we ride through
on motherhood, and riding, and the critic in me
It always starts innocently enough. I want to post a picture of me and my horse (the one that, by now, I feel as though you know yourself, his footfalls and his gently twitching ears). I reopen the app most of us know. I tell myself, it’s okay, you won’t get lost, you have a reason. Post the picture, for the joy of it, and then ignore it.
But how long did I expect it to last, that innocent self-restraint? How wise did I think I was?
Surely wiser than I am, an hour or so later, down rabbit trails of influencers styling me in clothes I don’t yet own, horse riders advising me on the right timing to ask for the canter transition, and then, with the same intensity of a wave starting far from the shore, with all its relentless unyielding energy -
the experts teaching me to watch myself parent.
Among the things they tell me I should be watching - my presence, my calm, how much I look at my phone when my kids are present how much screen time they have daily/weekly/annually, how often I raise my voice lose my composure how many vegetables they’ve eaten how much candy they’ve had if they’re well regulated if they’re overstimulated if they get along with others if they know how to be bored or play outside if they’ve lost connection with previous generations if they’re raised by a village or if they’re part of just isolated islands of ideas or if they have gifted brains or if they feel connected to the land to each other to me…
What they want me to see when I watch myself live is a lack of something, something they’d be so happy, too happy, to sell me an answer for. A parenting guide. A decluttering plan. Clothes that are trending, riding lessons in podcast form, a quick means to be better.
—
“Sometimes it is good to have a lesson that starts one way and ends another.” The other week on the circle that by now you now as well as I do (20 meters, in the center of the arena), I rode with spurs for the first time. Sometimes a small change is all it takes to become unraveled. As I tried not to think too much about the spurs, of course I thought of nothing but the spurs, an of course that did a hundred unseen things: I closed my hip angle. I perched forward, I gripped the reins with that fearful grasping as if I could hold myself up by seizing him.
“Go canter big around the arena,” she told me, and he flew, and that day I was unraveled by the speed and so I perched more and he grew more fretful and I just… disappeared from myself. I was only fear, I was only closed angles and panic, I was drowning in the rush of the air in my ears and in the impenetrable distance between the horse under me and the voice next to me and my own self.
—
Do you ever disappear under that pace of that self-improvement, that pressure of watching yourself, suddenly aware of all the ways you could have been doing it, improving on it, bettering it? Do you ever feel that you are nothing but the lack of the things they’re selling or the fear that settles against you? Do you ever think, where did I go?
There are layers to my critic - she is always, always prepared. If she is not critical of the fact that I didn’t invest in a decluttering plan for $30.99 she is critical that I wasted so much time scrolling the app that showed it to me in the first place. If I push against the criticism that I failed in the ride (failed the horse the instructor the activity itself) then she will supply that I was foolish to even ride on a day I was tired and already emotional. If I look for space from, her, she follows me.
—
The only way to ride beyond the panic is to ride through it. We turn on the circle, again and again, and I want this to have a real redemptive arc for you, I want to give you a life lesson on that specific time around, but I don’t have it. The ride ended - for me, anyway - in tears on the drive home. My critic is ever present, she is deeply practiced, she is the algorithm in my own mind - why didn’t you declutter and descreen and supplement and provide and create and make meaning and open your inside leg and drop your elbows and just stop panicking, Hilary, why didn’t you just do that…
This is a post about still turning on the circle with my inner critic. This is a post about riding through it, staying on the horse even though really, that time, nothing in my own mind changed. This is a post about not being self-possessed enough to innocently post a photo on that app for you to catch a glimpse of me and that same horse or me and these wild miracle children -
because I’m not yet.
Someday, maybe, you and I, we’ll turn on that circle differently. Until then, we ride through.