Courtney’s Secret Garden
Courtney Maum is having a midlife crisis. Parenting is taking so much of her time. Her writing career is going well, but that means she’s overwhelmed by deadlines and book deals. Her marriage is in a rough patch, and when she starts asking herself “should I have an affair?” and “should I become an alcoholic?” she recognizes she needs a change in her life.
She dreams of finding an escape that brings her back to her childhood passion of being outside for hours, lost in her thoughts.
In this episode, we follow Courtney as she tries to find her Secret Garden.
Courtney is an author, her most recent book The Year of the Horses is a memoir about rediscovering herself through her love of horses. Nora recommends her fiction: I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You and Touch.
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Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.
One of my favorite stories growing up was “The Secret Garden.” It’s a book by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and I was given an illustrated, hardcover copy in about second grade, which I have to this day. It was adapted very well into a movie in 1993 that was also an instant favorite.
And if you’re not familiar with the tale, it follows a little rich girl named Mary who is rude and entitled and generally unpleasant to be around, probably because she’s been emotionally neglected by her very wealthy parents who then of course die suddenly of cholera. Mary then finds herself placed with a wealthy, distant relative who is of course disinterested in taking care of the child that he has been charged with taking care of.
You’re not going to get the entire plot synopsis here, but Mary learns that her uncle’s dead wife had a walled garden that she loved. And that after his wife’s death, this uncle locked the garden away because he couldn’t bear to even see it, such was his grief.
So what does Mary do? She defies that uncle, she goes looking for the garden, she finds it, she unlocks it. And she loves it.
This is a little excerpt:
“The Secret Garden was what Mary called it when she was thinking of it. She liked the name, and she liked still more the feeling that when its beautiful old walls shut her in, no one knew where she was.”
I longed for my own version of this when I was a child. Not the part where I was suddenly orphaned by cholera which was, after this book, one of my main fears, but the part where I had something of my own, some place of my own. I could see myself, reading this book and watching this movie, by myself in a walled garden, talking to robins and growing roses, reading under a tree, writing in my notebook until I had enough material to publish a book, which felt like a reasonable goal for an elementary school student.
Lots of kids grew up loving this story. But Courtney Maum … she grew up living a version of it.
Courtney Maum: Honestly, it was just like so idyllic. Really beautiful in all the different ways. We lived in both Stamford and Greenwich, Connecticut. Greenwich was always fancy, but it didn't have these McMansions that it has now. It was very woodsy. Lots of animals. It was very similar to where I live now. And we had what seemed to me like the world's largest backyard- to me, our backyard, in my diary, I would write about it like a kingdom, you know. And I thought that there was an underworld and an overworld. I thought there were many different worlds. And it was really magical. My parents, like most parents in the ‘80s, were sort of hands off.
And Courtney loved that she was a free-range kid. She was able to get lost in the woods, get lost in her thoughts, and just be.
Courtney Maum: At some point, a family friend built me a treehouse. So when I was old enough to, you know, climb the ladder without killing myself, I had another, you know, just magical place to go dream. And so, most of my childhood was absolutely spent outdoors. My mom must have caught on to the fact that I wanted privacy, because at some point she got me this red tent that kind of retrofitted around my single mattress. And the red tent had pockets on the inside so you could file away all your diaries and my flashlights and all that stuff. And so, you know, on rainy days or whatever, I'd hole up in my little red tent and write.
Courtney’s entire life didn’t resemble Mary’s in “The Secret Garden,” but her bedroom was in an honest-to-goodness turret. She had a pony she named Fantasy. She took riding lessons. Like Mary, Courtney grew up with rich parents. And like Mary, money didn’t give her everything she needed growing up. Her parents got divorced when Courtney was 9, and her little brother had major health issues his entire childhood.
Courtney Maum: My God, if someone went backwards to my past, they'd be like, “What the hell was your fucking problem? You had this beautiful life.” I was, you know, materially, like, very cared for. And I have to say, certainly what was going on with my brother really encouraged me to be so self-sufficient. I basically started living like a secret life or something within my own house, or, like, disappeared within my own house and confused making my parents’ life easier by kind of estranging myself from them.
