My horse paws the stable floor,
each strike of his impatient hoof
rings steel and thunder 
through the barn.
His leg is a piston
of an engine with truthful eyes.
A horse cannot lie, unlike
the complicated prayers
I prayed to not want what
I wanted, not be what I was-
A nine-year-old 
in her backyard 
galloping on 
an invisible horse,
She held the reins,
hollered and whooped
pigtail and mane soared
over an imaginary jump.
What took me so long to 
heed the answer to my
heart’s honest wish?

© 2023 Kristen Skedgell. All rights reserved.

​When a child dies, no matter how old, people are often thrown into a crisis of faith.  How could God let this happen?  Why did He do this to our son, our daughter? To me?  To us? If this is what you call a loving God, then you can have it. How can anyone believe in such a cruel being?

Losing Kala changed my life in a way I never could have predicted.  His funeral was the first one I attended where there was an actual viewing of the body.  I stood alone at the casket, touched his tie, his sleeve, his hands, his cheek.  It was Kala, alright.  Kala’s body but he was not in it.  The logical question – where did he go- where was his spirit?  

Bible-believing folk were secure in their answer – he was with the Lord.  And the Lord was everywhere, overall.  He was the One you didn’t question. Whatever happened, happened according to His will.  If it something you wanted didn’t happen, it was God’s will.  If something happened that wasn’t supposed to happen – like a forty-nine-year old man dying in his sleep – it was God’s will. It was supposed to happen.  Who could argue with that? I did.  I wanted to know “why.”

For over sixty years, I’ve wanted to know the answers to everything.  But after years of studying different religions and various philosophies, I was no closer to a system of answers I could live by than I was when I started my search.  ​

​So, I begrudgingly concluded that life was just one Great Big Mystery Show.  I resigned myself to coexisting with Something I could not name or know and that probably didn’t know or care about me.  I deeply resented all the uncertainty. Unable to surrender to anything solid, I was tossed around like a piece of spiritual driftwood.

Until that moment at Kala’s casket.  Then the questions started again.  Where did you go, Kala? Where is your soul? If it’s “out there” somewhere, where does “out there” end?  What’s beyond “out there” and beyond that and beyond that and beyondbeyondbeyond.  

Where are you now, Kala? If you’re with God, where is God and who made God and who made the God that made God ?  And while we’re at it, when was the beginning and what was before the beginning and on and on.

These questions are not new.  What was new for me is that in Kala’s death, I ran up against the ultimate reality. That for all my pouting and screaming and stomping my feet, I was not going to get a signed affidavit from God that attested to the location of my beloved stepson.  

In this I can see a mercy that points to a benevolent God.  How can my small brain comprehend the vastness of the heavens and the intricacies of earth?  I would short-circuit, like a tiny computer processor trying to take on a universal data system.  I don’t have the capacity or ability to begin to understand where the Departed go. 

​Kala’s death released me from my indignation at Life. It’s as if I had been saying to Reality, how dare you not tell me everything about you? Life, how dare you insult me by hiding your answers from me as if I couldn’t handle them? How dare you, God, say you love me and keep the secrets of the universe from me?  I guess no one could ever accuse me of having too much humility.  

Well, Kala, your sudden disappearance splashed all these questions up into my face again.  Only this time, the answers were in the questions themselves.  The indisputable fact, that I don’t know for certain where you are- that you may be “out there” in the beyond or perhaps right here inside me has given me a bedrock of faith.  I am now comforted by the existence of not knowing. 

Nobody on earth can tell me what is beyond the gate of infinity. There are many faiths that declare they know and many self-proclaimed prophets to argue with them. I have no argument with any of them.  Many base their faith on feelings, an inner knowing.  I have felt things, too.  But I need proof. No one can argue with no beginning and no end.

If there’s an Energy or Consciousness, a Creator who hangs out in endless space, then why couldn’t it know everything about me and why couldn’t it be all the stuff the mystics and poets write about?  Why couldn’t I be enveloped in its peace, wisdom and love as much as I am in my own self-loathing, confusion and fear?

