I’m not Bo-Peep, but my sheep have shaped me

“Baaaaa, Baaaa,” the girls called to me in unison from the sidelines during field hockey practice.

“Come on, sheep girl, you can do it.”

“Don’t mess up, Bo-Peep, you might lose your sheep!”

My field hockey team likes to constantly remind me that I raise and show sheep and that I am, in fact, a farm girl. Ever since that first day when the school bus picked me up in front of my house with a field full of wooly sheep in the background, I have been made fun of by my classmates.

“Sheep girl and Bo-Peep” are only two of the monikers that I have been given over the years and the “baaing” from others is all part of a normal routine with my peers.

When I reached middle school, I found that I was really embarrassed by these nicknames.  I tried hard to avoid the subject and worked to become popular with my friends in school for cooler reasons. Believe me, showing sheep and living on a farm are not cool things to be known for in school.

But, every time another picture of my sheep and I winning another award at a major show showed up in the newspaper I had to go through another week of “baaing” and “Sheep girl” name calling. I would smile and go along with the joke when my friends would take pictures of sheep and send them to me to poke fun, but deep down, I hated it.

I couldn’t stand the fact they called me “Bo-Peep” and mocked me for it, but for some strange reason I never quit showing my sheep because of the peer pressure. Deep down I guess I knew that because I was involved in 4-H and had the opportunity to raise sheep, I was learning things and gaining lessons that my friends would never realize as they sat at home watching their TV or gossiping about others on their phones. So, I kept my sheep and continued to show them across the state at livestock shows, and eventually, my classmates grew bored with their teasing and let the subject go.

Recently, however, I was sitting in a team huddle after winning a game. My coach was giving us a long talk about how we played and where we needed to improve. My mom was leaving but needed to tell me that I had to be at a 4-H sheep club meeting later that night, so she called out to me from the sidelines in a very loud voice to remind me.

My teammates heard her and they couldn’t stop laughing at me. Everyone kept making jokes and antagonizing me about my sheep club meeting.

But, a funny thing happened. After years of being embarrassed by others for my sheep ownership, I found that I didn’t mind their ridiculing and, in fact, was proud of it!

I am a senior in high school this year and I am getting ready to start college this fall. I thought that when my mother screamed that embarrassing reminder to me in front of my teammates that I would be mortified when they started teasing me all over again. But, instead, I found that all the snippets and name calling from my teammates didn’t bother me at all. I had learned to accept what I was and to not let others pull me down from teasing or sarcasm. Instead of hiding my face in shame, I found myself smiling from a realization that I was just getting.

After years of raising and showing my sheep I have learned many things about them like genetics, nutrition, health, diseases, and general care. Because of my sheep, I have had the opportunity to travel to different places, meet new friends, win many different prizes, and develop skills like responsibility, integrity, and work ethics. It was a symbiotic relationship that I was only now realizing the benefits of belonging to.

My friends had never known the joy of holding a newborn lamb or the agony of dissecting a dead one to find out what it died from. They didn’t know how to feed, halter break, or shear a sheep. They had never bush hogged a field or put a barbed wire fence up in the sweltering heat of summer. I had done all those things and much more, and this realization allowed me to take the pettiness of my teammates’ mocking and just smile back.

However, now it was a smile of empowerment.

Bierhuizen is a senior at Eastern View High School. She writes an occasional column for the Star-Exponent.