Blame & Forgiveness: the Ultimate Cage-fight (Part 3 of 3)

For thirty years I never imagined I needed to blame or forgive my parents for anything. After all, there was no problem. Oh, that? Just a stiff knee. OK, it was completely rigid. Yeah, I kept it covered. Because of the scars. I had an infection when I was a kid. Stayed in bed. For a year. Missed two years of school. No, I never saw a doctor. Why did I need a doctor? I was healed by Christian Science. My limp never slowed me down.

Of course it didn't slow me down. I was a horse with its tail on fire.

My flight kept me just ahead of my past until I became a parent. I began to realize what parenting entailed after my daughter was born. It was sobering when my own history began to catch up with me. My emotions overloaded and finally halted me in a way my wrecked leg never had. I got into therapy and started on the excruciatingly slow work of sifting through all the pieces of my life. Including examining the choices my parents had made.

Yes, they'd both been raised in hard-core Christian Science families. Yes, they each had a sister who'd had a seemingly "miraculous" healing during their childhoods. Yes, they were isolated and insulated by church-member relatives and friends, plus a gung-ho Christian Science practitioner (who, when I spoke to him six years ago, still declared I'd been healed as a kid) and the supportive environment in Massachusetts at a time when such treatment was legal, the same area where Mary Baker Eddy originally set up shop. I understood this.

But with a parent's perspective, I knew there was no good excuse. Whether consciously or passively, my parents had allowed me to assume it was my responsibility to be perfectly healed (the only kind of healing Christian Science advocates) from the time I was thirteen. This was wrong. I would never want my daughters to feel their childhood health and circumstances were up to them. I'm the mother, the adult, their protector and enforcer and bodyguard. I accepted that weight and gift. It's an honor to carry the love and worry of having a child. I don't believe children are required to forgive their parents.

So gradually I shifted that burden off myself, especially as my leg began to fail. I understood my parents. But I didn't think I could or should have to forgive them. Our relationship was OK. They were supportive when I considered amputation, when my knee proved to be beyond replacement surgery. I empathized with my mother and father. I just wasn't sure I could really love them.

As I worked on my emotional tangle, I was also in the process of changing horse training methods. I was an effective freelance trainer and instructor who specialized in sorting out backyard family horses. I'd started out a seat-of-the-pants pony rider myself; later I was certified in England, taught lessons in any scenario you can imagine, and galloped race horses, so I could knock sense into any grumpy plug I met. I thought of it as a show'em-who's-boss technique, not without finesse, but using whatever force was necessary. Practical professionalism sometimes means shortcuts or quick fixes. It was what I'd learned.

Except I'd gotten sour after years trying to leverage and control a creature that instinctively fights to survive. Especially as I recognized how I'd tried to force myself into a mental pretzel to bring an impossible state of harmony.

This method of training hinges on understanding a horse's motivation, needs and fears. It's been called horse whispering but like a lot of things, it only looks magical until you see what's happening. It's more like horse obedience than breaking (a word I never liked). It's a relationship built on trusting a horse to act like a horse.

The more I honestly saw horses and the less I projected wrong assumptions or attributes, the more I realized what I'd done all those years. With crops and whips, spurs, tie-downs and gag-bits, equipment and muscle. I hadn't meant to be cruel. But sometimes I had been. I'm not sure which was worse--my casual indifference all the times I put a stronger bit in the mouth of a horse that might have bolted only in fear, or when I'd selfishly decided to push a young horse to prepare for show schedule. I just wish I could go back and do things differently. As if wishing makes any difference.

But as I handled horses with my new expectations--clumsily, then with more assurance--horses responded whether I had an established relationship with them or not. They had no agenda, no grudges or blame. They might be wary or jaded if they'd been spurred or muscled around in the past, but my consistent correct behavior was all they asked for. They could still be tough or resistant, but it wasn't personal. I didn't bring my own baggage into the corral. I played by horse rules of etiquette and the horses understood. They didn't care what I'd done, only what I was doing now. Their grace felt like a blessing. It humbled me.