People used to tell me Faith was a choice.  But I didn’t get it.  I didn’t understand what I was choosing between – one myth against another?  I wanted to know the truth about everything. I now know I will never know all the answers in this life.  But just as surely as Kala Weaver is no longer in his body and as surely as I cannot understand the universe, I am sure there is an intimate, positive presence in my life that I now choose to call God. 

When I touched the hem of Kala’s sleeve and realized he was no longer in his body, a profound transformation began in me.  Faced with the reality of his absence and the absence of answers, I began to make peace with reality of my questions. My heart opened.  When my beloved Kala died, I did not lose my faith.  I found it.  
​
- kristen skedgell

When Kala was a little boy, he wanted to be a magician when he grew up. This poem is dedicated to him.

TO MY STEPSON

Before you vanished, you sat with me in the back of the bus, 
produced a deck of cards and dazzled me with aces and hearts,
pulled a rabbit out of your pocket, told me of the women 
you sawed in half, exposed the iron chain that gripped
your lungs, the one you had yet to puzzle your way out of. 
Houdini, you saw me, a step away and called me, “Mama.”

Others on the bus, save one, didn’t see. Indifferent
as luggage in the hold below, they turned their righteous 
backs to us, didn’t notice the food you cooked and brought 
me, save your father, who followed your every move.  
But even he didn’t see you drop out of sight when the bus 
stopped at a railroad crossing and the driver opened the door.

A father’s grief is endless for his only son but he is not alone.
Since your final disappearance, I mourn two men, not one.

 
​© 2022 Kristen Skedgell
​All rights reserved.

One night, when I was ten years old, I gazed out my bedroom window into the endless dark and fell headlong into the existential abyss. I crawled under my covers, overcome with the stark reality of Reality, and burst into tears.  I sobbed and I wailed- who knows for how long but it seemed like forever.  No one checked in on me, no one cared; this proved my suspicions. Finally, the door opened a crack. The outline of my mother’s dark hair appeared in the doorway.

"What is the problem now? You’re supposed to be asleep." 

“I’m alone in the universe,” I cried. 
​
"Oh, for Christ's sake, we all are. Now stop blubbering and go to sleep.” The door snapped shut, leaving me once again alone in the dark.  Now to the wife of a bed-ridden alcoholic, mother of three children and sole breadwinner, my place in the universe must have seemed inconsequential to her.  But to me, it was the root of all my budding neuroses. I had been deprived once again of a mother's reassuring embrace to buffer me from the stark truth of solitary existence.  Had she dropped the laundry basket or hung up the phone on the police who were calling once again about my older brother, she might have sat on the edge of my bed and whispered the words of comfort I so longed to hear.  Words like she would always be there in my heart and there was a loving God who would never desert me.  Even Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny might have worked.

I’ve spent the better part of my adult life looking for someone make up for what I didn’t get as a child - to caress my forehead, tell me not to worry then kiss me goodnight.  If Freud was right in his theory of "repetition compulsion" this is not an unusual condition (According to the "PsychologyDictionary.org," a "repetition compulsion is a psychoanalytic term for the tendency to repeat past behavior and, more narrowly, to relive disturbing experiences.")  As per my compulsion to repeat, it's taken me the better part of my adult life to learn that no one on the earth can undo the past (although I do still take a stab at it from time to time.) No one can turn back the clock – that’s like trying to feed a starving person enough food to make up for years and years of deprivation.  She can only feed herself today, now, in the present, until her stomach is full.  Staying in the present, not getting overwhelmed with the past, is a good way to start the process of self-care and self-soothing.

I’m very lucky to have a partner who tucks me in at night but he’s not always around- sometimes traveling, sometimes writing, watching Kung-Fu movies or listening to his Chakra music.  When I’m alone in my bed, with just myself, facing that dark window, I trick my ten-year-old self back away from the black hole of depression using several strategies I’ve found helpful.
​
 First, I talk to myself out loud.  Yes, out loud. I might read something light like Dr. Seuss or “Don Quixote,” (although that’s a hefty tome for a fragile person beset with sadness) Both, however, help me to chuckle or even laugh, which everyone knows is ‘the best medicine.” I also hear myself say what I wish my parental units had told me when I was young. Then there are the sleep stories and music.  Many mediation applications play calming sounds (lullabies and sleep stories (my favorite is “The Velveteen Rabbit).   The best one I've found so far is the "Calm" app - good for any cell phone.

