LISA COUTURIER
When I first met Tyra, my Icelandic mare, she was in a dark, dusty stall. I made a kissing sound to get her attention, as one does with horses, but she refused to look my way. Or any other way. She was possibly the least likely horse to buy. Her palomino, golden-furred body was not tight, taut, and equine-athletic. Her belly, like mine, had a multiple-baby sagginess and her rump, like mine, showed evidence of yearly expansion. When I reached out to touch her, she trembled and her eyes darted to the stall door. All of this made it abundantly clear that that she’d probably rather buck me off than let me ride her, which, if it happened at all, would be a long-term negotiation.
Concerned that Tyra’s behaviour would cause me not to take her, her owner explained, “Awwww, she’s shy.”
She may have started out shy at her first farm in Idaho, but somewhere on her way through West Virginia, or Maryland where I found her, it was obvious that she wasn’t shy anymore. She was pissed off.
Aside from using Tyra as a broodmare, few people had spent time with her as an individual horse. As they age, broodmares become less useful as a means of making money, and many horse folk in my area have a tale about other horse people — the bad ones — leaving an older broodmare to rot in a field. Without attention or care over the years, broodmares are often unrideable and skittish. Tyra was entering that stage and now was a “for sale broodmare” which is kind of like being an old woman in a bar. She had endured years of being mounted by shaggy stallions, years of pregnancies, years of surrendering to men’s arms snaking up her vagina to check on the progress of her unborn foals, years nursing foal after foal, years of being stuck in stalls. It was no wonder she was reluctant to acknowledge me. For all she knew, I was just the next human in a long line of humans willing to subject her body to procedures she preferred not to tolerate.
I have been told, mostly by horse people who make money from breeding, not to get too emotional — that is, too liberal and menopausal — about the horse business and the broodmares left behind. Horses, whether mares or geldings, are immeasurably more powerful than any human and can break most leather tethers with the strength of their necks. Still, horses do what is asked of them — even when they are asked cruelly. Then they wait and watch. They give people chance after chance to do the right thing, even if we rarely do it, even if we never do it, all of which reminds me of myself and my relationships with people. Standing there in her stall, Tyra was like the main character in The Yellow Wallpaper. She was a female forbidden from expressing herself and whose true desires were ignored. She was bored and confined and, quite possibly, slowly going insane. In other words, at the time, I was thinking Tyra and I just might be at a similar point in our lives, emotionally.
Which meant Tyra was the mare for me.
I already had three geldings at home. And my own daughters, little fillies themselves, were starting — dare I say it, because they never want me to say it — menstruation, just as I was beginning to leave it behind. Everything about my daughters was young and silky and fresh and popping and gorgeous and sassy. I needed a female around who was more like me. I needed a perimenopausal broodmare. I needed Tyra.
A few months after I bring Tyra home, I find an article that links the lives of mares and women, entitled The Mare Model for Follicular Maturation and Reproductive Aging in the Woman. The article explains that the physical factors causing menopause are more alike between women and mares than, say, between women and rodents, who have ten babies at a time. It would make sense, it seems to me, to compare women to cows who, like us, have one baby at a time, but unfortunately cows and calves become hamburger, steak, and veal before they reach their bovine menopause. Although that’s not how the researcher explains it. She is more vague in her description, saying of the bovine fate, “Relatively few of these animals are maintained until old age.” Mares are kept around for twenty or more years, so their natural reproductive lives can be tracked. Apparently Tyra and I have both maintained our dwindling number of oocytes for decades, and now our little eggs of fiery life are burning out. The sun of our fallopian tubes is setting. I am my mare; my mare is me.
Of course Tyra doesn’t give a damn about any of this. She doesn’t know what I know about menopause, or think what I think about menopause. Which doesn’t mean she doesn’t think. She just thinks different things. Through the winter, I notice how much Tyra enjoys the simple pleasure of being alone, especially when it’s cold. One early morning after a night of sleet and high winds, it’s obvious she’s left the barn and my other horses behind for the delights of foul weather. I find her standing by herself in the centre of the outdoor riding arena. Her nearly foot-long, shocking white mane, whipped up and curled by the wind, stands as erect as Billy Idol’s Mohawk along her neck, frozen in place and shining with ice crystals.
I walk toward her, the sky still spitting, the sun barely rising through the gray air of our land. She reaches for me with her wide, black velvet nose, sniffing and snorting, her breath rising in steam around her eyes. We stand together in the stillness and the dark and the cold, our primordial follicles perishing. The early morning crows blast by overhead.