MY LITTLE PONY
All I want for Christmas is a pony.
Kidding! I just put that in to freak M out.
M isn’t fond of horses. And horses (who are like cats in this regard) therefore totally mess with him.
I, on the other hand, love horses, and horse ranches, and horse barns.
I rode horses (well, horse, to be exact) as a kid. This sounds fancy (“Fawn-SAY”). It was not. We exercised the horses that belonged to our rich hobby farm neighbour.[1] We were basically his stable hands - except we didn't get paid. We just got to ride horses, which was totally worth it. I don't remember being taught how to ride a horse. I am pretty sure my brothers and I just got hoisted up into the saddle. Maybe someone crossed their fingers that no-one would get their heads cracked. If so, that “someone” often forgot, because I do remember my brother getting bucked off with some frequency. These horses hadn’t been ridden for some time, so we were basically a bunch of “City Slickers” pretending to be “The Man from Snowy River”.[2]
The horse I rode was called Old Timer and he was indeed old. He stumbled all the time. You never knew when the floor/horse was going to go out from under you. This was especially problematic because we rode horses the same way we XC skied - constantly leaving a perfectly good trail to do choose your own adventure bushwhacking. If Old Timer had trouble keeping his footing on the dirt road, there was no hope in untracked forest. I have no idea how long we rode those horses. It all came to an abrupt halt when Old Timer tripped and broke our mom’s tailbone. She had to sit on a doughnut pillow for two months. And that, as they say, was that.
At least, until I was a parent myself. I was an easy target for the “Can I go to horse camp?" request - which sane parents decline without a backward glance. I didn’t know where one went to learn to ride horses where we lived. But I had a friend with six kids, one of which picked riding as her sport.[3] I figured her recommendation would be close to town since she was presumably twice as busy as I was with my three kids - and I had not a second to spare. I gamely sign S & H up. I am excited, until I discover at ~9pm the night before the camp, that the stable was an HOUR away from where we lived. It turned out the Sextet-mom had intentionally picked a stable that was far away so that she could catch a break from the rest of the brood. Clever trick for her. Madness for me. The girls are in camp all day long, so there is no choice but to drop them and return home. This equated to 4 hours of driving each day. FOUR HOURS! There is no part of me (now) that can comprehend what I was thinking.
As I said, I just really like horses. And S LOVED them. She was having to change schools that year, so I was particularly willing to make this work for her. It was worth it, until day 2, when the camp called approximately 1 second after I have returned home after 2 hours of driving. S was having an asthma attack. Turns out she is deathly allergic to horses.[4] I have to turn around and go pick her up. But H is still in, so the madness continues. By Friday I am done with driving to/from horse camp.
It is the Friday of a long weekend, and we are hosting our extended family at our cottage. I have spent the day shopping and packing the car, which is in full Jenga mode. I am tired, rushed and generally frazzled before I even get to pick up. Upon arrival, S wants to go see the horses, and barn, and barn cats (all of which make her nose run like a snot tap). So, I take C - who is a toddler still - out of her car seat and we hang in the barn long enough for S’s head to start to explode. Desperate to source an entire box of tissues and some Claritin, we return to the car only to discover it has a flat tire.
“Are you kidding me right now?”
I look about for help. Everyone else from horse camp has left the farm, probably because it was a long weekend, but maybe to avoid getting sneezed on by S. There is no cell service, even out on the road where I fruitlessness pace back and forth with my phone held up in the air. The barn has no phone, and the main farmhouse isn’t answering the doorbell. I can only hope I retained something from when I got mansplained how to change a tire, but obstinately responded to the mansplaining by 'womanignoring' the demonstration.
Just getting to the jack and spare took about fifteen minutes because I had to unload approximately $1000 worth of food and all our clothes. I have to stop to let C back out of her car seat because she only had about an hour of staying power, and I couldn’t use it up in a stationary car. Then I have to let the dog out, then I have to take C to the outhouse, then I have to find some snacks to keep the girls from disintegrating…and so on and so forth. FINALLY, I exhume the tire changing equipment. Jack in hand I stare at the tire. I spend somewhere between a minute and an hour of trying to access the part of my brain where “tire changing manual” is stored. Eventually I recognize that I have 3 little kids and a large puppy and there is, in fact, no operational part of my brain. Period.