It dawned on me that change itself is the key. It cultivates a state of gratitude and appreciation far beyond wimpily letting someone get away with something or whatever my concept of forgiveness used to be.

Change. I watched my parents struggle with their own bodies as they aged. Each had surgery for the first time (with varying amounts of willingness). After being doused in Christian Science all their lives, they don't speak the language of medical reality very well. I was dragged in as the reluctant interpreter. My mother and I shared a roller coaster of shouting and sobbing matches that wore off a lot of rough edges and allowed us to find something approaching normal, whatever that is. My father is much more private, but we've had our moments: I even screamed at him and smashed a coffee mug on the floor one time. (Note to my therapist: found that anger at my parents.) My frozen emotions broke loose and I felt exhilarated, even while I despaired of ever resolving my family's issues. At least I loved my father and mother enough to battle in the open. I'd been afraid I didn't. The giant glass elephant of our past fell from its pedestal and shattered into pieces we could lift. 

One day I found myself hugging my mother, my father. Saying, "I love you." I couldn't remember the last time I'd done it. And they told me they love me. Now I can say it whenever I see them. I hear the emotion in their voices as they say, "I love you." It's different now for all of us.It wasn't like a bolt of lightning. It was a gradual recognition my horses taught me to watch for: the smallest sign of the try, the step in the right direction, the search for the safety of our herd.

Blame & Forgiveness: the Ultimate Cage Fight (Part 2 of 3)

OK. My first child was born the day before my twenty-eighth birthday. She rocked my world. She shook my foundation like nothing before--not bone disease, not the rigid family silence of denial, not arrogant statements of idealism by our church. All my baby did was arrive when I gave birth to her. But she was perfect. She changed everything I believed about perfection being only spiritual.

As I held her in my arms,she asked what my standards were. Her presence asked what I would be willing to do for her. Her existence wondered what I would settle for. She shifted the foundation of my life the way a blade of grass cracks concrete to reach sunlight. I knew I would do anything for this brand-new creature. She was more important than all else. I made a conscious decision: if I ever had doubts about her health, I would take her straight to a doctor. I was the adult; if my child needed medical care she'd have it, Christian Science or no. I was her mother and there was nothing I would not sacrifice for her, no element in my life so sacred I wouldn't question it for her sake.

A few years later I abandoned Christian Science altogether. I got divorced and started seeing a therapist. I lived in the same area, not far from my parents who often babysat for me. One night my little girl was crying when I picked her up after work. “Mommy, my ear hurts.”

My mother's face was drawn and bleak. As far back as I could remember, she would have responded by saying something like, She's a spiritual idea--she can't really be sick--  We'd been hard-core Christian Scientists. Which was why I limped on a fused leg. And why I'd started going to therapy for depression and panic. And why we never, ever talked about the horror of those years I was a young teenager when we only prayed about the bone disease that almost killed me.

My mother said, “Can you do something for her?” But this time she meant, Can you stop her pain—now?

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s probably an ear infection.” It felt bold, rude, to state  the discord we’d always denied. “I’ll pick up some children’s Tylenol on the way home. Tomorrow I’ll take her to the doctor.” I held my little girl on my hip. She clung to me, her tear-streaked face pressed against my neck. The idea of telling her that what she felt wasn’t real made me nauseous.

“I‘m glad you know what to do.” My mother’s face crumpled. My father was a shadow behind her. They'd been raised by powerhouse single mothers fervent in the Christian Science mindset. This lifestyle was all my parents had ever known. But I could see them struggle too, now that I'd begun to question our lives. And their decisions. 

The next day as I stood in line to pick up the prescription, I thought, This is what parents do. They find a way to stop their children's pain. They keep trying until something works. Or at least they're supposed to. 

