Honey
S. held the lead rope in one hand and slapped her other arm against her thigh awkwardly, making a clicking sound in the back of her throat. She had a funny, half-grimace on her face, and she glanced at me then, to see if I was watching. Just as she had looked away, Honey began to circle her.
“You’re doing it! You’re lunging! Stand in the same place, right where you are, and just turn with her. Keep moving your arm. That’s it—that’s it!”
K, the college student who would become S’s horse teacher, was speaking urgently; already, I knew that any sense of urgency could throw S. off, cause her to withdraw into a comatose-like state. I felt my body tense up, expecting S to collapse and curl into a ball. But this time, S. didn’t. She did exactly what K told her to do, and I watched small wisps of breath escape from Honey’s nostrils and she circled and circled. S. was smiling crookedly, the left side of her lips curling toward her nose, the right side flat, stationary. She had a faraway look in her eyes. Then, suddenly, remembering something K had told her a few minutes earlier, she turned her body into the horse’s and said, firmly, confidently, “Ho.”
And Honey stopped.
It was mid-February, S’s only visit to the small town where I live, before moving here. Honey looked over at me then, as if to say, I told you she was yours. And, for the first time, I was certain.
***
Before that, there had been multiple conversations with K, one of my advisees, about this daughter I might adopt, about her love of horses, behind closed doors in my messy, small, hot office in one of the oldest buildings on campus. I told K more and more—things I wasn’t sure I should be telling her—but before S. moved here, I wanted to sure she would have at least one ally, one other person who knew the bad stuff and was going to stick it out anyway. Unconsciously, I wanted to scare K, to shock her, to get the rejection over with before S had even arrived. But K wasn’t afraid. That’s how I knew it was going to work out.
Sometimes, in the year that S took lessons from K, I’d be surprised that S withstood K’s pushing without pushing back. S is oppositional, afraid of challenge, afraid of failure—but I never saw her curl into a ball, not once, when she was with K. K pushed her hard, in ways nobody else dared. I would stand along the fenceline and watch S riding, thinking about all the social workers and teachers and foster parents who had told me all the things S would never be capable of doing. I wanted them all—as well as her current teachers, who care about her but are essentially passing her through school without making her work—to see her riding Honey.
Most people are gentle with S., careful not to hurt her, upset her. But K, and Honey with her, never treated her that way. And always, S stepped up to the challenge.
One day I got to the lesson and found S riding around the arena, telling K about her abuse. “I told her she could do what she wanted for the last 15 minutes,” K said. “And this is what she chose.” She was sitting in the center of the arena on a little stepstool, just listening. At the end of the lesson, S dismounted and buried her nose into Honey’s side. That’s when I realized she hadn’t been talking to K (though of course, she was aware of K’s presence)—she’d be talking to Honey.
“Honey’s my best friend,” S told me that night, solemnly, while drying the supper dishes. S hadn’t had many friends, if any. I knew this was a big deal.
***
Like all best friends, Honey and S always forgave each other, tolerated each others' weaknesses.
The night Honey spooked and S fell off for the first time, K made her go to the horse so they could make up, so S wouldn’t be afraid to get back on. I didn’t want her to do it—I was sure it could wait—but she listened to K, and I watched her bury her face against Honey’s neck and tell her everything was OK. And once, when S had given Honey the wrong command, Honey ran straight toward K and stopped just feet away from her, as if to say, “Mom, she doesn’t know what she’s doing, so I had to teach her—but don’t worry, I’d never hurt her.”
***
S’s lesson always began by bringing Honey in to groom her. Sometimes I would leave for an hour, even two—go to the gym, go home, make dinner—and then I’d be back and still they’d be at it, S. in a trance-like state, brushing or combing Honey’s tail, or cleaning the dirt off her coat. One day, a little irritated, I asked S. why it always took them so long to groom her, mentioning that if she loved riding so much, maybe she ought to get to it earlier, so she’s have more time in the arena.
“You don’t understand, Mom,” she said. “I’m talking to her while I groom her.”
“I don’t hear any words.”
“We talk through our minds, Mom,” she said. “Ask K. She gets it.”