But, hands down, the most soothing activity I’ve found to muddle through the existential void is praying to my Higher Power.  Meditation is also a great source of peace and comfort.  Someone once told me that “prayer is when we talk to God and meditation is when God talks to us.”  Again apps, such as "Calm" and "Insight Timer" are good to assist in helping one get into the habit of mindfulness.  Ten or twenty minutes a day spent in mindful concentration will go a long way in keeping one on this side of the abyss.  

So, I’ve shared some very practical things that I find to be helpful when I’m in the “slough of despond” and not wanting to do anything.  I offer them merely as suggestions and maybe one or two will be helpful. 
Oh, and there’s one more thing that helps. When I wake up and feel the weight of a ten- ton truck on my chest, I cajole myself into grabbing a bag of carrots and head up the street to the neighbor’s barn. Elton John, waits for me, knowing I come with a treat.  Elton is a grey gelding who loves to roll in the mud.  I give him a carrot and he listens to me with a mysterious but engaging silence. He’s the best therapist I’ve ever had and the only one yet to convince me that I am not alone.*
​
*In case of emergency, if there are no horses around, may I suggest a horse vacation- one in which you literally "vacate" your current life situation on the back of a horse as you gallop through exciting landscapes in exotic locations around the globe. (One organization that arranges these unique outings is "Active Riding Trips"  For more info, visit their website:  ActiveRidingTrips.com.)
**And in case resources do not permit for such a vacation, hoof your way down to the nearest toy store and pick up a few Breyer horses and make up your own vacation. 
                                                                                 
​                                                                                     ***

© 2019 Kristen Skedgell. All rights reserved. Photo illustrations used for educational purposes only.

SO much has transpired in the last three months, that I needed to edit some of what I originally said. The #MeToo movement has absolutely exploded, curbing my original skepticism. In Part B  of “Women, Horses and Power,” in addition to talking about my personal experience, I also offer my ideas on the next stage of the Women’s Movement. I invite you to skip to the end, if you’re tired of hearing “#MeToo,” but here is my story.

When I hit adolescence, navigating social rules and personal power became particularly problematic. Not only had I been raised to "question authority" and believe that “rules were made to be broken,” I had no idea how to handle myself when confronted with someone who knew all the rules but bent them to their own profit.  My first encounter with this was when I was thirteen. My mother was part of a Woman’s Consciousness Raising group with her neighbors on the street. One of her fellow-feminists had an eighteen-year-old son who invited me to visit him after meeting him at a party I shouldn’t have been at. I was thrilled. ​

When I arrived at his house after school, his mother escorted me to his attic room.  I knocked and waited at the base of the steps. Eventually the door opened but the person who answered wasn’t the one I remembered meeting.  He looked the same but this one was silent and cold. Without so much as a hello, he turned and walked up the stairs.  Confused, I followed.   When I reached the top of the stairs, I was swallowed up in a maze of bead curtains, Indian wall hangings and a blinding cloud of Patchouli incense.  When I finally found him, he was sitting half-clothed and cross-legged on a bare mattress.

This was the backdrop of my first sexual assault.  I didn’t scream for help.  I didn’t run down the stairs out of his house. I didn’t know what to do. I just froze.  Froze until “it” was over and I could find my way home where I calmly told my mother that I thought I might be pregnant.  Hearing this, my mother applauded my precociousness and suggested I get fitted for a diaphragm.   The words for “rape,” “abuse” or “trauma” never came up.  We just didn’t have the vocabulary of such things. But after that, I was determined to learn all the rules so no one would ever take advantage of me like that again.  

