There are crossroads in life where we choose a path and the impact is felt throughout the rest of our life, even years later. Unknowingly, I reached one of these important crossroads many years ago and made the wrong choice. In the blink of an eye, I chose to take a road that seemed logical and promising but turned out to be a dead end. If only I had realized how my choice would trap me in a situation with a tremendous potential for tragedy.
I was at a weekend convention for foster and adoptive parents. Some courses would help me earn college credits and fulfill the licensing requirements for the state. Other workshops offered no credits, but some of them looked interesting. They covered everything from recipes for picky preschoolers to how to deal with out-of-control teenagers to relaxation exercises. The strangest workshop of all was How to Be a Cowboy, which was led by a therapist who was also a comedian. Apparently, learning to rope and yodel and twirl a toy six-gun was relaxing and therapeutic for some parents.
I was really attracted to the cowboy workshop, the relaxation exercises, and the recipe class, but they didn't have much relevance to foster parenting, so with reluctance, I turned them down. Instead, I opted for a workshop called How to Integrate School and Home. In retrospect, there probably wasn't a more inappropriate class I could have taken, considering my lifelong distrust of, dislike for and disillusionment with the public education system in this country. However, at the time I had five foster children and, in Maine at least, they had to attend school.
So off I went to listen to some childless guy drone on about how important it is to get foster children right back to school, the day after the social worker drops them off at your home after plucking them out of their birth family's home or a previous foster home that didn't work out. Yeah, that makes sense. You wouldn't want to give them time to bond with their new family because then they'd feel even worse when they're plucked out of that home and sent to another one with no warning a few months down the road. (You can ask me why I'm no longer a foster parent, but you'd better clear your appointment book first. It'll take a while.)
I got my credits but wasted fifty perfectly good minutes that could have been spent on schmoozing with other foster parents who knew more than all of the presenters there or drinking coffee and eating those terribly fattening - but delicious - little Danishes that they always have at these events. I was depressed and tired on the two and a half hour drive home, and it felt like years since I'd seen my kids. It must have seemed that way to the kids too because all five of them jumped on me when I walked through the door and made it obvious that they thought I was a good enough foster mom even without all those workshops, so I figured that no harm was done.
Yesterday, though, I realized that a great deal of damage was done and a great amount of trouble came about because I had opted for that stupid seminar about education instead of one of the other ones. I was sitting out on the deck, pondering, as I so often do in the afternoon especially when I'm drinking my special cranberry drink when I heard hoof beats and Son's cat bristled and ran up a nearby maple tree. There in the field, was a horse, whinnying, tossing its head and grazing on our grass. It was Deva, our neighbor Charlene's two-year-old filly.
Now, Deva's mother, Snapper, was a rescue who seemed fine until one day on a trail ride, she decided to throw Charlene off and stomp all over her. (Horses are prone to episodes like this. They’re fine and you’re getting along like a house afire and suddenly, they think, “Hey! Why don’t I try to kill my rider? Haven’t done that yet.”)
Charlene spent days in the hospital and hasn't ridden since. She kept Snapper long enough to wean the baby, Deva but then gave Snapper back to the rescue farm she'd gotten her from. From time to time, she'd report to us on Deva's progress. According to Charlene, Deva was a whole 'nother kind of horse from her mother.
I took this with a box of salt because I've been around horses all my life. My grandfather trained them and raced them at harness tracks. We had four horses when I was a kid. I worked at a racetrack in RI, walking horses, mucking out stalls and exercising them. (I was a lot lighter then, needless to say.) I've been bitten, kicked, stepped on, leaned on until my eyes bulged, thrown and run over by horses and they're not my favorite animal. To me, they're like huge cats without any of the good points that cats have. You have to woo them to get them to "like you" and even then, they can turn on you in a heartbeat. Give me a dog any day.
So when Son, who is a fool for horses and has a way with them, couldn't get Deva to take a carrot from his hand or let him put a leash on her halter, I took it as a bad sign. Even my brother, who is an old hossman and former racehorse owner couldn't get her to let him touch her. As soon as either one of them put a hand on her, she'd shy away, toss her head and flare her nostrils. Finally, she turned around and kicked at Son and that was enough for me. I told him to leave her be until Charlene came home. We'd called her, but she was out.
The day wore on and it started to get dark, and the whole horse in the yard thing was beginning to get old. She had chased two of the cats already and we couldn't let the dog out without a leash and even then, Deva charged at us. I decided that we needed to get rid of this horse, so I walked outside and yelled at her to go home. (This has worked for me with coyotes and - once - with a bear.) She just looked at me and went back to grazing.
I yelled louder and started walking toward her and she stopped grazing and started walking toward me. Her nostrils were flaring again and she was snorting. Not a good sign. I went back into the house and the geek decided to blow the horn in his car at her, but that just made her run around in circles like a circus horse on amphetamines, so he stopped before she broke a leg or crashed into the car. There was nothing to do but wait for Charlene to rescue us.
She showed up just after ten, but the horse was nowhere to be found. Apparently sometime after dark, she'd gone back to her barn as horses are so often wont to do. As the geek and I sat there going over the events of the day, it hit me. If I had only taken that danged How to Be a Cowboy course! I could have swaggered over (Cowboys always swagger over to horses), roped her and hogtied her or whatever it is cowboys do to wild cayuses! (My brother says they shoot them, but that can't be right, can it?) Still, would Hopalong Cassidy or Roy Rogers (or even Gabby Hayes) put up with being trapped in their ranch house by a filly? I don't think so.
So, gentle readers, let this be a lesson to you. If you find yourself faced with a choice between a course of action that will teach you something that actually applies to your life and another course of action that is entirely frivolous but fun, opt for the road to fun and frivolity. I can almost guarantee that somewhere down the path of life, you’ll be glad you did.