So this isolation might not have been the healthiest for a kid, but it was what Courtney knew. And as she grew up and became an adult, Courtney stopped being a little girl lost in her thoughts and in the woods and became a writer. She got lost in the stories she wrote, in the characters and the worlds she created. And her own world grew and changed too: she found love, she became a wife. She became a mother to a daughter. And eventually, she became a pretty successful professional writer with book deals and deadlines.
So it felt like all of a sudden, Courtney was middle aged, and was giving all of herself to others.
Courtney Maum: I had no more secret gardens. I had no secret gardens. My child, who'd been such a joy, I was starting to have a hard time parenting her. And my marriage was getting quite rocky. I couldn't turn to the writing. I just was so deeply unhappy. And I literally remember thinking, “Okay, do I become a full-blown alcoholic? Should I have an affair? That might be fun. Is that a fun thing? Is that where I go for fun?” Like, I don't, I didn't know where to go.
Where do you go to find yourself? How do you return to the joy and meaning you felt when you were younger, with fewer responsibilities? How do we as adults carve space for something we love? Something that doesn’t make us money, or get the chores done faster, or support our family?
To find that secret, sacred place again, often, the journey begins with a breakdown. That’s what happened to Courtney.
I’m Nora McInerny, and this is “Terrible, Thanks for Asking”: Courtney’s Secret Garden.
We’ll start our story when Courtney Maum was really hanging on by a thread. It’s 2015. It’s a weekday – let’s say Wednesday, because that is the most nothing of all the days – and Courtney is being held hostage. Her captor is approximately two and a half feet tall, with blonde hair and a limited vocabulary.
Courtney Maum: So, it's one of those mornings that all working women know, but especially working moms, where you just wish you could send your kid through a portal to school, play, rehearsal. In my case that morning, it was, it was daycare, and daycare was a half hour away. It's just one of those days where I felt like I had no time for anything, no time for grooming, no time for my husband, no time for bullshit, just no time for anything. I was on a very short book deadline. I was working in branding and I had to do, like, a whole presentation to Hertz, the car company. I just had so much stuff to do. And my little two year old, who's so proud that she can put on her own socks, she has this thing where the toe seams have to be perfectly aligned, I mean perfectly aligned with the tips of every toe. And nothing can be out of place. It can take up to 15 minutes, you know, this ritual of my child. But she will not put on shoes without doing this ritual first. And that morning, there was just not time for this freaking ritual. And I just remember kind of having a breakdown. Like, I almost felt a proclivity toward violence. You know, I just felt enraged by everything. Like, why can't we all get on the same page? Why can't we be on my agenda?
It’s not just the socks. It’s the current political climate.
Courtney Maum: I was having a hard time with my friends because Trump was starting to present himself as kind of a candidate. And I really thought that if he ran, that he would win. I had always thought that. And I had friends who stopped talking to me. One friend told me I needed to see a therapist, which I did, but he was like, “I think you're having, like, a mental breakdown. How could you possibly think that?”
It’s marriage.
Courtney Maum: Oh, it was so bad. We were actually talking about getting divorced with my husband. That D word was coming up. We were in couples therapy, which was just so fucking weird.
It’s life as a creative person, where you are really only as good as your next thing.
Courtney Maum: I was under contract for a second book. My deadline was upon me, and I couldn't get that book to work, partly because I'd never been under contract before. So the contract only gave me a year. But it takes me a year to figure out what I want to write about. And I just couldn't handle the fact that the writing wasn't working. I couldn't handle the fact that I was going to miss my book deadline.
It’s the fact that Courtney’s daughter is in daycare that costs money, and she needs to go to daycare so Courtney can write her book and make money, but this daughter cannot go to daycare until her socks are on correctly and yes, we respect our children, we respect their sensory needs, and also the clock is ticking! The clock is always ticking!