It’s hard to rebel against someone with no rules. A liberal East Coast intellectual feminist is hard to surprise. Unless you somehow find a Midwestern Bible -Thumper who rides a Harley Davidson and declares he has the answers to 95% of life’s questions “or your money back.”  What could be more alluring to a traumatized fourteen-year-old?  Enter Captain, Team B. But by the time I realized that “The Doctor” believed that women were on earth to sexually “meet the needs” of “Men of God” and were to be subject to their husbands even if they’re whipped within an inch of their lives, what had started as a refuge became an inescapable prison.  On the other hand, this same “Doctor” (who was not a doctor) supported women’s rights to bear arms and he made sure you got your own gun license and went to the firing range alongside your men every chance you could and when he sold pro-Hitler, Holocaust-denying literature alongside his Bible literature, you turned the other way because your mind was so scrambled from being kicked up and down that soccer field, that was the only safe thing left to do. ( In May, 1971, “Life Magazine” ran an article called “The Groovy Christians of Rye, New York” about the early days of The Way in my hometown.  A close-up of my rapturous entrancement is featured on the first two pages. Click here to view.)

So, when it comes time to knit that hat with the cat ears, all you can hear is the laughter of the men behind those closed oak doors, telling dirty little jokes and high-fiving each other when one of them gets released on a million dollars bail because they’re just that lawless, not above the Law (though they might think they are) but utterly without it. And you honestly can’t believe that any of the concerns about sexual harassment and abuse of all those thousands and thousands of women marching in hand-knit hats will be taken seriously. But they are.  They exercised their rights as citizens and were “powerful.”

Thankfully, I was wrong.  I had seen the patriarchy "in power" for so long, it seemed to me that only an Act of God would change it. As it turns out it seems to have been an "Act of the Goddess, " kicked off with the Women's March and Pussyhat Project. And, there I sat in that cold January of 2018, smug by my fireplace, shaking my head at my idealistic sisters.  But I had underestimated the power of the Light Side.  There's no telling now what the collective power of the Divine Feminine can and will do.  Shatter glass ceilings.  Crumble bastions of sexism.  Sail on the wings of equality and love in relationship.         

So, there you go. Spirituality and self-care go hand-in-hand. My power doesn’t only lie in “speaking my truth” as an abused and oppressed victim.  It’s a start and a very important one. “Speaking truth to power” is empowering and liberating.  I experienced those feeling when I told my story of the cult in 2008. ("Losing the Way: A Memoir of Spiritual Longing, Manipulation, Abuse and Escape" published by Bay Tree Publishing, and soon to be Print-on-Demand through Amazon.) The #MeToo movement is a critical step in asserting our equality and humanity.  But it can’t stop there. ​

After we bravely exercise our right to use our voices and be heard, where do we go? I believe that healing the self and the earth are next stage of empowerment. They are not mutually exclusive. These two practices form the foundation of self-reliance that no man can take away. We can never undo the injustices and abuse of the past but we can learn to thrive in the present, and look to the future with hope. Too often so-called psychotherapy keeps us stuck in the past, on our wounds and not on healing. Equine-Based Psychotherapy is so effective because the horse demands that the rider be totally focused in the present.

So what’s the deal with women and power?  I know.  This is not a new question.  But it’s like I just woke up after a very, very long, Rip Van Winkle kind-of-nap and I realized, after six decades of being a female on this planet that I am still woefullly confused and astonishingly muddled about power, particularly feminine power. Like, what other so-called feminist argued against the Pussyhat Project of the Woman's March Washington on account of its likely “unintended consequences.”

My life experience has created on the one hand, a raging skeptic and, on the other, an enchanted fairy-like being to whom everything just falls magically into place. In other words, there have really been no observable causes and effects in my life when it comes to asserting my so-called power. I've either tried too hard and fallen flat or I've put down my shovel and struck gold.  So there it is - I believe in Luck and Chance and a lovable Creator with a Mood Disorder.  I'm still working on believing in my own power.

