be handling both the sale of your place and the purchase of the one you’re buying.”

She handed me a pen, and I tried to focus on the papers in front of me, but I felt like someone had just punched me in the stomach and I couldn’t see the words because my eyes were filling with tears. I blinked and tried not to cry, but it didn’t work. Tears streamed down my face and I started snuffling and tried to take a deep breath, but my chest felt tight. Jay brought me some tissues and put a hand on my shoulder, and that sent me over the edge and I started sobbing.

Maurine cleared her throat and said, “Um, can I ask what’s wrong?”

“Oh … don’t mind me,” I managed to get out through the tears. “I’m OK.” But clearly I wasn’t OK. I was bawling and blowing my nose into the damp tissue I was holding, and I could feel Maurine’s eyes on me. “It’s just, this was my dream since I was seven,” I said, and I told her how hard we had worked, with our own hands and our own backs. How we’d planted every tree and dug every posthole and made this place so beautiful. How we were helping so many animals and so many kids, and that it just seemed wrong to come this far just to fail. At which point I began sobbing so hard I was hyperventilating and couldn’t get another word out.