Dilemma

I wrote this in Jan 2010 as a journal entry and just now posted it.  Epilogue to follow...

It’s frightening to realize how much power I have over the interests my children are allowed to develop.  Which passions I choose to nuture or ignore, their total dependence on me for their schedules and therefore how they spend their time.    The decisions I make for them, both consciously and unconsciously, are very much rooted in my life experience: what exposures I did or didn’t have as a child, or what I wanted for myself but didn’t attain. 

From my windowed corner of a ski lodge, I am watching my 10 year-old daughter ski by herself, effortlessly, comfortably and happily.  She has the psychological security of a walkie-talkie communication with me, and familiarity with this mountain.  In the brief glimpses I have as she finishes her run and zooms into the lift-line, she looks graceful and confident, and I am so filled with pride and joy for her that I’m near tears.  That both my son and daughter are skilled, confident skiers is important to me.  It comes from loving the outdoors in winter, loving New England, loving mountains, loving snow and loving a sport I cannot do.  Learning as an adult in my early 40’s has proved difficult, and recently, fraught with peril.  I love skiing but from a safe distance at this point.  However, I am making very sure that my kids will not have my problem and we are a lucky family indeed to ski for 5 weekends a year.

 My current dilemma has little to do with skiing in particular except that skiing is a choice.  Really the dilemma is about what I am not choosing for my daughter.  It’s about riding horses: my experience as a rider and my daughter’s sudden passionate love for horses.  I am frozen like a deer in the headlights of my own conflict and hope that writing will help iron out my confusion.  Of course, this is a dilemma of the affluent.  If the rest of the people in the world had my problem of the moment, this would be a nice world indeed.  Nevertheless, it is my problem and I am searching for clarity.

C was suddenly smitten in 4^th grade.  I had assumed that we were safe.  My irrational and all-consuming worship of horses started well before kindergarten.  Horses were all I drew, daydreamed about, collected.  There were no dolls in my life, only Breyer model horses, eventually well over 100 of them.  My exasperated second grade teacher forbade me from bringing any more model horses for show and tell.  No one in my family knew anything about horses except my grandfather who had grown up on a ranch in Nevada during his childhood, but like us, was well anchored in suburban life just outside of New York City.  My first cousin, Jule, whom I did not really know as child and lived on the other coast, was equally smitten.  Is horse-craziness genetic?  I’ll never know.  At any rate, I did not grow up in a household that encouraged anything horse-related and drove everyone wild with my myopic focus. 

I took C to a barn once for fun when she was in preschool and popped her up on an ancient gelding.  Her legs were so short that the soles of her feet ended 6 inches before the bottom of my saddle’s flaps.  I led her around in her yellow bicycle helmet and she beamed.  And that was all.  I haven’t sat on a horse since before becoming pregnant with her and had settled happily into total denial of my deep addiction, or so I thought.  And then, just before her 9^th birthday, C asked, “Mom, do you think that someday I could have a horse-back riding lesson?”  I acquiesced, of course.  Little harm and great joy could come from a riding lesson or two.  I found a place nearby which, despite its ramshackle appearance, had reliable school ponies and happy horses turned out on grass paddocks.  I liked the way the older girls rode, the high standards of the head instructor, and the fact that everyone appeared to do their own work around the barn, and were nice to each other and their horses. 

After each lesson, the blazing light in C's eyes was unmistakable.  As was her total focus on committing me to the next lesson and the next.  Later that summer, I was hearing about how talented my daughter was, what a natural athlete she was on a horse, what a hard worker she was, how much they loved having her around and could they enter her in a show?  I said no.  And there were tears.  Too expensive I explained to C (the fee for the pony, for the instructor, fees for entering the classes, the shipping, not to mention the new clothes she would instantly outgrow).  But really, we could have easily afforded that single show.  So then why not?   Think Pandora’s box. 

I had worn my mother down too.  After years of hard lobbying, first riding lessons started in 4^th grade once per week at a local barn. “As long as there is a carpool,” said my mother who was buried alive between my traveling father and two sisters who were then 4 and 5.  The next year, lessons were twice a week.  Then summer riding camp but only for two blissful weeks in late August.  I spent most of each summer lackadaisically participating in the sorts of activities that make middle class children well-rounded and waited for my two weeks of horsey bliss.

During the school year, evening lessons took place in floodlit outdoor rings in the frigid dark.  Ponies, frisky from the cold and bored from endless lessons, would imagine goblins and bolt, and I remember being scared but never so scared I would skip a lesson – they were too precious.  One evening, my instructor gave us a break and walked us on our ponies to the edge of the “main ring,” to watch the big kids ride.  Older girls jumped brightly colored fences and danced their horses effortlessly in and out of the floodlights.  To me their riding was magical, and I remember being consumed by ambitious, driven desire that evening.  To be like them, to ride like them.  

