CHAPTER THREE

In February, Derek’s parents arrived for their first real visit since the welcome party on the day we arrived at the farm. I was excited because I knew Brad and Janice were thrilled about the farm—at least I thought they were, especially since they had contributed to our fund-raiser. We showed them the barn and the fences and all the work we’d done so far. Then we came back into the dining room and settled in. Esther was on her bed in the sunroom, Derek went back to the barn to get something, and I had to get something from the trailer outside, so we left Derek’s parents to themselves for the moment.

I wasn’t gone even ten minutes, but when I came back inside, no one was there. Derek was still outside in the barn, and Esther was in the dining room at the bottom of the stairs. I assumed Brad and Janice had gone out to the barn to be with Derek, so I carried on into the kitchen, without thinking much of it.

Derek came back in a minute later and asked where his parents were, so I realized they hadn’t been with him and that the fact that Esther was standing at the bottom of the stairs was a clue to their whereabouts. Immediately I knew something was wrong, and the look on my face alerted Derek to the same thing.

“Mom? Dad?” he called out.

Brad was upstairs in the makeshift “Esther offices,” and he called back as if nothing were going on, said he was “just taking a look around.” Janice had barricaded herself in the bathroom on the main floor, behind the door at which Esther was currently sniffing—Esther, of course, smelled their fear. What I didn’t know was that Esther had gotten up when I was outside, and she’d started to challenge Derek’s parents. When Esther challenges someone she gets pushy. Sometimes she’ll physically push you with her head, but usually it’s a more subtle intimidation—e.g.: blocking a doorway so you can’t get by. This was what she was doing with Janice—blocking the door, grunting, and getting into her personal space. Esther has no respect for personal space when she’s challenging. They already were not big fans of our girl, and the challenge led them to plot their own separate escapes, which left them on different floors.

“You can come out, Mom,” Derek said. “Don’t worry, we fed her already today.”

Derek loves to push his mother’s buttons. He eggs her on more than anybody. I am so gentle with Janice, but Derek will poke her and prod her until he gets a reaction, which he then finds funny. Derek says he just “asks her questions,” but we both know he irritates her on purpose. It’s not just about Esther; he does it with everything. All families have their little ways of goofing on one another, but this was not the time to be poking the bear.

We put Esther outside, and once we convinced Derek’s parents of that (and that I would take her to the barn), Brad came all the way downstairs, Janice came out of the bathroom, and they both sat uncomfortably at the dining table. Janice’s eyes were red, and you could tell she’d been crying. You can also tell when Janice is mad. It’s her Scandinavian roots. (She recently did a DNA test and found out she’s Scandinavian but insists it’s bullshit and that she’s from Ireland.)

Brad and Janice were both pretending nothing was wrong, but Derek wouldn’t let it go. He kept asking what the problem was, and that’s when the waterworks started again.

“What’s going on?” Derek asked. “I can see you’re upset.”

Finally, Janice snapped. “It’s the pig! Esther was trying to kill me!”

“Come on!” Derek said. “Of course she wouldn’t hurt you.”

“She was just sniffing to see who was in the bathroom,” I interjected, trying to calm her down. “She’s not used to you guys being around; she’s just trying to get to know you.”

I don’t think Janice truly believed Esther would kill her and eat her, but family time with Derek had decreased since the move to the farm, and she was missing her son and perhaps feeling abandoned—and worse, replaced by a pig.

So the Catholic guilt trip came out.

“You care more about the pig being happy than me being happy!” Janice cried. “You love that pig more than your own mother!”

It pretty much became a full-blown yelling match from there. This fight was worse than the one we’d had in Georgetown at Christmas. (For those who don’t know about our previous Christmas, it was a disaster of epic proportions. Brad and Janice brought a deep fryer and insisted on cooking a turkey in our vegan home. Fast-forward to now, with Cornelius, our rescue turkey, practically taking up residence in our home, and you can understand why this wouldn’t go over well. But somehow this visit started out even worse. At one point, Janice even asked Brad to take her home, but they ended up not leaving. We managed to talk them down—that’s when I got more vocal. I usually try to agree and appease when it comes to Brad and Janice, and I usually get quiet when it comes to arguing. I’m always on great terms with them. I rarely get a hug from Brad, but we’re never in a bad place.) While I try to keep my mouth shut when it comes to arguments, in this particular case, even I got involved once Janice was repeating her new go-to: “You love a pig more than you love us!”

