I Love That I Still Love Horses
The Comfort of Unchanging Facts in a Changing Body
“Are you able to do it on your own?”
It’s a good question.
My riding instructor is ready to fetch the mounting step while Maggie turns her head to study me through her long eyelashes.
Before I can overthink it, my left foot is in the stirrup and my hand is balancing my weight on Maggie’s wither. I swing my right leg over her saddle with a near-fluidity that surprises us all.
Motor memory is sometimes not memory. Sometimes, it’s the intuition that comes from pretending. Since I realized I loved horses at around age five, I’ve visualized saddling, mounting and riding hundreds of times, my imagination aided by my bicycle or the arm of the couch in my parents’ basement. At some point, what you know to be true becomes true.
No one in my family can remember how this love started but, seemingly overnight, I’d become the girl with the skipping rope coiled around her bike’s handle bars as makeshift reins and a plastic Atlantic City casino bucket collecting coins for a “horse fund”. When my parents were separated for a year, I got a golden horse Christmas ornament from my Mom and a wooden horse sculpture from my Dad. My favorite t-shirt was so well worn that the horse’s mane was cracking and peeling. I’d dog-ear pages of glossy equestrian magazines as if I were really in the market for boots and tack supplies, and though I badly wanted to take riding lessons, there was simply no breathing room left in an extracurricular schedule already packed with gymnastics, skating, swimming, track, and basketball.
Yes, this little-body-that-could used to be spry and restless and flexible. I’d entertain myself mostly through motion. I’d zip about as Tarzan or Peter Pan in a public square while my parents sipped cappuccinos at a nearby café, and I’d spend my summer evenings doing handstands in the garden with fireflies until bedtime. I’d contort myself into a bridge during TV commercials just for fun, and would spend recess gashing my new tights by sprinting on ice in the schoolyard with the boys. Whenever I heard heroic musical scores, I’d picture saving my classmates and teachers from dramatic situations, and emerging bloody, but otherwise unscathed.
It’s almost hard to believe that this same body has also spent most of its existence unable to bend over to pick something up, or clean the cat litter, or pee on command, or put on socks. It’s hard to understand how, in its late twenties, this same body started slamming itself into chairs like my elderly relatives, too pained and uncoordinated from glitching nerves to execute a smooth landing. It’s absurd that, not too long ago, this body couldn’t manage to lift its leg onto the tub’s edge to shave without triggering a bout of vomiting in the shower, and that it couldn’t stand during the first three days of a menstrual period, and that it couldn’t take a deep breath without it pulling in the knees. This body that had once been so keen to move couldn’t even be moved without pain—bumpy car rides would cause awful pelvic pulsations and being rocked gently while being hugged would make me wince.
My body changed long before I thought it would. As my identity morphed from active to unable, I fell out of love with all my favorite sports. When I started having trouble with the most basic bodily functions that people tend to take for granted, I began to fear movement. I stopped hiking and carrying groceries. I’d talk myself out of errands and travels. I’d rest for five days after being social for two. But my aversion to motion only fueled my problem, making me heavier and stiffer and unconfident. I spent years and small fortunes on osteopathy and pelvic physiotherapy to help me decode what my body was doing—or undoing—all the while surgery after surgery tried to extinguish the fire at my core.
Today is my first ride post-hysterectomy (my fifth and probably-not-final operation) and I expect it to feel strange.
My first thought as I straighten my slouched shoulders on Maggie’s back is that this might be too jarring for a healing body. The very few times I’ve been on horseback, I’ve paid for my joy with an aching groin and tingling nerves down to my toes. My second thought, as I gently divert Maggie from the grass she attempts to eat to test my lenience, is that I (almost) don’t care if it hurts. I need to ride today, both for my body and mood.
Just being near Maggie and her friends has stirred me awake. In my limited experience with riding, I’ve seen how horses react to the energy I bring into the “room”; I’ve watched their ears and tail mirror my own anxiety and agitation—powerful and instantaneous feedback that just can’t be ignored.
You have to trust a horse, even when you’re fearful and grieving, and you have to trust yourself. Sometimes, confidence is teamwork.
Maggie and I ride into the forest, and I keep my eyes far ahead for us both. It’s strange how comfortable I feel. Sure, there’s tension in my hips and in my legs but, when I gradually release it, there’s no other tension left anywhere. My pelvis doesn’t hurt when it rocks to Maggie’s rhythm, my spine isn’t blazing and my legs haven’t yet gone numb. I’ll take it for however long it lasts.
I let Maggie carry us uphill and downhill, my mind curious and open. Deer dance into our path and Maggie is trepidatious, but my posture tells us both it’s more than okay.
When Maggie and I start trotting, she is more enthusiastic than I am, at first. I feel the impact of her hooves, even if I am standing, even if I try to relax my back and hips as I lean forward, and I worry. I can’t help but imagine my strung-up ovaries bouncing about, or my pesky prolapse getting worse in just one morning of reckless bliss. But soon, I’m smiling, unafraid of being moved.
We ride for two whole hours that fly like twenty minutes, and I don’t want to stop.
I swing my right leg over her saddle again, and I’m back on solid ground. I spend a few minutes petting and thanking her, while I think to myself, “I love that I still love horses.”
It’s reassuring that some things don’t change despite everything that does.
And, though I hear the complaints of a full bladder and can already feel pudendal spasms that I suspect will be worse tomorrow, I also have a hunch I’ll be back on a horse real soon.
Because beneath all the assaults and the fear and the grief is still a fierce hoper who isn’t desperately clinging to the “before”, but who is receptive to the magic of the “after”.