What I Learnt about Love

when a lamb came to stay

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Sylvia and lamb

We have a lamb situation.

His name is Frankie.

And he’s sleeping on my couch.

How did this happen, I hear you ask?

Just when I thought life with four children was ‘almost bearable’ my husband organised a lamb for the family. In the middle of the school holidays. Just for a week or two.

“It will be good for you,” he quipped. As he slipped out the door, grabbed his bike, and left for work.

Frankie arrived at 10.30am — a white cloud with two large frightened eyes. He looked almost suburban in a blue collar, floral jacket with velcro tabs, and a disposable nappy. Lottie scooped him up in her arms, patting and soothing him with gentle words. Our cat shot out the back door with her tail puffed up like a door sausage.

I rang my mother. Lottie and I were driving to Grandmas house in a few hours to join her and the rest of the children. “Any chance you have room for a lamb?” I asked. There was a pause. “A real lamb?” she chuckled, “how old is he?”

“Four days,” I said. “He’s an orphan, he needs a mother.”

“It will be crowded,” she replied. “But I think we can manage.”

“You better take lamb off the menu tonight,” I suggested, and we both laughed.

On the drive Frankie slept on Lottie’s lap — his head flopped over her arm, his eyelids fluttering under thick wire-brush eyebrows. I swooned, nothing is sweeter than a sleeping baby. Lottie managed to eat a sandwich with her left hand without waking the lamb. We talked about how we would take care of Frankie.

“We have to bottle feed on a schedule Mum, no on-demand feeding, or he’ll become bloated,” she told me.

Lottie had spent the morning researching on the iPad. I nodded, goosebumps rolling over my skin as I remembered all the exhausting years of young motherhood.

Would Frankie sleep through the night I wondered?

Was I ready?

Was my heart big enough?

*

And just like that we had a baby in the family again.

We woke to the sounds of hunger in the still-dark morning and began the day warming milk in a jug of hot water, Frankie and the children frolicking around the kitchen table. We timed family outings around bottle-feeding schedules and watched movies on the couch, Frankie snuggled on my daughter’s lap.

Though my mother and I were the ones who mixed the formulae, sterilised the bottles, wiped excrement from the floor, feet, and a woolly bottom, and wrestled nappies over ‘difficult to cover’ anatomy.

In the evenings, after Frankie had his ‘dream feed’ we shared lamb stories. My mother told me about the tiny lambs her mother would place in the warming draw of her wood-fired stove, hoping they would survive the night. And how the ladies of the house would lift their skirts to thaw chilly bottoms as they cooked dinner.

And I told my mother about the black and white lamb at my great-grandfather’s farm that I visited every spring morning when I was five. I’ll never know what happened to that lamb. I guess I made up my own ending — an old sheep grazing in a paddock full of long luscious grass?

*

Or broccoli, mint and thyme? Like the culinary choices of Frankie when he escaped his pen — my seedlings trampled, flowering brassica gobbled, and cascading herbs trimmed. I was not impressed.

Neither were our other animals. Our cockatoo is jealous and our chickens are in a flap. One of our neighbours has complained about the noise. “Is the bleating sheep a permanent fixture?” she asked my husband. Have some compassion, I wanted to shout over the fence, he has no mother, he needs love. But I’ll agree, the lamb does have some attitude.

When it rained hard one afternoon, Frankie was at the back door, his tail twirling, his call announcing, ‘I will be coming inside, thank you,’ as he made a rush for the loungeroom and my couch.

I wonder if this is a sign. Should we move to the country?

But mostly, we think Frankie is adorable and the children love him. How could you not?

*

Last week, we returned Frankie to his home on a farm in Franklin, southern Tasmania. On the drive back to Hobart I felt lighter, with less to do and one less to care for. But my heart yearned —

for a little lamb and his familiar call, the way his tail twirled and milk foamed on his chin as he drank from his bottle, the sound of his hooves clopping on our hardwood floor, and the way he followed us everywhere, utterly devoted. Under the clamour of caring for a lamb and the children I hadn’t noticed how much I had loved him.

Perhaps it is only after you lose something you love that you discover how much joy it had brought you.

And you discover that you have space in your heart to love harder, to share more of your warmth, to give more of yourself.

Anyone who has cared for a fragile, gentle creature — a baby, a lamb, a puppy — knows the joy that comes from loving without requiring anything in return. And the more you love, the more love grows, like a chain reaction, a garland of hearts.

Love reminds us of the way everything is connected. It reminds us that we are not alone.

*

Last night, as I ripped leaves from silverbeet stalks, the sun sinking below the kitchen window, my children hungry and dinner late, I thought of the lines of a poem by Diane Ackerman —

isn’t it enough that all creeks flow seaward;

isn’t it enough that riverbanks come in pairs?

And I whispered to the vegetables, because no one else was listening —

to be busy with love, that is enough, isn’t it?

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What’s keeping you busy these days? What’s bringing you love?

Wishing you more of it —

Kate x