It wasn’t until I spent a long weekend caring for the horses with S that I started to get it, too. There is something about horses, but about Honey in particular, that made me quiet and attentive and sure about what I was feeling. I can’t explain it.
S loves the barn, loves the girls (and one boy) who hang out there with their horses, loves the horse stories they tell each other, loves knowing the latest gossip about the pecking order, which horse likes which other horse the best, loves being part of that circle of graceful, powerful animals and people. Without these people, these horses, this place, I am truly not sure we would be where we are—connected for life and struggling to make sense of each new challenge.
S’s work with Honey was a metaphor for our lives together—the need for quiet reflection, the need for strength and confidence, the need to acknowledge each others' strengths and to work through each challenge. Somehow, even though K will graduate in a year and a half, I believed Honey would be in S’s life forever.
***
And then, almost exactly a year to the day when S and Honey first met, Honey died. K and J, S’s college buddies, came to the door and looked through our back window, and immediately, I knew. Honey had been colicing, but the vet believed she was OK. Sadly, she was misdiagnosed; she had ulcers, not colic, and the medication she’d been on had actually made the ulcers worse. She died struggling to stay alive in a way few animals do, clearly sure she was dying before her time.
Even though there was no way I could have known, I talked to S. about “what ifs” the night before we heard. What if my father, her grandfather, dies? What if Honey dies? What if…what if…
But there is no way to prepare for something like this. For at least three hours, the four of us—J, K, S and me—wept together, telling stories about the things we remembered, asking why, why, why. Later, in the barn, we sat in a circle with others who had loved Honey, who loved K, and told more stories, wept some more.
S missed a week of school; I missed three days. On one of the nights, S got out the photos I’d taken of her with Honey and we wept and wept, outlining her body on the small, square, inadequate depictions of their time together. Then, we decided to go to the barn to make a memorial; S left photos and books and the poem I’d written about the first time I saw them together. She went into Jazz’s stall and wept against her neck. Jazz stood still as if she understood.
Still, now, it is hard for her to go to the horse barn without crying. On Thursday she was with J for the evening, and when they went to bring in J’s horse Jazz, S sat in Honey’s stall and wept and wept.
S is learning what grieving is all about—and with this grief comes the grief of so many memories, animals tortured and killed by her tortured family members, her little-girl-self tortured for so many years.
***
For about two straight days last week, S was acting out, refusing to take responsibility for anything, even the most minor error. Finally, exasperated, I said without thinking, “I hope you can overcome this need to always be right, this need to refuse to take responsibility for anything you do wrong. Think of how it destroyed your bio family.”
S was quiet then, still, for the first time in at least two days. Then she got out her drawing pad. She had an idea: she would draw them all, write all the words they’d said to her, in some cases, draw their ugly, bulging private parts separate from their body. She would do this and then she would rip every single letter, every pencil line, up until the small, white pieces were unrecognizable. She would draw herself as she was, carrying all of the pain around, and write all the mean words she'd said to me--you're not really my mother, I want to go back to my last family, I hate you, I want to kill myself, I hate my life. And then, we would burn them.
This went on for hours, drawing and burning, until we were almost gleeful. “Fuck you, fire alarm!” she’d shout. “You can’t keep us from doing this!” Again and again, I’d get up on the stepladder and turn it off. But we were stuck in the kitchen, couldn’t even imagine going outside. Fuck my father, who raped children. Fuck my mother, who let him do it, who told me it was normal and OK. Fuck my brothers, who hurt me too, even though they didn’t know any better. Fuck the mean part of me that says the same things to my mom that they used to say to me. And then she wrote down all the words they’d used against her, whore, stupid, bitch, princess, good and bad, all the ways they’d labeled her. All if it, into the fire.
We almost forgot to walk the dog, but eventually, when the burning was over, we did. I feel good, she said, as she threw the ashes into the white snow. A week later, I can still see them there, a dark, smoky squiggle under a tree in our yard, not remotely powerful or scary.
***
The day after the burning, it was unseasonably warm, and S and I decided to take the dog for a real walk, the kind we hadn’t taken in months due to either icy sidewalks or cold temperatures or both. We meandered through town, ending up near the barn, and S asked me to wait while she went over the mud pit to say hi to the horses. It was getting close to sundown, but I said yes anyway. By then, we’d been walking for nearly two hours, and even the dog complied, lying down in a small clearing. I crouched beside him and watched.
