The thing my son loves most is no longer making him happy.
This past summer, my son Charlie fell off his horse. He has been riding horses since he was four to help with his cerebral palsy. He is nine now. This has never happened in all the years he has ridden. It was an exceptionally mild day for August in Tennessee and so he and his horse were walking the sensory trail outside. Charlie loves this trail with its windchimes in the trees and mirrored glass tunnels that wind between tractors and hay bales and what will be a corn maze in autumn. He’s always been an outdoor kid, craving the wide blue skies and windswept days over the static atmosphere of our living room. So on this day, all should have been well.
Until Smoky, who is a larger and newer horse at the therapeutic riding center, startled at a rustling in the brush and shimmied sideways, away from the two side-walkers, one of which was my husband. Charlie was left unattended and unsettled, literally. Charlie slid slowly down Smoky’s side and into the dirt. His legs, ensconced in his braces, bent at an odd angle and his hips twisted. Thankfully, Smoky trotted away rather than toward my son who had been silent with shock up until then when he began to wail. My husband scooped him up and hugged him tight. He didn’t appear to be significantly injured, but the damage was done. Charlie cried those big crocodile tears that inevitably trigger my own and sat gingerly in his dad’s lap for the rest of the session.
The next day, a Saturday, he woke up stiff and when we put him in his supported seat he winced. We checked him for bruising and swelling but found none. However, as any parent of a kid with a disability knows, just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. So, Charlie spent most of that weekend in his bed happily watching YouTube videos on his iPad. By Monday, he was mostly better in the physical sense. But when his riding session came around again, he began to cry when he caught sight of the barn. By the time his helmet was on, he was shaking and pointing toward the van to “go, go, go.” He did not enter the arena that day.
Trauma is real. Charlie had been through an incredibly scary and unnerving and painful experience. We knew it would take time. But the weeks turned into months and he still refused to ride. Something in me cracked each time he began to whimper when I told him he would have horseback riding that afternoon. From the time he was in preschool, horseback riding was his thing. He adored it. It was by far the best form of physical therapy we found for him that strengthened his core and taught him to care for an animal and himself. He used to sign “more” when the lesson had to end. How had we gotten to the place where he feared what he once loved?
I have a vivid memory of a bristling chilly spring day in May, sitting on a slightly crooked wooden chair on the campus quad, in my polyester robe at my graduation waiting to hear my name called and wondering, “okay, so what now?” I majored in English because I loved books and talking about books and writing about books and holding books and the smell of the library, and well, you get it. But how to turn that into a career?
I had watched enough “Sex in the City” and my VHS tape of “You’ve Got Mail” to know that New York is where I needed to be if I wanted to stay in the writing/book business. So, I moved to Manhattan and worked at a publishing company in Chelsea and did the long commute and ambling walks in Central Park and food-sampling at the street festivals. I loved New York. But after a few months, it became apparent to me that I did not love publishing. I spent most of the day watching the clock and drawing out my lunch hour and planning my weekend. My particular division was reprints. I didn’t even get to read all those juicy new manuscripts I dreamed about when I pictured a job in publishing. I was devastated. I had a plan and a life I pictured and it fell apart. The “future” wasn’t panning out and I did not know what that meant for me. I ended up quitting that job and working at a bakery around the corner from my apartment. It was stop gap until I ran out of money and had to move home. I went to grad school. I became a teacher and you know what? I loved it. It was talking about books and writing about books and reading books with teenagers who were wonderfully weird just like me. And then I had my babies and began writing books of my own and I love that. Now I get to tell the stories and make people feel all the things.
Sitting on that lawn on that spring day, I did not know how much heartbreak was ahead of me. I did not know where the thing I loved would lead me or how that love would change over time. Charlie gets back on the horse now most sessions. Sometimes he even smiles. But I don’t know if he will find his way back to it in the same way he once knew it. It doesn’t devastate me like it used to when things don’t go as planned for him. If anything, it is a small reassurance that he is living his life and taking risks and finding new things to love like we all do. His winding path is an unpredictable one. There is freedom and independence in that.
Jamie Sumner is a special needs mom and author.
Jamie-Sumner.com
Author of the middle-grade novels:
