To Cry with a Horse

On Tuesday afternoons, I teach a class that lasts until 2:35. This means that Violette, whose school lets out at 2:15pm, is usually stuck doing homework in the library until I'm able to sift through the stampede of students and make my way out to pick her up. This particular Tuesday afternoon, John was in the city for a business meeting, and took it upon himself to bring our girl home and rescue her from longer hours closed in by educational walls. The two had a ball together; Violette is a Daddy's girl in every sense of the term. Violette is also, however, a prepubescent girl. Anyone who has ever been a prepubescent girl, or who has ever been in the vicinity of a prepubescent girl, understands that the delicate time between eleven and twelve years old hides massive landmines for parents. We never can guess when we'll step on one and cause our sweet little angel to blow up. Call it our own parents' retribution. Violette has always been a well mannered pre-adolescent, to be sure. But as parents, we can tell when the switch goes off, and we're suddenly on her "list." On this Tuesday, in the midst of their farm-play, John offered Violette some deer sausage, a freebie gift he'd gotten from our local meat processor. He didn't, of course, tell Violette that she was eating venison. Not until she asked for another, and a third, and possibly a fourth. Then he dropped the bomb. They'd been eating Bambi's mother.

Violette was horrified. Her demeanor went cold. Her smile disappeared, and volume of her silent treatment was a torment to her poor dad. John was cool about it, recognizing his faux pas, and offering Violette the chance to go inside and shake it off. Violette refused, and threw her energy into mucking out the stalls of her horses. When the stalls were clean, she put her foot down and told her father that she would be fetching the horses today - alone.


And so she did. Violette made her way out into the pasture, where the first face she met was that of our sweet, freckled Appaloosa yearling, Milly. Violette was still wrestling with her anger toward her father and the new hormones that were firing up and exacerbating the bad feelings when she reached out to touch the nose of the filly. Milly stretched toward the girl's hand and flared her nostrils. It was Violette's cue to let down the barricade and wash the emotions out. She cried, she wailed, she yelled, she stomped. Milly watched her, patiently, attentively. Every so often, Milly would nod her head in agreement with the little girl, giving Violette a sense of honest validation. Milly stayed with Violette until her tirade was complete. Then, as they both breathed a heavy sigh, they turned together and walked side-by-side to the barn. Violette was healed, and returned to her joyful, creative self.

The following weekend, my husband found Milly stretched out on the floor of her stall. The poor filly had contracted a tape worm infestation that was ready to claim her life. She'd dropped an enormous amount of weight, and there was no regiment of hay or grain that would replenish the nutrition she had lost. We'd tried so very hard over our three months with her to bring her back to health, but it was impossible to save her. The vet visited her that day, and reluctantly told us that euthanasia was her only option.

I was crushed. I laid my head on her cheek and sobbed until I was out of breath. I cried until my eyes burned and my nose throbbed. I told her how much I loved her. I told her how sorry I was for letting this happen to her. I thanked her, most of all, for saving our daughter.

Then the time came to tell Violette what had happened. The news hit our girl like a punch to the gut. She chose to retreat into the barn and invest her energy into her chores, but the sight of Milly's empty stall registered like an icy hole in her heart. It was freezing outside. We were up to our calves in snow, and the bitter wind chill dropped temperatures well below zero. In spite of the weather, I asked Violette to walk with me, and she did. We made our way out to Sunshine's shelter, a memorial for the horse we'd lost during our first night. The wind whipped at our faces, and bit with fiery teeth into our noses and ears. Violette was unfazed. She had no Milly to vent her feelings to, so she vented them into the wind.

Violette screamed things I never thought I'd hear my daughter say. Her words were dark, they were painful, they were real. The wind caught the words and muted her voice before they could reach beyond our shelter, but I was there to hear. Hearing her cry out made me remember what it is to be an eleven year old girl. It's the first time we encounter the dark side of our psyche. It's the first time we entertain thoughts of death, of devastation, of betrayal and of hatred. It's the first time things seem so dark, so unmanageable, that we consider what this world would be like without us. It's the first time we weigh the severity of our pain against the significance of our life.

Having let it out, and having frozen ourselves into numbness, Violette and I returned to the house - she to her room, I to the kitchen. The purgation she'd endured in Sunshine's shelter left her exhausted, but began her healing. As the family trickled back to the home and settled in, Violette emerged from her room, smiling silently, to give us each a loving hug. Before night fell, she had written a letter to Milly and enclosed it in a box with hay, a horse treat, and an old bridle.

Milly was a wonderful presence on our farm. She was sweet and docile, gentle and unassuming. She will be missed forever. But even in her death, she healed my daughter. And she healed me a little, too. I could finally let the eleven-year-old girl inside of me rest, because my daughter had just vented all of our pain into the wind of Emotive Acres. I was able to put that pain in its place. Violette, unfortunately, sill has many big moments like this to go. I can't be more grateful, however, that so early in her life she learned to cry with a horse.