S stood by the fence and watched the horses until Jazz walked over. Jazz stood still, and they locked eyes. For at least 20 minutes, they stood like that, while a horse named Jack lingered around, occasionally getting a nip on the butt from Jazz, who was clearly saying, “Are you blind? We need some alone time.”
I knew S was talking, but I couldn’t hear a word. Later, when I asked her what she’d said, she answered, “I told Jazz that Honey had died, and she didn't really get it before, but she does now. Plus I told her about all the assholes that we burned last night, and I explained that that meant I had also burned all the parts of me that don't want to go on, and she thought that was pretty cool." Then she sighed and said, "I miss Honey."
“I do, too,” I said. I could feel tears pressing against the back of my eyelids. I took a deep breath.
S. said, “Well, I think Jazz can get the message to her because they were such good friends."
“What message?” I asked, confused. “That Honey's dead?”
"No, Mom, that I miss her, and that I'm going to work through all my stuff and burn out all the bad things and be OK." Needless to say, that was the moment when the tears fell. I walked quickly ahead of her so she wouldn’t see, which was easy since Cody the dog was getting restless by this point and pulling me along behind him.
The gray sky was burning away, filling with pink and blue. I remembered the sky looking just like this the day S and Honey had first met—or at least, in my memory of that day, this is what I see, a streak of blue and pink on the horizon.
***
And now, to lighten the mood, I must tell you that my daughter loves to moon me. It is an incessant and annoying habit, one which I accidentally encourage because it always happens so unexpectedly that I laugh in spite of myself.
I mention this because, just as I was thinking about the pink-and-blue sky, trying to decide whether to let S. see that I was crying, S. said, "Hey, I just had the urge to moon you, but I don't think I'm going to be mooning people anymore. I think I burned the girl who moons people!"
“We’re walking down 7th St. It’s not even dark out yet. I’d say this would be a really bad time to moon me,” I answered.
"Yeah, we're walking down 7th Street in More-Ass Minnesota! Get it, Mom? More Ass!"
And, in spite of myself, I laughed. Cody barked at me and pulled harder on the leash. We were almost home.
“You’re doing it! You’re lunging! Stand in the same place, right where you are, and just turn with her. Keep moving your arm. That’s it—that’s it!”
K, the college student who would become S’s horse teacher, was speaking urgently; already, I knew that any sense of urgency could throw S. off, cause her to withdraw into a comatose-like state. I felt my body tense up, expecting S to collapse and curl into a ball. But this time, S. didn’t. She did exactly what K told her to do, and I watched small wisps of breath escape from Honey’s nostrils and she circled and circled. S. was smiling crookedly, the left side of her lips curling toward her nose, the right side flat, stationary. She had a faraway look in her eyes. Then, suddenly, remembering something K had told her a few minutes earlier, she turned her body into the horse’s and said, firmly, confidently, “Ho.”
And Honey stopped.
It was mid-February, S’s only visit to the small town where I live, before moving here. Honey looked over at me then, as if to say, I told you she was yours. And, for the first time, I was certain.
***
Before that, there had been multiple conversations with K, one of my advisees, about this daughter I might adopt, about her love of horses, behind closed doors in my messy, small, hot office in one of the oldest buildings on campus. I told K more and more—things I wasn’t sure I should be telling her—but before S. moved here, I wanted to sure she would have at least one ally, one other person who knew the bad stuff and was going to stick it out anyway. Unconsciously, I wanted to scare K, to shock her, to get the rejection over with before S had even arrived. But K wasn’t afraid. That’s how I knew it was going to work out.
Sometimes, in the year that S took lessons from K, I’d be surprised that S withstood K’s pushing without pushing back. S is oppositional, afraid of challenge, afraid of failure—but I never saw her curl into a ball, not once, when she was with K. K pushed her hard, in ways nobody else dared. I would stand along the fenceline and watch S riding, thinking about all the social workers and teachers and foster parents who had told me all the things S would never be capable of doing. I wanted them all—as well as her current teachers, who care about her but are essentially passing her through school without making her work—to see her riding Honey.