My therapist asked me, "Where's your anger at your parents?" She asked this year after year. I'd say, "Oh. I don't know." But it was there, percolating under my thick skin. I'd cultured toughness to counter the failure I'd always felt at having failed to be "healed" in Christian Science. And as I began to see who I was, I knew I was hard hard hard, a former child soldier with that thousand-yard stare. Depression could knock me into a fetal position for days at a time. My employment history was sketchy and unreliable. I jerked in my sleep from PTSD. I'd assumed the responsibility of my own survival--the perfect "healing" I was supposed to achieve when I was thirteen and fourteen and fifteen, the spiritual healing my parents had expected. Ironically, this strength and  responsibility had made me passive and codependent in relationships, marriages...and of course with my parents.

By the time I had a second daughter (ten years after the first) I'd come to believe certain things about parenting. I made sure my girls knew I'd go to bat for them anytime, anywhere. I'm the pit-bull hell-parent they can depend on. I run interference and advocate when it's needed. I'm my kids' firewall: to get to them, you have to get through me. I've realized how hard I can be, and tried to not to be hard on them. (It's hard!) In turn, they've made me grow in a way that nothing else could. My insistence on a higher quality of life for them has taught me that I deserve good too.

"So how's your relationship with your parents??"

During this time, my connection to my parents remained close. But it gnawed at me. I was in therapy for over a dozen years and my therapist was right: I couldn't put my past ordeal into perspective until I confronted it like a frightened horse shying at a rock. Being a parent made me see that my own parents had abdicated human responsibility to a "higher power." They'd been raised to believe  Christian Science prayer was my only hope during my childhood osteomyelitis. But I finally looked straight at what their decisions--conscious or passive--had done to me. I lived with the consequences which were physical (my scarred, bent, fused leg that I eventually had amputated) and emotional: my codependency, depression, mood swings, broken relationships and inability to hold a job.

I hit bottom. The bedrock of my feelings was apathy. I wasn't sure I could ever love my parents. I didn't hate them; I understood who they were and why they'd done these things. I was fluent in Christian Science; it had been my first language and the way I interpreted the world around me. But my second language became Reality. Its hard pan floor was my bottom line: children should never be expected to forgive their parents. They should never be put in that position. The act of being a parent assumes total responsibility even for bad luck and unexpected disaster. I believed parents had to cowboy up and accept this.

I'd begun to let go of the inappropriate burden I'd taken up in childhood and give it back to my mother and father. 

But I wasn't ready to just call it even.

At least, not until horses gave me a reason. Not until horses showed me the grace in forgiving. Not until horses let me see it--and need it--from the other side.

Stay tuned for Part 3. This photo of my daughters and me was taken a few years ago. (Now, of course, they're both taller than me...)

Pardon the Interval

Sorry about this interim. I haven't returned to my cage-fight soliloquy yet and it just occurred to me that I could apologize for the delay. I appreciate your interest in this muttering I call my blog. I've written stories, journals and poems steadily since I was ten years old or so, which means four decades now...but I've never had readers until lately. I wasn't expecting to love blogging but I do. There, I've said it. Heart on my sleeve.

Thought I'd write today/tonight but...it's a blue one. So perhaps tomorrow. Not to worry. Got lots to say about children, parents, blame, consequences, horses, journeys, choices, Being Tough and yeah, forgiveness.

Be well.

Blame & Forgiveness: the Ultimate Cage-Fight (Part 1 of 3)

Everyone asks me the same question after they've heard my history. They say tentatively, "...so how's your relationship with your parents now?" They ask it haltingly.

Now I answer, "It's the best it's ever been. I love them."

I say this with all honesty. My parents live a dozen miles from me here in the wilds of upstate New York. They moved here twenty-some years ago to watch their grandchildren grow up. And watch me come to terms with my life. Our lives. My progress seems to have allowed them to stretch past their previous comfort levels that were as rigid as the leg I had amputated. They are getting older and I'm glad we've found this balance. 