It got heated, but I was trying to calm them down. I had so hoped things would be better on this visit. In fact, things needed to be better on this visit, or I was worried it would forever set the tone for our relationship with Brad and Janice moving forward, at least for as long as Esther was in the picture. I know everybody likes to make jokes about their in-laws, and how they wish they didn’t have to see them. But my relationship had improved so much with both of them since Derek and I had first gotten together, and I really didn’t want to lose that. Derek and I both thought the move to the farm would help bring them even closer, because there was so much to do. Brad loves the outdoors and Janice is great at organizing and sorting and all those things moms do so well, so I thought they’d be here all the time.

But it seems that Derek’s parents had believed that our buying the house and the farm—with the help of their donation to the fund-raising campaign—meant Esther would now live in the barn with the other animals, and our life would return back to pre-pig normal. They didn’t get that Esther was one of us and that this was her house just as much as ours.

This whole scene was doing little to help mend the already-strained relationship Derek’s parents had with Esther. Janice was openly expressing how unhappy she was, and she was still irate about the way she’d been portrayed in the first book. I was mortified about that too. I seem to recall her saying the words, “Don’t you ever utter my name in public again.” (Oops.)

So dinner was tense, to say the least. Janice refused to eat vegan cheese and wouldn’t really try anything she wasn’t familiar with. It was unpleasant for everyone.

The mobile home on our property is a full living space with a kitchen, a living room, two bedrooms, and a full bathroom. The whole trailer, except for one guest bedroom, has now been taken over by the Happily Ever Esther Farm Sanctuary (HEEFS) office and the Esther Store shipping department, but at the time Brad and Janice visited, it was just a big, welcoming, pig-free space. We had turned on the water and power in the trailer in anticipation of their visit, so, fortunately, they could go there after dinner, and once they had retreated to the safer space, Esther could come back into the house.

Since then, Brad and Janice have not set foot in our house—they go straight to the trailer or just stay outside. It’s not perfect, but at least it means we can have them over, and offer somewhere they’ll both feel comfortable while I continue to work on their relationship with Esther. (One day Janice will call Esther her grandpiggy, I can feel it.) Nevertheless, I was super optimistic about where our relationship was heading.

It was a few months before we saw them again, but that next visit was 100 percent better. Janice still wasn’t cuddling with Esther by any means, but the weather was warmer, so we could all be outside, and that seemed to make a huge difference. It was the best visit we’d had in years. And then, I think, a real turning point was when they attended the rehearsal for a TEDx Talk we did. It was the first time they’d actually heard us tell our story from the very beginning, and I think they finally got the message.

Still, when we got invited to their house for Christmas again, I had visions of the Ice Storm Christmas we had spent together in Georgetown. We’d been lucky to even survive that Christmas, so I remained a bit uneasy as the date for this one approached.

Amazingly, when we arrived we were told we would be enjoying a totally vegan Christmas dinner—no turkeys frying beside the house this year. And the vegan dish was not just for us, but for everyone. It was so great. It was probably the single biggest step Derek’s parents had made since any of this started, so it was a major milestone, and Derek and I were ecstatic. Our relationship with Brad and Janice has never been better; it seems they finally get why we feel the way we do.

That’s not to say they’re banging down the door begging to babysit their grandpig, but it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that they support us. Derek may never admit it, but I know it drove him crazy to think his parents didn’t support him, and I’d guess most children would feel the same way. But they just didn’t understand. I think they were afraid we were making a crazy decision by moving to the farm and giving up our jobs so quickly. Things were moving very fast for us, and normally their family would never take a risk like that. It took time to help them see where we were coming from, and for them to realize that we meant business.

Around this time, Esther started to explore the forest. She wanted to check out everything. She also started having a bit of an attitude. Having access to the woods was totally new to her. She had never been able to explore so far from the house before, nor in such interesting surroundings. She didn’t want to leave a single stick unturned. We had a pretty good setup by now as far as a perimeter fence was concerned, with only a few gaps still to be filled. But Esther soon realized she could bust right through the fence, so we were constantly trying to stay in front of her and control where she went.

