THE NARRATIVE ARC
Learning to Ride Couldn’t Fix My First Marriage
But it made me feel a lot better about everything else
I was a New Yorker who never drove. She was a Midwesterner who drove everywhere. We met because my former spouse got a job as a cantor at a synagogue and moved us out to Indiana. She was one of the first friends I had, smiling at me as she introduced herself. “Hi, I’m Diane.”
Diane was also married, and she and her husband were raising two young children. Her father ran a horse-equipment store for many years before he retired. Still, when Diane asked me if I wanted to come to a riding lesson with her, it was the last thing I expected her to say.
Growing up in New Jersey and moving to New York after college, my only experience with horses had been glimpses of those who pulled carriages in Central Park. I understood why people wanted to ride them, but wished the horses had their freedom.
Yet, the idea of riding lessons with a friend in the Midwest seemed different than just hiring horses to take you on a ride. For one thing, it was about learning to relate to a horse you would see for months or longer. It was also far less expensive than any lessons on the east coast would have been.
I said yes to Diane — and myself.
The next day, Diane picked me up. We drove half an hour to rural pasturelands with an almost limitless horizon. After a few minutes, we stopped in front of a barn that looked like something in a kid’s chapter book; faded paint, long rows of horses in stalls, fresh hay, a large, circular staging area where riding lessons took place.
I followed my new friend into the barn and she introduced me to the owner Sydney, a woman with short blond hair and riding boots. Sydney sized up her students quickly and assigned horses to each one.
Our class was small — six students of varying abilities and experience. The horse assigned to me was a chestnut-colored stallion named Flame. He was older and there seemed to be little that would surprise him. I learned to cherish that, as I often goofed up my moves as a newbie in Sydney’s class.
Sydney found it hilarious that I had barely any driving experience and was learning to steer a horse instead. She teased me about it frequently. I told her I thought riding horses was better for the environment anyway. That made her laugh even more, but she allowed that I was right.
My riding days were among the happiest I spent in my newly-adopted state. I loved the intelligence, responsiveness and beauty of the horses. I loved their power when they were ready to speed up and the grace they displayed when slowing down.
I also liked getting to know the students in our class, finding they were, for the most part, kindred spirits. Overall, I had an almost idyllic view of everything surrounding my lessons — and I needed that. I needed it because in the back of my mind, I knew my marriage was falling apart.
It wasn’t anything in particular that brought the notion into my head. But the marriage had been tumultuous in New York, with intense arguments that never seemed to get resolved. What held us together in earlier years was a shared love for writing and performing songs together. In our new synagogue-based life, time for songwriting was scarce — at least for my partner.
There were expectations around this new life, too. Congregants assume you’ll attend synagogue regularly and join the Sisterhood group, and I tried (though was usually late on Saturday mornings).
Synagogues and Jewish rituals and holidays have always interested me and I enjoy observing them. But I just wasn’t quite the cantor’s wife I was trying to be.
When Sydney asked if I had kids, she wasn’t referring to the unspoken supposition that cantors’ and rabbis’ wives should be mothers, too. Instead, she was trying to get me to post, because, while most Indiana riding classes were based on Western style, Sydney taught her students the English way.
“Well, you know, Jenna, if you’re with a kid, and you’re just about to sit down, they call out, “MOM!” And you have to get up again.”
I laughed.
“That’s the kind of movement you do when you’re posting. Up, down, up, down, up, down, and up, there you go.”
I knew exactly what she meant and was posting in two or three lessons. We then progressed to trotting and finally, cantering. I don’t remember every step of it, but I know it involved closing my hands around the reins and adding pressure from my legs. There were a couple of things you had to do pretty quickly, and it took me a while to get there. When I finally did, it felt like I was flying.
Once in a while, we invited family members to Sydney’s class, and Diane’s husband came along with mine. As Flame was such an old horse compared to the others, I was asked by both men what I saw in the aging stallion. I told them Flame let me climb onto his back and run without complaining. “Something I can never do at home.”
Diane’s husband found it funny. Mine did not.
Some months later, I was riding larger and faster horses, and had more confidence in them and my riding abilities. There were days and weeks when I wished I could wake up and run outside to the barn, and not have to be at home. But there was no one I could talk to about how I felt — especially within the marriage.
I knew only that riding allowed me to be in the present at a time when I really needed to be. I also knew that the person I was trying to share my life with was confessing his own unhappiness to a mutual friend. There was little I could to do stop it; mostly, it felt like I was playing a character in someone else’s (awful) play.
It would take another year before we moved to a new city and synagogue and became parents of a wonderful son. A few years after that, the marriage ended and eventually both of us remarried. Those marriages were happier ones, though divorce is never easy, especially when you have kids.
On the other hand, if you are headed for divorce, I do recommend some way to be physically active — whether it’s riding, dancing, walking, swimming or whatever attracts you.
Just putting yourself into the moment in a physical way can make all the difference in the world to your morale.
Diane and Sydney, I haven’t seen you in a very long while, but I hope you’re still where I left you.
Ride on.
Thank you for reading this story.
