The cows still have to be milked
The cows still have to be milked
Self-reliance is not grit for its own sake. It is the quiet confidence of someone who knows they can show up — even when it costs them. And it is one of the most important things you can bring to a marriage, a family, or a life.
We both grew up on dairy farms. The details of our experiences were different, but we came away having learned the same lesson so deeply that it became part of who we are. We have a phrase between us — shorthand for everything that experience taught us. The cows still have to be milked. It sounds simple. To us, it means everything.
We use it with each other regularly. We have tried using it with others and found it takes too much explanation to land. But between us, there is no better statement about what self-reliance actually means in practice — not as an abstract virtue, but as a lived reality. This is that explanation.
Bruce’s story
Bruce
We lived next to my grandpa’s dairy farm. Helping him was something I loved — it was optional, it was time with him, it was my choice. Then when I was twelve years old, my grandpa fell off a haystack and broke his neck. He survived, but he never fully recovered. And what had been optional became mine. Every morning at five, and every evening — without exception.
In the winter it could be forty below zero. In the summer, close to a hundred degrees. Some mornings I didn’t feel well. Some mornings I didn’t want to go. It didn’t matter. The cows still had to be milked.
I remember one January morning in particular. I woke up to the radio and heard the temperature — forty-two below. I lay there and something in my whole spirit wanted to rebel. I thought about my friends, still warm in their beds, who would be there for hours. The thought of pulling on all those layers and still being painfully cold seemed unbearable. And then I thought about the milkers — almost certainly frozen up, which meant an extra half hour of miserable work on top of everything else.
And then one thought stopped everything. If I didn’t go, my mom would have to.
I had been entirely consumed with feeling sorry for myself. One thought of someone else broke the trance. I got up, dressed, and went out.
I didn’t appreciate any of this at the time — putting it mildly. But that experience gave me something I have drawn on for the rest of my life. I know I can do hard things. I know I can show up when it matters, even against incredible odds. And I know that the moment I stop thinking only about myself and think of someone else, something shifts.
Val’s story
Val
My chores weren’t the milking itself, but they were real and they were daily. Herding the cows in from far-away pastures, feeding the calves, the twice-daily rhythm that never paused for anything. Not for Christmas. Not for illness. Not for a bad day at school or a heartbreak or an injury. The work was just there, waiting, every single day.
Farm work wasn’t profitable in the way people imagine. Crops failed. Cattle died. Machinery broke at the worst possible moments. I worked jobs in the summers to have money for clothes and the things I needed. I learned early that you provide for yourself what you can, that you don’t wait for circumstances to cooperate, and that hard things don’t become optional just because you’re struggling.
Years later, in the hardest seasons of my marriage, I believe that early training is part of what kept me standing. I could wipe my tears, put a smile on my face, and drive my kids to their games and their performances. I could show up to church when my heart was breaking. I could keep going when I desperately wanted to stop — because I had always known that the cows still have to be milked, no matter what you’re feeling.
What this means beyond the farm
We are aware that not everyone reading this grew up on a farm. But we suspect you know what we mean. Life has its equivalent of the cows for all of us — the demands that don’t pause for our emotional state, the responsibilities that require us to get up and function regardless of what we’re carrying.
The people who have learned to meet those demands — who have developed the capacity to show up even when it costs them — bring something invaluable into a marriage. Not because hardness is a virtue, but because self-sufficiency is a form of love. When you can carry your own weight, you are not a burden. And when the hard days come — and they always do — you have something to draw from.
This is what we mean when we talk about self-reliance. Not independence for its own sake. Not the closed-off self-reliance of someone who has decided not to need anyone. But the grounded, practiced capacity of a person who has shown up when it was hard, who has learned what they are made of, and who brings that knowledge into every relationship they enter.
Bruce & Val
We came into our current marriage as two people who had already learned — the hard way — how to carry their own weight. We are not perfect at it. But we are practiced. And what that has made possible between us is something we are still grateful for every day: a love that doesn’t have to do the work of holding either of us together. It can simply be what it is.
The cows still have to be milked. And somehow, in the going out to do it, we find out who we are.
And yet — sometimes the cows have to go
There is one more thing the farm taught us. The same discipline, the same showing up, the same refusal to quit — there came a moment when the right answer was not to keep milking. There came a moment when the right answer was to sell the farm.
Knowing the difference between the two is perhaps the most important and the most difficult thing this metaphor has to teach. We have written about it separately, because it deserves its own space.
On knowing when to keep going — and when letting go is the most courageous thing you can do:
Read: Sometimes you have to sell the farm →Somewhere in the going out to do the hard thing, we find out who we are. It turns out that is worth a great deal.