There were times I didn't think I ever would. I used to think I would never want to try.

What is your relationship with your parents...I didn't have to answer that question until I was in my mid-thirties. Until then I refused to identify any rift in my life, definitely not written in the jagged scars on my fused-solid leg. I bobbed and limped with every step I took in my twenties, in my late teens. After I'd ditched the crutches, which was after I'd climbed out of the wheelchair, which was after I escaped the bed in a small room of our house where I spent most of the year I was fourteen. 1976. The bicentennial year celebrated the nation's declaration of freedom. One of those more recent freedoms was a "blue" law that permitted parents to choose prayer over medicine in treating a child's illness or injury. It set the bone disease free to ravage my childhood and my sanity as well as my left leg.

As second generation Christian Scientists surrounded by church-member friends, relatives and practitioners (who pray for money), my parents were cocooned and isolated. Their confidence that my sudden knee infection would be healed was tempered (I sensed this) by terror that a doctor would amputate my leg immediately. The worse my condition grew, the more imperative it was for me to be healed. The Christian Science church claims it has a method--a "science"--that doesn't pressure the individual to heal herself. Especially a child. But. As I outlasted the disease, as I gained weight and the horrible gouges in my limb began to close, when my knee eventually bore my weight without any sign of bending or flexing, I accepted it was my fault I hadn't been  completely healed.

I carried that weight for twenty years. I remained a devout Christian Scientist the way a battle-scarred soldier might refuse to renounce the war that destroyed her body. If you give all you have for a cause that means nothing, how can you go on? And I still expected to be healed. Gradually, or maybe instantaneously. Christian Science promised my physical body wasn't real but changeable as any dream. Healing would erase my little incident of being bedridden, my odd gait and scars, like a bad debt forgiven.

"What happened to your leg?" This was as far as the conversation got for many years.

"Oh, I had an infection when I was a kid and it's stiff." Sometimes I added, "I was healed by Christian Science."

I never held still long enough for anyone to argue. I said my activity was my true spiritual being shining through. At fifteen I climbed onto my horse from the crutches before I could walk unaided. I completed a grueling course of stable work, riding and teaching in England to be certified a British Horse Society Assistant Instructor at eighteen. At twenty-two I married a dairy farmer, did chores, exercised racehorses, and square danced at the Grange on Saturday nights. I was healed!...or mostly. My firewall was solid. My family and I had our story straight. We stuck to it. There was no blame.

Just the black rot in my heart that ate at me like the infection had. The need to be normal. The ache to run. The fear that today was always the last day of my physical freedom.

My emotional lid was screwed on tight. Super-glued. Sealed in concrete. It was a time capsule that could never see the light of day. Because something was alive in there. If I hit my thumb with a hammer, I screamed and swore. Pain equaled rage disproportionate to the moment. Rage equaled pain. And both bled back in my self-hatred. But asking if it was related to the shiny scar-tissue on my rigid leg was like looking at the sun. The blinding light of reason turned my healing to ash, fallout of a treatment that had approached human sacrifice.

Of me. As a child. By my parents. Overseen by a church. Protected by a state law.

Programmed as I was, my reflexes reassured me. Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science, always had an answer. FATHER. Eternal Life...commonly called God... And, MOTHER. God...My parents were the mortal manifestation of God's care. God is the parent Mind, and man is God's spiritual offspring. My parents loved me as a spiritual idea.

Then in my late twenties I had a baby. I became a parent. And everything changed.

To be continued.

Stump Love

I love my left leg, the one that isn't there anymore, the one I feel but can't see past mid-thigh since it was amputated. I've had a love-hate relationship with it my whole life. Now it's just love.

My left leg betrayed me by swelling up one night when I was almost fourteen. I couldn't understand why my body would do this. It had accomodated my running, jumping, riding, and climbing trees or ropes; it made it easy to believe my family's Christian Science doctrine that a body was only the manifestation of thought, a mortal representation of my limitless spiritual being.