Whenever Courtney had felt lost or confused, writing was her coping mechanism. She’d get lost in a story, and it would help her return to herself. But now writing is her profession, and if you’ve ever monetized your art, you know that once it’s a job, it can start to feel like a job.
Courtney Maum: Professionally, it looked like I was killing it. My husband and I had written a movie together. We were touring for the movie. My first book was a big success. The second book, I got paid what seemed like tons of money. It was getting optioned for film, like, everything was happening. But I was so unhappy. And looking back now, I realize it's because my secret space, my kind of recharging center, had always been writing. Always. And that was the first time where my relationship to writing had become monetized. I'd never had that before. And so when I got that first book deal, that was amazing. But the second book changed things. There were expectations. They purchased a book that didn't exist. I had to write it. I had kind of marching orders. Which all of this, by the way, is a huge privilege, you know? I was very lucky, but all of a sudden there were people watching my most intimate process in my whole life. I think I would have rathered have someone watch me having sex than watch me write.
Not only is Courtney feeling more pressure on her writing, but she feels like she doesn’t have enough time to write the way she wants. Where she can get lost in her head and in the pieces that she’s writing.
Courtney Maum: I just think it's really frickin’ hard to exist as someone who needs a very long, wide runway of time and silence and isolation for my own work, and generally only has that from 9 a.m. you know to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday. And then of course, of course, I have to pay the bills other ways. So, you know, I find myself now with maybe six hours a week where I can really disappear. It's not enough.
Without her personal writing time to check in with herself and recharge, Courtney starts to withdraw in her marriage, too.
Courtney Maum: I find myself withholding information and thoughts from my own partner so that I can have something left for myself. I'm not proud of that. I pity my husband a little bit. But at the same time, I don't know that I could– I have to have something private to write about. And if he knows absolutely everything, I lose myself a little bit I think.
This, for many of us, is just life. This is adulthood. This is the culmination of our duties and our tasks and our responsibilities, which are all privileges to have. To be loved is to be needed. But all of these things, they do chip away at our time until one day, we might look at ourselves and our lives and think, “Wait, what? Where am I? What is this? A series of to-do lists? A pile of bills on the table that I haven’t opened? A relay race where we’re handing off baton after baton, running in the same circle, never quite catching up?”
Yeah. Yes.
Many of us have locked away those secret gardens, those places where we felt alive. Many of us have never had them. Many have been locked out of them… maybe not by a depressed widower of an uncle but by other circumstances equally out of our control.
We used to dance, or paint, or run, or write… and now we just don’t. Or we do, but it’s a job. Or we do but very rarely, and we’re not even good at it anymore. We tell ourselves we’ll go back to that place once the laundry is done and work slows down, which never happens. We’ll go back to it -- or find it -- when we have some stability again, or for the first time. Someday. Someday… we say.
But the days roll on, and someday never arrives.
So for Courtney, standing in her kitchen while her child refuses to put on socks, she realizes it’s not the socks. It’s not just politics, or marriage. It’s everything, it’s… all of it.
Courtney Maum: I want a timeout, and I'm not going to get one. It doesn't work. She's not going to stop needing me or going to school. I don’t know. I don't know how to make the time stop so I can just catch up with myself a little bit. I just was so deeply unhappy. And then my insomnia, which has always been a chronic struggle for me, just couldn't, couldn't sleep. And I just didn't know where to look for fun. I didn't understand what fun looked like anymore. Fun for me had been work.
We’ll be right back.
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So Courtney is… not doing great. And she’s also really doing her best to try to get better. I mean, she tries pretty much everything.
Courtney Maum: Okay, so, first of all, drugs and supplements both. I tried antidepressants, benzos, all different sleeping pills. I tried acupuncture, massage, all sorts of different healing modalities. I went to nutritionists. I spent a lot of money at a clinic in Northampton getting tons of blood work done, trying to see what was going on with my hormones. I went off birth control. I went back on birth control trying to manage estrogen. I took a whole battery of dance classes. I tried hip hop, I tried salsa, I tried modern, I tried African. I tried going back to yoga, which used to be something I loved and kind of fell off. I tried drinking a lot. I tried not drinking. Travel. I don't know. That feels like… that feels like a lot.