When she did get through the forest fence (always her favorite place to go), we had to place stakes in the ground in front of her, forcing her to turn around. The forest is large, and she wanted to keep going and see it all. She knew we wanted her to go home, but she didn’t want to go, and she’d make it clear we were cutting into her “me” time. She’d stand her ground and shout.

It wasn’t that we didn’t want her to have fun, but it wasn’t safe. She could get to the road from there. Also, these areas hadn’t been checked for hazards such as garbage and broken glass, so it was really stressful when Esther went into the forest. Not to mention that we almost always had other work to do, and taking a two-hour break to explore the forest, although fun, wasn’t what we had in mind for the day.

Whenever it came time to make Esther go home, things would get ugly. She would scream, bite at us, and bite at whatever stick we could find in our attempts to block her path. The first time it happened it was a bit of a shock for us because she’d never done that before. But we knew she was upset, and we tried to roll with it. It became a literal wrestling match, and she always had the upper hoof. Boy, did she become a little gremlin. Or a not-so-little gremlin. More like an angry Smart car coming at you at 40 mph. (Can a Smart car even go that fast?) We’d be guiding her back to the house, and she’d stop and veer off every now and then and turn her head to yell at us.

After one of these forest fights Esther would hold a grudge, sometimes for days. She would be snappy and wouldn’t let us cuddle with her, which for me was the worst punishment imaginable. It was heartbreaking, and a total departure from the Esther we knew. I was terrified that this was the end of her happy, playful personality.

We were also worried about what it meant for people visiting the farm. The whole reason we opened the sanctuary was so people could get to know not only Esther, but all farm animals. We knew that hundreds of people were lining up to visit when we opened the sanctuary to the public, and the Esther everybody knew online was not the Esther we were seeing at home. Esther was the very reason people were coming to visit. What if she turned out to be a grumpy, pushy pig? That would do nothing to help us change people’s opinion of pigs. It was the opposite of the impression we were trying to give people, and it was the opposite of the Esther we knew.

We were still having moving pains, getting used to being so far away from everyone and everything we’d known. I already felt very guarded, afraid to let certain aspects of our personal lives out into the open. All kinds of people I really didn’t know were friending us on Facebook, so even my personal page had become more of an Esther fan page than anything else. Now it was winter, when people often hibernate, but I wasn’t ready for friends to visit anyway. We’d moved to a house that really wasn’t all that hospitable for guests (at least for the first six months), and I was embarrassed about the house at first, mainly because it was so uncomfortably cold in the winter. It didn’t look too bad, other than not being our style (the wallpaper!), but it wasn’t a suitable house yet, and it definitely wasn’t a cozy place to relax with friends in the living room.

We couldn’t leave to visit our friends either, because now we had more animals to worry about. We didn’t trust the fences, and we were forever anxious that there would be an escape when we weren’t home. Plus, with Esther out of sorts, we didn’t trust leaving her home alone either. So we felt very isolated.

I personally think it boiled down to three things: First, some of our friends simply resented our “success.” Second, some just didn’t get our new lifestyle (which was a legit departure from the Derek and the Steve our friends had known before). And third, in fairness to everyone else, we had become so busy and worried about leaving the animals alone that we had to turn down invitation after invitation.

It felt like there was a wall going up: old friends on one side, all these new people coming in on the other. We did have a great new friend in Krista. We met her through another animal charity when we auctioned off a Tea with Esther, which went for $5,000. (And then the couple that lost offered to match it, so the actual total became $10,000.) In all of the planning and executing, Krista, who ran the charity, became a very good friend and ultimately joined our board. So even though we lost some friends, we gained some awesome friends we’d never have met otherwise.

Still, everything we used to know and do was gone—and even as we write this, it still feels that way at times. We also made some mistakes as we went. For instance, I missed my best friend’s housewarming party and noticed a week later she had unfriended me on Facebook. That was very painful for me. Even though we didn’t speak very often, I’d always known she was there for me, so to think that all of a sudden she wasn’t there really hurt. We have, thankfully, reconnected since then, but the falling-out was a big reminder of what’s most important. It’s easy to take people for granted, and you often don’t realize how important they are until it’s too late.

