The Accident Was on a Trail Ride

... But I finally got back on a horse!!!!!!!!!

Hi.

I’m so happy to be writing and annoying you again!

Below, please find a long winded video sort of giving an update-ish on the last couple of weeks.

Does a 20-damn-minute make up for it? (It probably does the opposite, hehe)

You can 100% skip it - or demand a more thorough dramatic retelling of the specifics- but consider it a Podcast for those in a mood to listen rather than read. Or, you can read and skip the superfluous listening.

I wanted to try to update you on the nuance of my milk-bottle-inspired negligence (= girl went missing?_…. So please click below if that’s preferable or of interest.

Some stories are better left “said” then stated (“spoken” or signed than circumlocuted on paper)… and this might be one of those, even though that’s near sacrilege to say on Substack of all places?

Little casual continued update [as carried over from @catchingbreaths vanishing stories]:

So, last week, my love was sick, so we quarantined apart for my potential sake.

It wasn’t because our youngest or anyone else had gotten it, because that would feel unethical. But it was mostly because I couldn’t remotely put another thing on my plate with how poorly I had been doing with a weird spine pain flare up, that was really an ongoing prior nerve-pinch problem from months ago.

On the flip side: There were so many lovely things to say too at that time, so I legit didn’t know how to keep dueling realities from taking away from that, for my own self.

(Addendum: Not because I think any of us have the capacity to hold that much space for each other when the world is a dumpster fire, pressing Johnny Cash on repeat and expecting us to look like we aren’t breathing in ashes. So also: ignore me! But also: now you’ve been sort of updated?)

The injury I mentioned regarding the horseback accident last week- which was a really not completely to blame for the already rampant spine stuff as of late, and the many many many injections and trips back and forth - but I need to state the following:

All images I have from that (otherwise joyous and amazing) weekend are not of the horse I got knocked off of. I need you to know this, for the sake of my own feeble little ego.

The accident was on a trail ride- not in a ring. And he was bigger- I need you to imagine a Dwayne Johnson size horse, just for the sake of my whiny little Freudian-trinity of the Superego, Ego and Id. The (otherwise joyous and amazing) very persnickety trail horse that I got bopped off of actually looked like a blonde Keanu Reeves…. so please imagine that as well.

All images or footage of Follin and I riding were from the day before; The first time I’ve been on a horse since a child!

It wasn’t a lesson- it was meant to be a walk around the ring because the trail was too muddy and thus had been cancelled that day - but I asked her if I could try to remember a posted-trot since childhood, and she was so amazing that she let me try.

I cannot describe how happy this moment was, and both days on a horse. Both Flower (shown in any equestrian images) and… Kevin.

I have held onto the dream of horseback riding again since I had to stop at around 10 or 11 or so (unsure exact age?), after just a couple of years as a daytime homeschool student.

My favorite part was actually mucking the stalls and cleaning their hooves and stuff. I have only beautiful memories of my childhood, and have no qualms saying that all day long… even if that very statement makes me a very bad brooding writer.

I remember feeling so privileged enough to be near a horse or in a stall, that I didn’t even need anything else except the smell, and the responsibility, and their presence. I used to read so many horse books from the library as a kid, and still wish I could get back in touch with that dream. That may never end.

I’ve talked about it ALL THE TIME for two full decades since. No hyperbole. Truth.

We of course can’t afford lessons, even if I’d muck all the stalls in the world to pay for time into this dream.

So, having said all of that, I’ve now set the scene for how triumphant it felt to finally get back on a horse!!!!!!!!! [Look at all my exclamation points. I’m screaming at you!]

My love and teenage daughter both felt like I should let the dream go because after all the spine surgeries - and especially the huge one for my pelvis - they felt like the impact would be super dangerous.

And, to be fair, a non posted trot felt like something I should never do again.

But she was beyond generous to let me try a more formal English one and …

To say this felt triumphant is a massive understatement.

I’ll just leave the rambling, introductory words at that… And update you more later?

PS. The photo above is my favorite.

I love that it’s Follin and I in one photo… But also, it’s double butts on double butts.

PSS. Follin’s Papa started to feel better after about a week apart.

It was awful being apart during such a painful time, but not as awful as the time I contracted Covid days after having stomach surgery around this time last summer, and had to try to recover alone in a bedroom to keep them safe. So….

No complaints?

I spent the last weekend wondering if I will ever have a life that feels worth living.

This query was conjured (rightfully?) almost single handedly by my pain.

This, my friends, is called “internalized ableism” (and violently so)… but let me try to explain first.

I just got home from my first ever summer camp.

Not really (it wasn’t summer camp) but… really-really, sort-of?

My daughter and partner and I had the privilege of going to Camp Ridvan to celebrate the holiday and… it was easily one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life.

It healed things I didn’t know needed to be healed. It let me see my youngest thriving amongst true friends- being herself after a lot of loss, and change, and change and loss. She has been the guiding light in so many ways in the last year to even create the forest footprints that led us to making literal ones but…

I even healed the parts of me that didn’t know my husband in context.

Context is everything. In ASL and in lip reading: context is how I survive and understand.

But for years (as a very supercil’, one-note example amongst hundreds of deeper but private ones) I have allowed him to be teased and even blamed for his sometimes acerbic delivery… razor’ed honesty… and manner of speaking without moving his face.

In the south we call it “northern face”. I have genuinely felt actual frustration deep inside, at times, when he’s been ridiculed for this before, because I selfishly… wanted him to fit into “my” life in a way that ruffled less cultural feathers.

But that subtext means: MY culture®️.

It meant: “Why can’t you assimilate more into what causes me less perceptions of judgement or shame, even though it is myself who is letting myself be influenced by any one who would be so face value to take faces as a marker more important than integrity, or devotion, or depth?…” and so on.

I’m embarrassed to my cuticles to openly write these righteous ‘roasts’ of the ‘me’ who just wants to smile and perform enough that no one ever stops throwing flowers at my feet enough to notice that the roses really smell like poo (poo poo-ooh).

“We are HERE to make mistakes” a thought leader and friend said to me at one point on the trip. She was reflecting on how infinitesimal our own inferiority complexes can be in the presence of an open sky… and I reflect now on the fact that the sentence she said - simple and no less profound- can take on equal and somehow divergently powerful meaning no matter what word you place the capital-letter emphasis on.

Finally amid the CONTEXT of the culture my partner grew up around, I felt a staggeringly new understanding of the very same face I’ve been staring at for 13 some odd years... yet never fully seeing.

Surrounded by Persians, his ability to go deep into conversation and have the hard discussions without downplaying someone else’s right to their feelings… his balance of discordantly teary-eyed vulnerability and deadpan (and thus unnerving) everything…

Looking back, the cultural prejudice that we called “growing up in the north” was like if my daughter’s hypothetical future spouse wished she’d stop being so emotive, without grasping that the mannerisms she witnessed most were as a CODA with Deaf culture always in the corner.

(Or rather, a circle… because that’s how we like our tables)

Without context, we put White-Out over the parts of each sentence that matters the most.

PART TWO.

More tomorrow!

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