The Horse I Never Had
It was all my mother’s fault
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It is a long, long time ago. When the world is black and white, and I am five years old, living in Essexville, Michigan with my mother and father and older sister, Mary Margaret.
My Friend Flicka, The Lone Ranger, Rin Tin Tin, and Annie Oakley are popular TV shows; Snow Fire is a popular movie, one I have seen half a dozen times, featuring a beautiful white stallion that communicates with Molly, the main character. Horses are magic, and I want one more than anything in the entire world.
Yet any time I ask my mother for one, she tells me we have plenty of animals. We don’t need more.
We have dogs. My father is a hunter, so we have 2 beagles and 1 unruly Weimaraner, but we don’t have horses, and we need them.
My mother never truly appreciated my genius, and she tells me that horses are too expensive. I explain I’ll save up. She tells me we have no place for a horse (we live in a three-bedroom, one bath tract home on a quarter acre). I tell her we can move. In fact, we should move. Then she explains safety. Horses are very very big, and I am very very small. I will fall off, break my neck, and die.
End of story.
A story doesn’t end until the book ends, and my book is not yet written.
I tell my mother, I agree. I am too small for a horse, so we will get a pony; it will be spotted (I didn’t know about pintos or paints or any of the right terms), and I will call it Michael. My mother raises her eyebrows right about this time, cocks her head, and frowns, and when my mother frowns, I know I’m in trouble.
“The answer is ‘no,’” she says. “No horse. No pony. And if you bring it up again, no dinner.”
Sometimes my mother makes liver for dinner, sometimes steak, so I ask the important question: “What are you cooking for dinner?”
She is not happy with that question and sends me to the room I share with Mary Margaret, and I lie on my bed and cry and cry and cry.
Nothing will be ever be okay. I will never have a horse, never ride through the west, never do rope tricks. My mother is the worst mother in the whole wide world, and I would trade for anyone’s mother, even Polly Potter’s mother, who wears an apron and drinks beer out of the bottle. I bet she’d get me a horse or a pony.
My sister walks into the room, asks why I’m crying, and when I tell her, she pulls a Children’s Highlights from beneath her bed (I think she snatched it from the doctor’s office). She thumbs past “Gallant and Goofus” and flips to the back, where there is a tiny, black and white ad, featuring a picture of a gorgeous Palomino, with the headline: “Win This Horse.”
To win the horse, we simply needed to mail in an entry form. Ahh, if only we were rich, Mary Margaret and I could send in dozens — 100s — of entry forms. However, we are not rich and asking my mother for enough money to buy dozens of stamps would have raised her suspicions, so we gather enough change to buy two stamps and send the entry form away.
And wait.
And wait.
And wait and wait and wait.
Obviously, our entry form was never received, or we would have won. Mary Margaret and I are convinced. So next year, when she filches yet another Children’s Highlights and we see yet another ad for the exact same horse, we send away even more entry forms and still don’t win.
The contest is rigged, and I am crushed. (Mary Margaret is more accepting of defeat and never mentions winning a horse again.)
I am not accepting of defeat, and my grandmother, who understands (as grandmothers always do) my need and desire and obsession brings me horseback riding.
At six, I am much too small to fit into any of the saddles, so I can’t go trail riding, and my grandmother, who is quite old in my eyes, at least 50, leads the horse around the pen, whooping and clucking at it, until it starts to trot, and I can legitimately say I’ve ridden a horse.
I cling to the saddle horn as I bounce on the horse’s back; dust flies into my face, covers my teeth, and I have never been happier
I am every cowgirl who has ever lived: I am Annie Oakley, Dale Evans, Molly from Snow Fire. And I need — I desperately need a horse.
I tell my grandma how my mother keeps saying ‘no,’ that we don’t have room, and my grandma tells me that people who don’t have barns or land board their horses and visit them once or twice a week.
I am in heaven, where magic happens, and where mothers can’t say ‘no’ to reasonable requests. I can’t wait to get home. Surely, now my mother will say ‘yes,’ and make me the happiest girl in the world.
It doesn’t exactly turn out the way.
I get home, rush inside to tell my mother the wonderful news about getting my very own horse and boarding it and how I will brush it and ride it and shoot up all the bad guys invading Essexville, but my mother has a very different agenda.
She holds me at arm’s length, examining me with all the intensity of an FBI agent. She turns me to the left, to the right, looking for cuts, scrapes, deadly bruises. She runs her hands up and down my arms, checking for broken bones. She parts my hair, lifts it off my neck, looking for…mites? Fleas? I never do figure that one out. Then she tell me to open my mouth, stick out my tongue.
I comply.
“What’s all over your teeth?” she asks.
I have no idea. I shrug.
“Looks like dirt,” she says.
Then I remember the dust flying in the arena. “I’ll brush them,” I tell her.
“Hmm,” she says. It is not a happy ‘hmm.’
I head towards the bathroom then stop and turn back to her. “Grandma says can board a horse, that means…”
She cuts me off. “I know what that means, and the answer is still ‘no,’ and will always be ‘no,’ until you’re a grown adult and even then it will be ‘no.’ Now brush those teeth.”
I march off to the bathroom, slam the door, and brush my teeth, all the while thinking/knowing my mother is a dreadful, unfair woman, who doesn’t deserve to have me as a daughter.
I’ll show her. I’ll get my horse. I’ll win it from Children’s Highlights, and I won’t even board it. I’ll keep it in the backyard, right next to the dog kennel, and I’ll feed it apples and grass, and when all the bad guys come and try to take over Essexville, I’ll save everybody.
Everybody but her.
Unless, of course, she get me a horse. A Palomino. Then I’ll save her. Maybe. But she has to get me the right horse, and she has to let me keep it in the backyard. That’s the deal.
*****
My mother never lived up to her part of the deal. She bought me books with pictures of horses, but no horses themselves, no matter how I begged. But I showed her.
Eventually.
Fifty years later, I bought my own darn horse. I didn’t end up with a Palomino, and I actually didn’t end up with just one, either. No, I ended up with three horses, a donkey, eight goats, thirty-two ducks, four chickens, plus a slew of inside animals.
My mother would have been proud.