I lay in bed for almost a year with the infection. It felt as if a stake had been plunged through my leg into the mattress; the pain was excruciating even when I lay motionless. I tried not to look at the running sores. I couldn't bear to watch my leg being destroyed. (This is called religion-based medical neglect of children, relying on prayer for a child's healthcare rather than medicine. It's still legal in 38 US states. I'll be writing more about this. You bet I will.)

Over eighteen months my leg fused itself in a bent position. It was scarred to the bone in places, deformed and atrophied from mid-thigh to mid-shin. I kept it wrapped with an Ace bandage. I was deeply ashamed that I hadn't been healed perfectly. Ten years passed before I could bring myself to stop wearing bluejeans with my swim suit and just wrap my leg.

Shame is a powerful force. Walking with a bobbing stride on a bent leg was not something I could hide like my scars. With every public step I took, I felt exposed as a spiritual failure. In turn, with each step I was more determined than ever to find my perfect healing.

Flash forward twenty years to my first x-rays. I'd quit Christian Science and stopped trying to pray my body into perfection. Othopedic specialists diagnosed the disease as osteomyelitis, a bacterial bone infection that had run its course. They were impressed how I'd coped and how fit I was. They had no solution; my knee had fused solid like the limb of a tree. How long until I couldn't compensate anymore? They shrugged. "Stay active!" they said, and shook my hand. I walked out of the hospital that day feeling absolved of a life sentence for first-degree mortality. I had a human history. I was a survivor, not a failure.

I stopped hating my leg after that. I appreciated it even as my foot gave out and needed surgery. I wasn't afraid to look when the podiatrist examined his handiwork every few weeks, not even at the wires that stuck out of my toes. (His staff was dazzled at my skills on crutches. They said I was the best they'd ever seen.)

My body demanded an end to my limp five years ago. In the hospital after my amputation, I was anxious how I'd feel when I saw my stump. But when the doctor unwrapped the Ace bandage to take a peek, I saw a neat seam of staples that ran around the end of my abbreviated thigh, simple and inoffensive. (There were 31 staples; it was almost exactly 31 years since I'd first been hobbled by circumstance, religion and disease.) Now, walking with the prosthesis, my stump has gained more thigh muscle than it had all the years when the joint was frozen. Not a huge amount, but muscle is developing normally--after 30 years!

During my physical therapy when I learned to walk with the prosthetic leg, my PT looked at the last x-rays of my weird, late leg. He pointed out something amazing: the knee cap had mostly dissolved. Little channels of bone ran down through the bent joint, reinforcing the structure. He said, "All the activity you did caused your leg to rebuild the bone to strengthen your leg." My body had rerouted its normal function to support an unexpected form. I felt a rush of love for my battered, misused, lost leg.

My stump is the latest incarnation of my leg. It does its job, whether wearing a hydraulic leg or bobbing in time to my crutches. It's different not having a body part I'm ashamed of; I keep thinking there's something I'm forgetting, but it's only the shadow of a habit. The absence of that shame is a stronger sensation than my missing limb.

You Say Prosthetist

I made a conscious choice at a fork in the road on my way to amputee-hood. This was at the pronunciation of the word "prosthetist."

I like words: they're the medium I've clung to and invested in, self-taught as I am. I've collected them, tried to spell them right, and annoy my daughter by insisting "LOOK IT UP!" when she asks what one means. (And with Google around this is way too easy. When I was a kid we looked up vocab words in old-fashioned paper books called dictionaries. And it was uphill both ways.)
 
