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.

On Re-Reading Terry Tempest Williams' Refuge on the 25th Anniversary of My Mother's Death...and Other Topics

When I decided hurriedly last fall to teach _Refuge_ by Terry Tempest Williams in my Creative Nonfiction course this spring, I chose the book partly because of our institution's commitment to sustainability and partly because I wanted to temper the edginess of my syllabus with a classic. That we will be discussing the book only a few days after the 25th anniversary of my mother's death never occurred to me when I made my syllabus. In truth, I'd forgotten the power of the book, how I'd read it for the first time in college while I was grappling, finally, with what my mother's death meant for me and my life.

I have been trying for weeks to finish my re-read, and now I'm probably lagging behind even my most slacker student. For once, it's not procrastination that's the problem. I'm halfway through the book, and only halfway, simply because I am finding myself savoring every image, sinking as I had the first time into the details of a place I've never visited and a family nothing like my own.

On the first read, when I was in college, I remember mourning that I never got to have the conversations Williams had with her mother in the end. There was no space in my family for the kind of honesty Williams' family (or at least the women in her family) had with each other--and even if there had been, I was 13, and although I was a thoughtful, brooding, intuitive kid, I was still a kid.

I did talk twice to my mother about her death. The first time, on the day of her third and final diagnosis with cancer, she'd come home to give us the news, and everyone else left the kitchen, overwhelmed. I sat at the table, silently waiting for what would come next. She came up behind me and I thought at first that she was going to hug me, or kiss the back of my head, but instead, she slammed her hand hard against the wood in front of me. Once. Twice. "I wanted to be here for you girls," was all she said, and then I burst into tears, and it was over. Whatever else we might have told each other ended the moment my tears came, and then she took me onto her lap, joking about how she hadn't done so in years, rocking me against her.

The second time was toward the end. She lay in her hospital bed in the makeshift sick room we'd created out of what had once been our playroom, wearing a red robe, and pushed her hand into a fist, saying, "I'm going to fight this for you girls. I'm not done yet."

Both times were small openings I've often regretted not taking. There were so many other times when we were alone--I liked to stay close to her always, but especially after she got sick--and I wanted so much to talk to her about whatever was in my heart, whatever mattered, though honestly, I was usually at a loss as to what exactly mattered. Mostly, there was simply a comfortable silence between us, or I would play my clarinet for her, or she would sing and I'd join in, or we would have a brief but clearly important exchange that I would for years afterwards turn over and over in my mind. "It's a waste of time to keep on fighting" (said about the tensions among her siblings); "Sometimes the only way to respond to hate is love." One-liners that I can't, won't, forget.

I don't have any idea if my mother did talk to other adults about what it meant to her that she was dying, but I doubt it. She had close women friends, and her sisters, but I have a feeling that nobody, even those closest to her, were able to hear.

The first time I read _Refuge_, I was jealous, grieved, a self-centered reader in a way. But I remember also being drawn to the way that each sentence, each phrase, felt like an enacted ritual--the careful recording of the Great Salt Lake's water level at the start of every chapter, the careful laying-out of dead birds found strewn near its shores, the Mormon rituals of healing, the careful attention to each detail of landscape, each sensation in her body. This time, further away from the raw grief of my mother's death, I am simply riding the waves of every syllable. If I read the book before bed, I actually dream myself into the waves of a lake the rises and rises, whispering poetry to me. I am, in a way, lost in the language.

For the last four days I've put the book aside because they have been, so far, the most difficult of my entire parenting journey thus far. On Friday, S. decided she wanted to look up information about her biological father at school. I got a strange e-mail, mid-day, from her special education advocate who also has her in the Resource Room for math, English, and a study hall. It was a brief update on what S. had achieved thus far that day, with these last two sentences: "At the end of study hall, she asked to look up some information about her biological father, and I agreed. She didn't find much."

I googled bio father's name. The first thing to come up was an address and phone number in the city in which S. was raised. The second, the registered sex offenders list, with a current photo.

I called the school office. "Don't let S. make any calls today," I said.

"She's here right now, asking to make a call."

"Don't let her, unless she wants to call me."

I remember getting up then and walking across campus, not knowing where I was going, and ending up at a friend's office, where I immediately burst into tears. I was surprised at how sure I felt about seeking her out--she is not my closest friend here, though she's someone whose intensity and honesty I am drawn to--and she talked me through my anger at the teacher, reminding me that what I needed to focus on now was how I would process with S. her reasons for doing this research.