This fall, C has pined for riding lessons but our family schedule was too tight between her 7^th grade brother’s activities, her activities and my work to fit in one weekly commute to the barn.  C is a dancer: it was her first true passion—she has been dancing in her room, in the family room, around the dinner table since she was tiny.  When I send her up to get a sweater or a hairbrush and she doesn’t return I listen for the overhead thump of dancing feet.  Now she attends ballet three times per week and will start her beloved modern dance class as well this January.  Too much.  I meant to make her choose: riding or modern dance.  We can’t do both – too expensive and too much time.  Lo and behold, an email came from the barn offering a short January session of 5 Saturday morning lessons.  I caved and C is ecstatic.   

All the while knowing what I need to tell her.  That I will support her development as a dancer but not as a rider.  In my heart of hearts I know that if offered the larger choice she would instantly opt for an existence with horses over dance.  But while riding feels good and welcoming now, it will not in another year or two when all her peers are leasing or owning horses.  I caved because I know there is no better place on earth for a girl than a dirty, airy barn full of horses.  Am I the peak of hypocrisy because I was the embodiment of that happy girl at the barn?  Or am I the good mother protecting her daughter from the bottomless ache of only being able to touch this world with her fingertips, or the catastrophe of running full-throttle into the cold wall of finite cash flow?  Do I wish my mother had protected me?  Or is it better that I experienced my private school of hard knocks?

“You were so good while you were having your heart torn out.”  My mom looked at me dead-on as she said this in a recent conversation.  By high school I had my own horse and hit that wall brutally hard when our financial world fell apart.  The story is complex for everyone in my family, but the abrupt ending of everything horse-related is what counts in this particular dilemma.

When I look too closely at C's copy of the book, A Very Young Rider (the same author wrote A Very Young Dancer, A Very Young Skater, etc.), I can feel ancient teenage tears lurking under the surface.  I see photos of my horse’s veterinarian, farrier, a judge I worked for, a store where I bought my bridle, and familiar show-ring faces.  The girl who is featured in the book trailered her horse to the barn where I boarded and she and I trained with the same rising star instructor.  In a corner of my mind, my ego rants and raves a very old and hysterical tirade.  “You have NO idea!  I was going to be good, really good – I would have qualified for the National Horse Show…. 

The lurking impact occasionally reveals itself in a recurring dream: loading my kind, big-hearted horse onto a trailer and watching the door slam, never to know what happened to him.  The dream always takes place trapped inside the sixteen year-old mind’s denial of reality, naïve belief in the good intentions of horse dealers, and adolescent ostrich-like hope of bigger and better horses and competitions which were obviously never going to materialize.  Another darkly comic side-effect is that even today I cannot enter horse show grounds without suddenly needing to squelch involuntary tears.  My good friend K is the only person I dare take with me to watch big riding events.  Ironically, she doesn’t particularly like horses but finds herself invigorated by the teamwork and passion in the cross-country rides and gets a rush out of spectating.  As we turn into the grounds and the tents of the temporary stables come into view, she shoves the kleenex packet at me.  When I’m composed , we hustle to the warm-up ring and have a fabulous time plotting the best strategy to see promising teams over favorite obstacles.

I have been upset in retrospect, from time to time, about the role my parents played in all this.  Or the role they didn’t play. Why weren’t they more involved?  Why didn’t either parent or any relative attend even one show?  No photos, no memories in anyone’s head but mine.  But these are petty, adolescent complaints.  The sport was mine and mine alone.  I rode public transport to the barn, begged rides to shows from other, "helicopter" parents, and took pride in working to afford my bridle, saddle and some lessons.  More importantly, to the obvious question: "how could my parents have had so little insight into the financial ramifications of me horseback riding that they let me climb so high and fall so far," the answer is that they were fighting complex challenges, and they loved me, saw all the good that riding did for me and none of our lives comes complete with a crystal ball.  Even so, my inner teenager has been licking her wounds ever since and my inner helicopter mother is determined, rightly or wrongly, to protect C from the same fate.

There are many large and important lessons I learned from navigating the whole affair.  Certainly I have drawn on those larger life lessons to become who I am now: a largely happy woman immersed in a rich tapestry of family, career and projects that sustain me.  C has no such autonomy: the only way for her to get to any barn is to rely on me, and the riding world is too much my world to be completely her world.  But perhaps in my role as gatekeeper, I am depriving her of those larger lessons.  Or perhaps, the bottom line is really that in my own snobbish way, I simply don't want her to be viewed as "second class" by her horse-owning, horse-showing peers, when actually she would be completely O.K. and would ultimately benefit from the experience.

Someday C will be upset with me for a grave parenting mistake no matter how hard I try to do right by her.  An error in my judgment that will, in retrospect, cause damage and anger and upset her.  Will she ask, “why didn’t my mother let me ride more when she knew how much it meant to me?” “Why did Mom let all of HER unnecessary baggage get in the way of me just wanting to learn to ride a horse?”  After all, which is more painful: to be cut off from your heart’s desire before you can touch it or after you’ve possessed it as yours?

C, who is pink-cheeked in her helmet and done with the icy cold, is getting impatient with me.  She wants her well-deserved cocoa and is spelunking in my bag for cash.  A shrewd observer of my moods, she voices concern about the expression on my face, “Mom, are you O.K.?”  It seems her mother has been taken over by aliens as she types.  I have not told her what I am writing about and am not going to.  Right now, hot cocoa is definitely the only answer, and satisfactory for us both.