This is the language of a journey into elective amputee-ism. My auto-fused knee from the untreated osteomyelitis (bacterial bone infection) thirty years before was called an ankylosed joint. The surgery I was offered by doctors--to break and fuse it straight to give me a stiff, organic peg-leg--is called arthrodesis. The amputation I opted for is transfemoral, or above-knee: AK, or AKA, as in above-knee amputee. (As opposed to BK = below-knee, or "baloney amputee" as my daughter says, or as we snotty knee-less ones sniff, "Flesh-wound.")

So I began to talk to prosthetists, the folk who make the prosthesis (pl. prostheses). I just wasn't sure how to pronounce their job title. You can accent the second syllable, prosTHETist, which sounds like prosTHEsis. Or you can say PROS-thetist, which isn't too bad but seems to take longer, and I've lost most of my physical quickness but I can damn sure make up for it by talking fast.

Or you can say PROStheTIST, which mid-word, sounds to me like the target word is prostitute. As in, "I have to go see a PROS...theTIST tomorrow..." I've said this. I've seen (OK, maybe imagined) my friends' startled eyes widen, at least momentarily. I might be a little oversensitive. 

When it was decision time, mine wasn't even close. I say prosTHETist.

Here's a peek inside the lair of the fabled prosthetist. I've worked with several in five years, all with different approaches, but the rooms look the same. A chair to sit in while you put on and then take off (and put on, and take off, and put on...) said fake leg as it is adjusted. A mirror to force you to see how much weight you've gained since you lost that two-legged quickness. Parallel bars in case you want to do a little gymnastic routine, or maybe just not fall of the new leg. (Pronounce their job however you will, prosthetists as a whole get really excited and unhappy when you fall down.) Note the little wrench on the stool. The stool has wheels so the prosTHETist can zip around the linoleum and swoop in to tighten or loosen one of a million tiny fittings while scrutinizing your gait with the intensity of a good farrier.

This photo was taken by my older daughter at my first socket fitting five years ago this month. The socket was a step in the fitting process, and I don't think there was even a knee on that leg, just a pylon. I'd spent thirty years limping on a fused leg bent at a weird angle slightly straighter than 90 degrees; not a day of that time passed without my wondering, imagining, envying, and yearning to stand up straight. I emailed the picture to everyone. A friend who's known me for twenty-plus years and survived a lot of mutual horse adventures declared, "That's a new pony smile."

For me it was a toss-up: which was more amazing, that I could finally stand up straight? Or that my daughter could take such a photo with a phone??

You can decide for yourself how to pronounce the name of the dude or chick who makes fake limbs. But first get cracking on those vocab words. They'll all be on the final.

Horse Goddesses

 At the red barn down the road from the house where I grew up in the 1970’s, the teenage girls were fearless. In my eyes, those girls lived on another plane. They rode bareheaded with their hair blowing. They rode barefoot, smoking cigarettes and listening to transistor radios in shirt pockets. They always knew what to do. They were free. They were goddesses. I worshipped them when I was at the barn, out of the sight and hearing of my family and church.

A horse goddess relied on instinct and experience. Her techniques might be ignorant or rough but her balance and skill were genuine; it’s impossible to gallop bareback badly. A goddess reined her horse off the mini-bike trails to sail over the endless New England stonewalls that rambled through the woods and hemmed the roads. She might let her boyfriend climb up double, but he was an accessory as changeable as bellbottom jeans. After a fight with her parents she'd hitchhike to the barn and climb to the loft under the peak of the roof, armed with a sleeping bag and a six-pack. She was amoral more than immoral, decisive and profane, as unapologetic as her horse. She was as confident as I was anxious; she was a law unto herself.

The barn on the corner was all that was left of an eighteenth century farm losing the battle with an upper middle-class suburb. Planes screamed into the sky beyond the entrance to the air force base only a few hundred yards away: Hanscom Field and M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory. But goddesses only viewed their surroundings for the opportunities offered. They bought cigarettes from the buildings’ vending machine for fifty cents a pack. They stole traffic cones for their mounted obstacle courses. They climbed the chain-link fence at the back of the barn to free dogs from the pen that served as Lexington’s pound. The rangers at Fiske Hill National Park were powerless to stop the girls from using the historic rock foundation as a practice jump.

