Flat Broke with Two Goats

by Jennifer McGaha

them—I realized that if someone told me right then that I could go back ten years, have my old life back exactly as it was, a life where I never saw my husband, where our lives were always about becoming instead of being, I would have refused.

When you have gone through a sort of travesty of your own making, failure begins to feel like part of you. You get used to it. People around you expect you to fail, and you learn to expect it from yourself, to see it as almost comforting in its familiarity. You begin to believe you are destined to make a mess of things. But then there are those unexpected kindnesses, those moments when someone does something to make you believe that perhaps you are more than the sum of everything you have done wrong, that perhaps you are worth more than you think.

She knew you could make mistakes and get past them and that you could forgive the people you loved for doing the same.