Fortunately, a truck comes up from the back field. I stand in front of his truck and do the ‘if you want to get by me you will have to run me over’ thing. After much pathetic begging, he changes the tire for me. I pay him in beer. Back in business, I repack the minivan, wrangled the girls into their seats, load up the dog, and get behind the wheel…and discover I can’t find my car key! I check all my pockets. Nothing. I look all around the driver’s seat. Nothing. Out comes everything from the trunk again (every single item of which has an open top and needs to be individually inspected). Nothing. I retrace my steps back out to the roadside. Nothing. Black through the barn. Nothing. Back where I tied up the dog. Nothing. Back to the…OUTHOUSE.
Literally, “Oh Shit”.
I gingerly peer into the outhouse hole. It’s pitch dark down there. All I can think of is the movie “Trainspotting". I decide that if it’s in there, that’s where it’s gonna stay. I have no clue what to do now. In a daze, I go to unlock, I mean unbuckle, C from her car seat. As I stick my hand down into the crumb filled seat belt hole…I feel something…you got it…the @!%@! car key. It had fallen out of my pocket when I unbuckled her two days, I mean two hours, earlier. With everything and everyone finally loaded back in, I set out on the two-hour drive to the cottage. Slowly, on backroads because of the spare tire.[5] I drive about 100 feet down the road and then have to pull over - for just a wee bit of a cry. If I could have locked myself in a bathroom - this would have been one of those times. But no way was I returning to the nightmare inducing outhouse, so I do the cry-in-front-of-your-kids thing.
Kids, who are jacked on fruit roll ups and oblivious to the chaos: “What’s wrong Moma?”
Me: head pounding against steering wheel.
You would think THAT would have been the last straw (hay pun!) for horses and our family. But the most ill-advised foray was yet to come.
A friend who is contagiously enthusiastic and not incidentally an incredible salesperson, convinced M that we HAD to go to a Dude Ranch. I was so excited that I didn’t really think it through. I booked a ranch because it was on our West Coast road trip driving route. Only later did I learn that this was a unique riding experience. They assigned a horse at check in, and you could ride anywhere you like. It was like tour skiing, except on horses, without a guide. This did not sound like something for beginner riders. But they wouldn’t just send us off into the wilderness without running through the basics. Right?
Wrong. It turned out to be a Dude-LESS ranch because we went at the same time as the national rodeo was going on. The few staff on site were not mentor inclined. The girls get up on their horses okay. M mounts next and (having pretty much never been on a horse) doesn’t know how to get going. I am about to give a run through when the stable hand smacks M’s horse - WHAP! - on the rump. His horse takes off like a rocket, the girls following suit. I quickly clammer to get on my horse. And it is only then that I realize: a) this is a bad idea, b) I haven’t ridden a horse in 25 years, and c) I no longer have the flexibility to get my foot into a 6-foot-high stirrup. Long story short: it did not go well. The ride progresses from bad to worse, culminating in me looking up from helping C manage her skittish horse to see S, in the middle of the road, as his horse is rearing like Black Beauty right in front of a Coca Cola MAC truck. Her life flashed before MY eyes. THAT really was that. For real.
I instead filled the horse-gap with a pony sized dog.
I do still love barns though.
All I want for Christmas is a horse barn.
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[1] Located beside our upper middle class hobby farm.
[2] Two of my favourite movies. As I said, I like horses. I also like cows.
[3] Let’s take a moment to ponder what a colossally poor idea it is to give one of six kids free rein (another horse pun!) to pick their sport unilaterally.
[4] We once stayed in an Airbnb that was decorated with moose heads and cow hides. S couldn’t breathe the whole time we were there.
[5] We invented a game called Silver Lining where we pointed out things we wouldn't have gotten to see if we were driving along random back roads. These included a windmill and a cheese factory. Certainly things we wouldn’t have otherwise seen…but, to be honest, not actually worth seeing.