So what does this have to do with horses and what do horses have to do with women and power?  Some of you might recall Freud's stupendously stupid theory about girls and penis envy. He claimed that little girls’ were infatuated with horses because they unconsciously thought the horse was an extension of their absent phallus. But any blind person can see that just as many boys have a passion for horses as girls do (see Mohammed, Alexander the Great, King Richard III etc.).  Freud's theory just confirms that, once again, that it was Freud’s obsession with the penis, and not the girls', that caused the envy.  

                                                      Horses: The Power Archetype 

Horses have been the symbol of power for both patriarchy and matriarchy for centuries. Remember the Amazons who rode astride their Greek steeds and shot terror into the hearts of any man who would cross them.  Freud would have run for his life, shielding his "obsession." But somehow, when men got a hold of the saddle and turned it sideways, women were prohibited from riding because they were straitjacketed in corsets. Patriarchy took a giant pace forward. Notwithstanding lords and dukes pranced around on their ponies in tights.  I wonder what Sigmund would have said to that. (It would be a fascinating study to trace the suffragette movement and male oppression in fashion and horses.)

As for my endlessly fascinating struggle with my power, I'm still working on that Woman in the Mirror.  Like Michael Jackson (God Rest His Soul) sang, I ask myself to change my ways and the one recurring response I get is to "Connect With the Divine Feminine" in me.  In other words - make peace with my True Mother- Mother Earth- the one those Amazons worshipped and fought for and with.  Of course, there is Power in Numbers, as unleashed in the Women's March in Washington, but what's come of it?  Where did everybody go? 

                                              Mother, Father: First Lessons of Power

For me, as an individual woman, having power (or not) has been like having a soccer ball for a head and being kicked around a field by two opposing teams.  To talk about the leaders of those two teams, I have to get really personal and talk about my biological mother, Captain, Team A. After all, the personal is the universal and she was the captain of one of those teams.  She prided herself in being a feminist in Greenwich Village right after World War Two.  She was a serious writer who had no time for dogma or convention, be it religious, political or social. She was a free-spirited, strong-minded, determined woman who smoked whatever she chose to, associated with whomever she wanted and to whatever degree of closeness she chose and kept her priorities squarely on the page.

Then she met my Dad- a hard-drinking, drop-dead handsome officer fresh-back-from-the South Pacific who produced radio shows before the War and composed love songs for my mother on the piano.  Within weeks, they were living together.  Then after a few years, on a whim, they drove to Virginia Beach and eloped.  Before long, my mother was sitting on a park bench in Washington Square Park reading Ezra Pound while her two little boys played on the swings.  City-life seemed idyllic and suited my parents well. Until The Mistake.  My mother graciously said that I was “the best mistake they ever made.”  But Child #3 forced them out to the suburbs and my mother started looking longingly across the Hudson River back at Manhattan.  Family lore has it that she almost jumped off the unfinished end of the Tappan Zee Bridge out of desperation.  I’m glad she changed her mind.  But it doesn’t surprise me that the memoir she wrote in her 80’s ended in the Village, before she met my father or had a family.

                                        Mommies' Convo Sparks Feminist Inspiration

All was not lost in town where I was born. I happened to go to nursery school with Betty Freidan’s daughter.  One day, while my mother and Betty were waiting for our nursery school to let out, my mother, (then, Marian Castleman), shared something she had discovered that morning in the library.  On a hunch, my mother had compared popular women's magazine before and after the War and discovered, as she had suspected, that prior to the war, heroines were strong and independent like Rosie the Riveter. After the War, however, "Susie Homemaker" became the paragon of virtue for every American woman. 
​
According to my mother, Betty exclaimed that she had just been commissioned to write a book about depression among suburban women but she was casting about to find a way to prove it.  My mother's tidbit of information gave her  a direction. That brief conversation between two housewives on the steps of a nursery school helped launch one of the most important classics in the Women's Movement in The Feminine Mystique.  (My mother, Marian Skedgell, is recognized for her contribution in the “Acknowledgements” of that same book.)  

To Be Continued.........

​© Copyright 2018 by Kristen Skedgell. All rights reserved.