And then, a call from school, shaky voice. "Mom, I need you to bring me my birth certificate."

"Why?" I asked.

"I just NEED it. Can you bring it, please?"

"Your new one, with my name on it?"

There was silence. "Yes, that one," she said, realizing, I think, that she was caught.

I went to school, and found her in the hallway weeping. We walked toward the Resource Room, where her teacher gave us a quiet place to talk. After awhile, she sat down with us, making the situation worse with platitudes like "Before you asked to do this, you were so happy. And now, you're not. Now, do you want to stay happy?"
and "I'm adopted, too, but I'm not able to directly contact my birth parents. I can only contact the agency that handled the adoption."

I know she didn't mean it, didn't know any better. But I couldn't help but feel like a failure. I'd tried so hard to prepare the school for S's arrival, but clearly her strongest advocates--and this woman has been a damned good one overall--couldn't understand the effect of telling a girl with the kind of trauma S. has experienced to, essentially, just not think about it--or compare it to the very different experience of being adopted as an infant.

Later, she sent me an e-mail with some suggestions for ways S. could calm down when she got upset, including memorizing a bible verse she could recite to herself.

I left school an hour before it let out, telling S. I'd be back at exactly 3:30 as I always am.

At 3:20, she called me, panicked.

I knew then that it was beginning. She wasn't done moving her body and heart through the trauma. I'd known this, of course, but I'd expected that the flashbacks, the intrusive thoughts, wouldn't start with this intensity until much later, in her late teens or early 20s. I thought it would take a long time for her to feel safe enough to feel everything. But, no, she was ready now.

I talked to her college buddy who would have her on Sunday about what had happened; she was glad for the information but didn't seem concerned. Saturday went normally, except for the hour after we received a letter from the social security office demanding "proof" of S's abuse. "How dare they not believe me," she said, after pulling the letter out of my hand. I'd never been good at masking facial expressions, and now, I was angry at myself for allowing her to realize something was wrong when I opened it.

On Sunday, while washing the dog with her college buddy, she remembered animals tortured, sometimes at her hands at the command of her older brothers. But, it would be more than 24 hours before she could verbalize this memory. When her college buddy called me to come home, I found her lying in J's lap, barely able to talk.

Most of Sunday she stayed next to me, disassociating. For some reason, on Monday, she insisted on going to school, and when I told her she should stay home with me unless she could follow all the rules, she got violent. Hit me in the face, spit on me, bit my hand, kicked the car, called me a bitch. Somehow we ended up at school, somehow she ended up out of the car and in the building. She then called me multiple times from the office, each call getting more and more threatening. The school personnel decided to keep her there, try to stabilize her. Eventually, she was in classes as if nothing had happened.

After school, she said she deserved her consequences and was ready for them. We went home, she wrote for awhile about what she should have done differently as usual, she listed the consequences she was going to take as usual, and then, I asked her what was going on. "Sometimes people who have had trauma begin to feel it in a way they couldn't at the time once they feel safe," I said to her, and that was all it took--she was a little girl lying across my lap not talking, not talking. Or weeping and telling me everything she could remember. Or feeling the tremors and pain through her body. Or asking if I was going to keep her even though I now knew everything. All night Monday, all day Tuesday, we went on like this, until in the end the demons, at least for now, had left her.

I had the urge to seal off our house, to pull away from everyone, but I knew I couldn't, shouldn't, do that. I talked to her college buddies, who assured me they were in this for the long haul, even though it was going to get hard, promised they would tell me if it got to be too much for them. I sent an e-mail to friends giving them an update. S's godparents called to say they would do anything we needed but didn't know what to offer--I thanked them and said I didn't know, either. A friend came over with dinner because she didn't know what to say, and we ate a hot, homemade meal for the first time in three days. The friend whose office I'd visited after the first phone call, when some part of me knew what was going to happen, that it was the start of something big, wrote and said, "I don't know why we don't open our lives to each other in the spaces we inhabit--academia, small town, whatever. I am not going to shield myself or my family from this. Come over Friday like we'd planned if you think it will help. Cancel anytime if it won't. Whatever you need from us, we're here." Another friend wrote and said, "You say S. is stabilized now, but what about you? How are YOU doing?" It was a question I hadn't allowed myself to ask, but the answer is, good, healthier than I've been in a long time, strangely. Still, I told her I knew my own grief was going to come, and I was glad to have friends who I knew would hold me through it when it did come. I haven't processed anything emotionally yet.