I first met the goddesses in the 1960’s when I was six years old. I was desperate to visit the horses. I followed a friend and we biked the half-mile down Wood Street. We straddled our bikes at the edge of the road and gazed at the red castle, the white shingled roof and tall green sliding door. Above the door was a row of small transom windows, New England-style. A jungle of sumac hid small outbuildings; the scattered boulders of stone walls between them dated back to the Revolution.

A self-possessed girl with long hair led a rawboned horse out of the barn.

“Can we have a ride?” my friend asked.

“No. Get out of the way. My horse kicks.” She lit a cigarette, vaulted onto a back higher than our heads and wheeled her steed down a rocky lane that led to the woods as we stared. Goddesses had no time for mortals.

When I was ten, my mother let me buy a pony from a family we knew at church. He was small and spoiled; later the girl said he bit her so she christened him after one of Mary Baker Eddy’s Glossary entries in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: RED DRAGON. Error; fear; inflammation. My pony was named after evil.

Dragon bared his teeth and charged at me in the pasture when I came to catch him. He nipped when I scrambled on, bucked when I wanted to go faster, and scraped me off in the bushes. In Sunday school I'd read, All of God’s creatures, moving in the harmony of Science, are harmless, useful, indestructible. Dragon threw his head and smashed me in the face as I bridled him. I didn’t have a saddle the first year so I rode bareback with one hand anchored in thick mane. When I fell, Dragon flattened his ears and snapped at me.

After a few months of glorified pony rides, I coaxed Dragon behind the tails of the older girls’ horses. The goddesses led and I followed. Three- and four-hour rides improved Dragon’s behavior but when he was tired he’d lie down right on the trail.

“Break a stick off a bush and smack him,” a goddess commanded from her tall gelding. She took a drag on her cigarette. “Make him get up. Show him who’s boss.”

Dragon’s sweat soaked through my pants and made my seat and legs sticky. Deerflies droned in the woods. Under the power lines near the highway the air smelled like sweet fern and wild blueberries. Dragon’s little red ears flicked back and forth, or pointed straight forward in alarm or curiosity. When a goddess splashed into a local reservoir to swim her horse illegally, I tamped down my guilt and kicked my pony forward, then laughed and clung as he bounded like a dolphin.

Cars streamed from the base and Lincoln Lab on summer evenings. The Star Spangled Banner echoed over loudspeakers in the distance. Outside the barn, one of the horse goddesses lit an extra cigarette and passed it to me. She sighed and shook her head when all I could do was cough and choke on my guilt.

At home, I draped my pants on the radiator to dry so I could wear them again. The seat and inside of the legs were crusted brown with dirt, a bareback rider’s badge of pride.

My mother always snatched them away to the washing machine. Sometimes she said, “I know that you know who you are.”

A spiritual idea above the influence of mortal illusion, according to our church.

I squirmed. Once, I’d seen a huge portrait of Mary Baker Eddy on a Sunday school field trip; her painted eyes fastened on you and followed you around the room. It was exactly how I lived.

Sometimes I felt myself whimper, my front paws up on a religious chain link fence, like one of the strays the town held at our barn. The pound was a little concrete room tacked onto the barn’s far end. When the barn was quiet, a horse goddess would climb to the weak spot on one corner and slither inside. She’d boost a dog up to another girl who hoisted it over the fence to freedom. Like the dogs, I couldn’t ask outright. But I wished the goddesses could scoop me up and liberate me too. I wanted them to save me.

The goddesses are still out there. They still roam. You’ll spot them from time to time, wild girls bareback on rawboned horses. They rein their mounts through the centers of small towns on their mission to somewhere. Watch for them now that it's spring. They're careless in traffic. They know mortals have to yield the right-of-way.