And when all else fails and your friends aren’t interested in driving an hour to see you, there’s always Ricky Gervais, who’s always been a tremendous champion of animals and actually made the trek to visit us. It blew our minds. I felt like such a child that day, waiting at the window to see Ricky and his partner, Jane Fallon—a bestselling author and former TV producer—pull up to the farm. Derek graciously went out to greet them because I was too nervous and excited. It was surreal to see them get out of the car and look around. When I finally did get the courage to walk outside, Ricky and Jane greeted me with a hug and a smile. They were so kind and genuine, much more genuine than I’d have expected of people who were so famous.

I was amazed they knew our animals’ names, and they seemed legitimately interested in what we were doing. It really struck Derek when Ricky at one point looked around and asked where our cat Delores was. When they came inside and Ricky saw Esther for the first time he did his famous laugh and said, “Oh God!” just like when he’s killing himself laughing on TV. It was incredible; his laugh is beyond infectious. And Jane is just the sweetest. She knew who everyone was, asked questions about how everyone was settling in, and made us feel so comfortable. I now chat back and forth with Jane regularly, even if it’s just to say hi, hope all is well. (I really love her.)

And they weren’t in a rush either. Sometimes we don’t know how long people plan to stay, but they took lots of time to walk around and shoot the breeze. We loved showing them around and taking them to meet the other animals. Ricky was very cautious around the larger ones. We were expecting the arrival of some cows the following day, and Ricky asked about the cows—specifically, if we would have to milk them. We explained that since none of our cows had just given birth, no, we wouldn’t be milking them.

That’s when we explained the dairy industry to Ricky, in what seemed to be an eye-opening moment for him. We told him that dairy cows are inseminated and then kept pregnant so they are able to lactate. Ricky was surprised to hear that making milk wasn’t part of a cow’s natural everyday life—a common misconception. He said he’d just believed the marketing all these years. His response was in his facial expression more than in words: he seemed genuinely shocked, and you could almost see the wheels turning in his head. The dairy industry has done an amazing job of making people believe the fallacy that it’s harmless. As in, if you got a cow pregnant once, she’d spout milk for the rest of her life. Or as Ricky thought, as if cows just naturally gave milk because that’s what cows do. Very smart people (and Ricky is one of the smartest) believe this stuff because it’s what we’ve been led to believe since we were children.

Derek and I always try to be very gentle in how we explain the horrific realities of animal food production, and we never force information down anyone’s throat. But if someone asks, we’ll let loose with everything we know—even the stuff that can be hard to hear. We think a huge part of our success comes from making people want to ask these difficult questions, and once they actually know the truth, it’s very hard for them to turn a blind eye to what goes on. Unfortunately, people believe what they’ve always believed because that’s all they’ve known, and we all have to be understanding of others and their choices. Traditionally, we are taught that the dairy industry is full of happy cows who live wonderful lives in majestic fields instead of enduring repeated forced impregnation and living in cramped quarters.

Sometimes we feel disappointed by our friends or family who don’t become vegan. And as a result, it’s sometimes hard to maintain those relationships. It takes a lot of work on our part too to make sure friendships don’t suffer. Like I really didn’t think my relationship with my best friend would change because I went vegan, but it has. You’ve got to do everything you can to maintain these relationships, even if it’s not the easy way out.

But there are people who have gone further in their beliefs than we have, which makes us look like we’re behind the times. For example, the other day we met a vegan who was formerly an organ donor. He has since revoked his donor status because he can’t guarantee his organs will end up in the body of a vegan, and he doesn’t want his liver or kidneys inside someone who is eating meat. Pretty extreme, right? I mean, how far do you go with this stuff?

People overcomplicate veganism; there is no single answer. It’s not just about the animals or the environment or your health, because becoming vegan is triggered by something different for everybody. We all just have to do the best we can to do the least amount of harm. I can’t say if Ricky gave up dairy, but he cares so much about animals that I can tell you it got the wheels turning, and he left the farm with a lot to think about.