After what had started out as a good session in the round pen with Red, I had run into a whole new snag. He wouldn’t allow me to get near him to put the halter back on. Given the design of a round pen, catching an unwilling-to-be-caught horse is a trick. I hadn’t mastered it and was feeling muddled, stuck, out of ideas. Unlike my mare, he had no interest in ‘join-up’, as Monty Roberts calls it. I left the round pen, knowing that the mounting confusion I felt was making things worse. He was too smart, too attuned not to pick up on it. In fact, my muddle may have been what was driving his 'stay away' mode. My inner self and outer presentation did not match.

..... Periodically I had gone back to try putting the halter on. He’d turn and spin or back away at the last moment. Eventually I knew I’d just have to open the gate and let him go. He’d run right back to the stable to where my mare was. Given his history of intense abuse, the worst thing that could happen to him, I guessed, was to be caught. Once again, his history reared its ugly head. I had picked him up from a neglectful owner thinking he was going to be a good guest horse. This huge, angular, brown horse, not much to look at nevertheless carried an imposing presence. He had arrived with all but one shoe left on, the hoof having grown 6 inches underneath it. It was amazing how fast he could hobble around, so unbalanced. My farrier had come several times to carefully shave it down, but he still wasn't finished. I didn't want to ride him until I knew him better and wanted his feet, unshod, to no longer be an issue.

I sat there, leaning back in the old, homemade wood slatted chair that was suspended on a springy metal frame. It had been left behind at the old, rundown stable when I’d bought it, a heavy old thing that turned out to be the best seat in the house. I sat looking out at the big horse still out there, feeling flumoxed. In this moment as I drifted, I had a sudden flash on the wild, dusty hysteria of the remuda, from his days as a working ranch horse. The frantic milling of the horses, dodging the rope as a cowboy came to catch his next mount. Any mount would do - they were all treated like pick up trucks. At least that part of his life was over.

The spring sun offered a pleasant, drowsy heat that allowed me to drift as I pondered what to do next. So many things had gotten easier with him, part of it due to time, some of it due to a trust developing between us. But the gaping holes between the points of connection were large and I never knew when I was falling into one. Climbing out required some thought. This time I didn’t want to ask for help from the trainer at the neighboring stable. I wanted to do it myself. This was about Red and I. The fact that someone else might be able to go in the round pen and catch him didn’t answer the question of why I couldn’t. This didn’t seem to be about technique, horsemanship. I desperately wanted him to want to be with me, the way my mare was. But Jewel’s history was totally different. Besides being a mare, she was low on the horse totem pole. She was willing, someone to be with rather than fight with. She was the go along, get along mare. He was a conundrum.

I sat there with the sun seeping into me through several layers of clothes. It was so pleasant at this time of year, making it hard to remember just how inhospitably hot the sun became by June. Impossible to describe to those who had never experienced it. And as I sat there, letting my mind roam, it came out of nowhere. I could sense it seconds before it arrived, could almost smell it, feel it as a shiver. The flash of understanding came in the form of two words - parallel histories. Somehow we had parallel histories. If anything, Jewel and I had opposite histories, but Red, now there was something to think about.

I leaned back in the chair, propping my feet up on an overturned bucket as I pondered this idea. He had gone from an idyllic range life, or so one imagined given his ranch history, to quite the opposite. Abuse and confusion, domination and subservience. Always watching out, looking over your shoulder for an escape route. No wonder I understood his need to have space to escape into. I could recognize the feeling when it occurred. That, too, came as second nature to me. I, too, had always been the artful dodger, dazzling them with the footwork so they didn’t look too deeply at anything else. Didn’t come near.

As an only child, I had grown up in a household of older adults, all of whom were over 40 by the time I was born. My father was an alcoholic and that led to intense verbal abuse, which increased over the years to the point where it became our primary form of communication. Escape had always been the means of avoiding him when we all lived together in the huge old 1880’s Victorian house where my mother had grown up. With my grandmother and uncle also in the house, they were the buffers and witnesses for my father’s behavior. At 12, when my grandmother died, the household was broken up. My parents bought a small house in another town, wrenching me from my one dear, forever girlfriend and placing me in the direct line of fire of my father’s abuse.

Once they’d moved, there was no protection. My father and I had launched into direct combat, intensively outwitting each other with wildly abusive retorts. My mother struggled to find a balance, some way to keep me safe. While she had considered divorce over the years, she'd told me, as I repeatedly asked, that she was afraid he would shoot himself. Getting me out of the house was the only solution, and so at 15 I left home for boarding school, a terrible financial stretch for her. And in a sense, my mother’s fears were pretty much the way things had worked out. In my senior year in college, my mother died of a massive heart attack. A year later, on my mother’s death date, my father was found dead. It had been death by alcohol poisoning. By 21, I found myself on my own.

I cherished the umbrella of loving support that sprang from my mother’s brothers and sisters but they all lived great distances from me. And, of course, by now they were all gone, having lived extraordinary lives well into their 90s. When I was 30, I had been blessed through a short-lived marriage with the arrival of a daughter who brought trust and acceptance by the bushel. My sometimes tough, abrupt manner had been tempered over the years as a single parent by raising a loving daughter who embodied love and trust.

But the tension these early events had created never seemed to leave. My easiest means of escape had been intense activity, busyness, most certainly being out of the house, out of direct line of fire. Somewhere in my subconscious was the feeling of something threatening to catch up with me. I'd often heard myself refer to fearing the wolf at the door. While it started with my father as a young child, it continued in my adult years as a feeling that I was somehow going to be found a fraud. My father, and perhaps the culture of the time, had implanted unworthiness at an early age. It seemed to take a lifetime of struggle to identify and release these embedded messages. Red, it seemed, was forcing me to face myself in ways I was only vaguely aware of. My friend, Ronni, a nationally known psychic I did bookkeeping for once a week, had been right about this horse. I had met my teacher.

As I sat in the sun, tipped back in the old chair, I could feel the tears stinging, tears that said I was on the right track… follow the tears for the wisdom behind them, how many times had I said that to someone I’d counseled. Something was going on here with this horse that was well beyond traditional horse management. Through his escapes and panic, his apparent feelings of not wanting to be touched, his fear of all but those who simply exerted a forceful command over him, his behavior was plunging me deeper and deeper into myself. I didn’t trust easily either. I was fearful of being caught, albeit on other levels. I’d wasted enormous energy over the years outwitting unseen enemies and heartless, intentional invective. My abandonment issues were often out there floating on the surface. It seemed amazing that by my mid 50s all this was still so alive.

I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and swiped at the tears with my sleeve. Swinging my feet off the bucket, I sat up straight in the chair with a new sense of purpose, following the feeling into the thought. My commitment to him, yes that’s what was needed. I needed to take that feeling into the round pen. My commitment was that he would not, at any cost, be abandoned. What in the hell, I thought, was his commitment to me? As it hit me, I sucked in a sob. Perhaps all I could ask from him was to just try. To try to trust. What more could be asked of either of us? Wasn’t it the hardest thing to do?

To be continued next month...

Author Sue Newman lives near Tucson, AZ. She can be contacted at snewsy@rnsmte.com