Most people are gentle with S., careful not to hurt her, upset her. But K, and Honey with her, never treated her that way. And always, S stepped up to the challenge.
One day I got to the lesson and found S riding around the arena, telling K about her abuse. “I told her she could do what she wanted for the last 15 minutes,” K said. “And this is what she chose.” She was sitting in the center of the arena on a little stepstool, just listening. At the end of the lesson, S dismounted and buried her nose into Honey’s side. That’s when I realized she hadn’t been talking to K (though of course, she was aware of K’s presence)—she’d be talking to Honey.
“Honey’s my best friend,” S told me that night, solemnly, while drying the supper dishes. S hadn’t had many friends, if any. I knew this was a big deal.
***
Like all best friends, Honey and S always forgave each other, tolerated each others' weaknesses.
The night Honey spooked and S fell off for the first time, K made her go to the horse so they could make up, so S wouldn’t be afraid to get back on. I didn’t want her to do it—I was sure it could wait—but she listened to K, and I watched her bury her face against Honey’s neck and tell her everything was OK. And once, when S had given Honey the wrong command, Honey ran straight toward K and stopped just feet away from her, as if to say, “Mom, she doesn’t know what she’s doing, so I had to teach her—but don’t worry, I’d never hurt her.”
***
S’s lesson always began by bringing Honey in to groom her. Sometimes I would leave for an hour, even two—go to the gym, go home, make dinner—and then I’d be back and still they’d be at it, S. in a trance-like state, brushing or combing Honey’s tail, or cleaning the dirt off her coat. One day, a little irritated, I asked S. why it always took them so long to groom her, mentioning that if she loved riding so much, maybe she ought to get to it earlier, so she’s have more time in the arena.
“You don’t understand, Mom,” she said. “I’m talking to her while I groom her.”
“I don’t hear any words.”
“We talk through our minds, Mom,” she said. “Ask K. She gets it.”
It wasn’t until I spent a long weekend caring for the horses with S that I started to get it, too. There is something about horses, but about Honey in particular, that made me quiet and attentive and sure about what I was feeling. I can’t explain it.
S loves the barn, loves the girls (and one boy) who hang out there with their horses, loves the horse stories they tell each other, loves knowing the latest gossip about the pecking order, which horse likes which other horse the best, loves being part of that circle of graceful, powerful animals and people. Without these people, these horses, this place, I am truly not sure we would be where we are—connected for life and struggling to make sense of each new challenge.
S’s work with Honey was a metaphor for our lives together—the need for quiet reflection, the need for strength and confidence, the need to acknowledge each others' strengths and to work through each challenge. Somehow, even though K will graduate in a year and a half, I believed Honey would be in S’s life forever.
***
And then, almost exactly a year to the day when S and Honey first met, Honey died. K and J, S’s college buddies, came to the door and looked through our back window, and immediately, I knew. Honey had been colicing, but the vet believed she was OK. Sadly, she was misdiagnosed; she had ulcers, not colic, and the medication she’d been on had actually made the ulcers worse. She died struggling to stay alive in a way few animals do, clearly sure she was dying before her time.
Even though there was no way I could have known, I talked to S. about “what ifs” the night before we heard. What if my father, her grandfather, dies? What if Honey dies? What if…what if…
But there is no way to prepare for something like this. For at least three hours, the four of us—J, K, S and me—wept together, telling stories about the things we remembered, asking why, why, why. Later, in the barn, we sat in a circle with others who had loved Honey, who loved K, and told more stories, wept some more.
S missed a week of school; I missed three days. On one of the nights, S got out the photos I’d taken of her with Honey and we wept and wept, outlining her body on the small, square, inadequate depictions of their time together. Then, we decided to go to the barn to make a memorial; S left photos and books and the poem I’d written about the first time I saw them together. She went into Jazz’s stall and wept against her neck. Jazz stood still as if she understood.
Still, now, it is hard for her to go to the horse barn without crying. On Thursday she was with J for the evening, and when they went to bring in J’s horse Jazz, S sat in Honey’s stall and wept and wept.
S is learning what grieving is all about—and with this grief comes the grief of so many memories, animals tortured and killed by her tortured family members, her little-girl-self tortured for so many years.