In Refuge, Williams writes about surrender, about allowing even the most painful and foreign intruders to become our friends. It was an idea I had trouble with the first time I read it--cancer as friend? Death as friend? But now, I think I understand. This is who S. is, who I am, and this is the path we are on together, the path I chose willingly, in some ways, but in other ways, the path that has been thrust upon me because I chose to love a child whose suffering I will never understand. We can't fight what will happen next, or what has happened--we can't decide not to look--so we have to give in to the ugliness and know that however we come out on the other side, scarred or healed, or both, we will come out.

But Williams also teaches that there is also a time to fight, to go forward into the dark wounds with a sword, to cut out the cancer, to let the body convulse with anger. She finds the links between her family's cancer and the environmental degradation linked to violence and war. I called the social security office and asked them if they understood what they had done to my daughter--how dare you, I said calmly, interview a 15-year-old traumatized girl and then send us a letter like the one you sent? S. is not a number, she is a human being. She has been silenced her entire life. How dare you not listen this time.

I asked to meet with her advocate, told her I wanted her to do some reading about trauma--politely. Then I sent an e-mail stating clearly that she was never to tell S. again not to feel her feelings, that she was to call me if S. needed to talk about her past and couldn't put it in the box she has learned to imagine our crazy, old cat carrying alongside her, cartoonish and scary at the same time.

But I am not going to let this anger overwhelm me; I'm going to use it as a tool to ensure that my daughter is not traumatized again by people's ignorance or by bureaucracy. But as for the trauma, the waves that will rise and rise and threaten to drown us both, I will not resist them.

Now, reading _Refuge_ as a mother, I am remembering how, on Saturday, right after getting that letter from the social security office saying her number could not be changed, there was no evidence of a serious threat to her safety, no clear record of her abuse, S. and I walked the dog out to the small lake in town. Almost exactly a year ago, S. visited for the first time, and we had made this same walk, sans dog, so that she could have the experience of walking on a frozen lake.

That time, she'd been trembling, her feet barely able to touch the ice, her hand in mine, a death grip. I remember coaxing her through the walk into the center of the lake, to the little wooded island where we'd sat for awhile, in silence, in awe of the way the light reflected from the snow into our eyes, shielded by trees.

There was a hesitation this time, too, but then she let the dog run and glided across the frozen surface. We hiked to the island in the middle of the ice and I reminded her how, when she'd come here last time with me, she'd shouted, nonsensically, "I dub this island cat's island!"

"That was so strange," she said. "I was a different kid back then." I had to smile, because in no way is my daughter not still strange.

But, I knew what she meant. "You've come so far. I can't really believe how many odds, predictions, you've beaten in only a year."

"It's because of you," she said. "Because you really love me. Because you really talk to me, really listen."

I breathed in deeply and thought, whatever happens next, I have those words, this moment.

I thought, fleetingly, about how there was no one I could have said those sentences to, and meant them, when I was 15. I thought, fleetingly, about the upcoming anniversary of Mom's death, and counted backwards, and realized it was the 25th, which for whatever reason is a milestone anniversary in our culture. I thought, fleetingly, about how much had happened in my life since my mother died, and how I wished I could have talked to her the way my daughter talks to me, and how I wished she was alive, of course, and here right at this moment, on a little wooded island in the middle of a frozen lake, staring out through the branches.

And then S. did the only thing there was to do: she lifted our dog and shouted, "You are no longer cat's island. We have returned Now you are Cody's island! I now dub thee Cody's island!"

Cody the dog wriggled out of her hands and leapt over a branch, then turned and tugged us toward the frozen water and open sky, out of the woods.

As we walked back, S. said, "I was so terrified, but I'm not anymore."

"Terrified of what?" I asked.

"Of falling through the ice. Of getting stuck. But now I know it will hold me, no matter how scared I get."

"Fear has no power over us unless we let it," I said, knowing only a fraction of what I meant. And then we finished the walk in silence, and trudged up the hill to the little lakeside park and back across town. The sun was shining.

As we neared our house, S. said, "We should make this a ritual and come back here every year at this time, no matter where we are or how old we are," and I wanted to promise that yes, we would, but I know life is not so predictable.

"Let's come back next year for sure," I said, and she nodded. Good enough. One hour, one day, one year at a time. And then, finally, we were home.