Healing social anxiety via goats

The smell of toast greets me at the door, which I open without knocking.

Nobody’s home but the house hangs onto the memory of breakfast, cosy with dressing gowns and boiling kettles and the fuzzy shock of a toddlers’ hair, unbrushed.

Now everyone’s at work, or daycare, and I stand in my friends’ laundry wrapped in the toasty residue of their morning. The washing machine is halfway through a load and there’s another in the queue. Cloth nappies. The cat litter tray. A mop. Nothing primped on my account; I am entrusted with the truths of the household.

Every Wednesday morning I milk Mel’s goats, sometime between first light and second coffee. I park up, stride to the shed and fill a bucket with chaff and grains, a pinch of copper, sulfur and seaweed, a slosh of apple cider vinegar. Then I duck into the laundry adjoining their cottage and grab the stainless steel milking pail and a damp cloth before walking down to the back paddock where the kid goat bleats – waaaaaaaaa! – and the does press against the fence in greeting.

I tip the goaty granola into three separate feeders on the milking stand and open the gate. Lupin, Maeve and Marie clip clop up the wooden ramp to the platform, always in the same order, and I gently close the locks around their necks and feet, their heads already buried in breakfast. Three litres of raw milk later, I reverse the steps and see myself out.

I love this routine, live for it. The hushed home and upturned toys. The ginger cat who’s never quite sure if he’s my mate or mortal enemy. The goats with their beach ball rumens, wispy beards and udders of every size, shape and gravitational bent. And I especially love those mornings when my friend’s smiling head pops through the door as I’m washing the milking pail — she’s home! Snappily dressed for work or still in pyjamas, me with my hands in the sink and straw clinging to my jumper — and we share a percentage of a catch up that’s enough to replenish the relational tank till next time.

Way back when I interviewed Claire Dunn on the podcast, we broached the topic of introversion. Claire suggested that, just maybe, it’s the formality of our social engagements — with their set times and dress codes and pressures to perform — that makes introverts of naturally sociable people. I really feel that as somebody who has run from big events, and small ones too.

But these days, rooted in growing and foraging and local gatherings that fuzz the boundary between hanging out and lending a hand, I seem to have boundless social energy, because it hasn’t been drained worrying about what I’m going to wear or how we’ll split the bill.

This story began with toast, and the purring domesticity of Wednesday mornings at Mel’s house. The subtext is how brilliant it is to share goats, and the wealth of still-warm milk in glass bottles clinking in my backpack. And the message, now I really think about it, is how healing it is to bear witness to our friends’ spaces in their natural state, their faces too. And that sharing the load — milking, planting, processing, minding the kids — far from inconvenient, is the connection we’ve been searching for.