***
For about two straight days last week, S was acting out, refusing to take responsibility for anything, even the most minor error. Finally, exasperated, I said without thinking, “I hope you can overcome this need to always be right, this need to refuse to take responsibility for anything you do wrong. Think of how it destroyed your bio family.”
S was quiet then, still, for the first time in at least two days. Then she got out her drawing pad. She had an idea: she would draw them all, write all the words they’d said to her, in some cases, draw their ugly, bulging private parts separate from their body. She would do this and then she would rip every single letter, every pencil line, up until the small, white pieces were unrecognizable. She would draw herself as she was, carrying all of the pain around, and write all the mean words she'd said to me--you're not really my mother, I want to go back to my last family, I hate you, I want to kill myself, I hate my life. And then, we would burn them.
This went on for hours, drawing and burning, until we were almost gleeful. “Fuck you, fire alarm!” she’d shout. “You can’t keep us from doing this!” Again and again, I’d get up on the stepladder and turn it off. But we were stuck in the kitchen, couldn’t even imagine going outside. Fuck my father, who raped children. Fuck my mother, who let him do it, who told me it was normal and OK. Fuck my brothers, who hurt me too, even though they didn’t know any better. Fuck the mean part of me that says the same things to my mom that they used to say to me. And then she wrote down all the words they’d used against her, whore, stupid, bitch, princess, good and bad, all the ways they’d labeled her. All if it, into the fire.
We almost forgot to walk the dog, but eventually, when the burning was over, we did. I feel good, she said, as she threw the ashes into the white snow. A week later, I can still see them there, a dark, smoky squiggle under a tree in our yard, not remotely powerful or scary.
***
The day after the burning, it was unseasonably warm, and S and I decided to take the dog for a real walk, the kind we hadn’t taken in months due to either icy sidewalks or cold temperatures or both. We meandered through town, ending up near the barn, and S asked me to wait while she went over the mud pit to say hi to the horses. It was getting close to sundown, but I said yes anyway. By then, we’d been walking for nearly two hours, and even the dog complied, lying down in a small clearing. I crouched beside him and watched.
S stood by the fence and watched the horses until Jazz walked over. Jazz stood still, and they locked eyes. For at least 20 minutes, they stood like that, while a horse named Jack lingered around, occasionally getting a nip on the butt from Jazz, who was clearly saying, “Are you blind? We need some alone time.”
I knew S was talking, but I couldn’t hear a word. Later, when I asked her what she’d said, she answered, “I told Jazz that Honey had died, and she didn't really get it before, but she does now. Plus I told her about all the assholes that we burned last night, and I explained that that meant I had also burned all the parts of me that don't want to go on, and she thought that was pretty cool." Then she sighed and said, "I miss Honey."
“I do, too,” I said. I could feel tears pressing against the back of my eyelids. I took a deep breath.
S. said, “Well, I think Jazz can get the message to her because they were such good friends."
“What message?” I asked, confused. “That Honey's dead?”
"No, Mom, that I miss her, and that I'm going to work through all my stuff and burn out all the bad things and be OK." Needless to say, that was the moment when the tears fell. I walked quickly ahead of her so she wouldn’t see, which was easy since Cody the dog was getting restless by this point and pulling me along behind him.
The gray sky was burning away, filling with pink and blue. I remembered the sky looking just like this the day S and Honey had first met—or at least, in my memory of that day, this is what I see, a streak of blue and pink on the horizon.
***
And now, to lighten the mood, I must tell you that my daughter loves to moon me. It is an incessant and annoying habit, one which I accidentally encourage because it always happens so unexpectedly that I laugh in spite of myself.
I mention this because, just as I was thinking about the pink-and-blue sky, trying to decide whether to let S. see that I was crying, S. said, "Hey, I just had the urge to moon you, but I don't think I'm going to be mooning people anymore. I think I burned the girl who moons people!"
“We’re walking down 7th St. It’s not even dark out yet. I’d say this would be a really bad time to moon me,” I answered.
"Yeah, we're walking down 7th Street in More-Ass Minnesota! Get it, Mom? More Ass!"
And, in spite of myself, I laughed. Cody barked at me and pulled harder on the leash. We were almost home.
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