That feels like a lot? It is a lot. She also does therapy, she does couples therapy. And in one of her therapy sessions, an idea was put forward… something that Courtney hadn’t done since childhood. And she decides to try… horses. Riding them, specifically. It’s an experience that had always made her feel magical and capable.
Courtney Maum: I think that I'd been actively suppressing my love of horses for 30 years. Because my life as an almost 40-year-old was very, very different from my life as a, you know, coddled pre-teen. When I was growing up, you know, my parents paid for the horseback riding. And riding costs a lot of money. And I always felt sure that as a freelance writer, I would never, ever be able to afford it. And I didn't want to get addicted to something I couldn't afford. I didn't want to have to force my family to make sacrifices. So it was just something I actively put in my past in a box that was never to be opened again. But in the fall of, let's see, this would have been 2015, I was at a birthday party. And I met a new friend, someone I'd never met before. And, you know, when he went to introduce himself, he said, “Oh, I can't hug you or anything. I just came from the barn.” And it was like a dam literally just flooded inside of me. And I said, “What barn? Who's your instructor? Where are you riding? Like, give me all the information.” And it just, at that moment, shot through my system as like, “This is it, this is what you need.”
Nora: What does it, what does it feel like the first time you walk into a barn, and like, get to be on a horse again?
Courtney Maum: Oh, my gosh. It didn't actually start with the contact with the horse. It was the smell. People think it's awful or, or it's completely addictive and healing. So it was the smell where I just thought, “Oh, my God, I'm home.” I mean, basically the way it smells to me is the way that, you know, these candles that people spend $300 on that smell like leather, like cognac and old leather and wet hay.
Courtney Maum: My first lesson back, I thought was going to be like a nearly orgasmic experience getting on the horse. But in fact, it was, it was very embarrassing because my teacher that day, a German named Katja, is super safety first. And she's like, “I don't know you from Adam. I don't know what your riding’s like.” So you know, she put me on this lead line, which is what you put like 3-year-old children on where the horse has the bridle and everything, but you're tethered, you're attached to the instructor. So if the horse does anything wonky, makes for the gate or whatever, they can kind of control, control the horse. It's training wheels. And I just felt so embarrassed.
Sure, it’s embarrassing, but it’s also, as she mentioned… home. A different kind of home. One where Courtney is not a wife, or a mother. She’s not even a writer. Nothing about riding horses reminds her of her life outside the barn, and that’s why she loves it so much.
Nora: [Snaps her fingers] Come on. Come on. Let me pet you. Let me pet you. [Clicks her tongue] Miniature horse … That was a miniature horse breathing into the mic. [Dog barking in the distance]
That’s me, absolutely NOT at home. I’m here at the barn in Connecticut where Courtney keeps her horse, getting absolutely rejected by a miniature pony who does not want to be my friend at all. I’m in Courtney’s secret garden, and there are horses, mini ponies, chickens…
Courtney Maum: We lost one recently. Larry is no longer with us. Larry liked to jump the fence and uh… [Nora: Learned his lesson?] Well, he wanted to live with horses. [Nora: Yeah.] Well...
Nora: He died with the horses.
Courtney Maum: He actually, we can't find Larry.
Nora: Oh, no, Larry!
Courtney Maum: So it's possible. My, my conviction is that he went to Florida. Like, he's a sunbird.
Nora: Yeah.
Courtney Maum: Snowbird! But, yeah, we. Larry is one down, one man down.
Nora: One man down. Okay. It's the danger of having a dream, Larry. [laughs]
Nora: Like, what part of yourself do you get to access when you're here or with your horse?
Courtney Maum: Oh, my childhood self. 100%. Where, first of all, I was younger, my parents were taking care of me. I did not have worries and I didn't have sleeping issues yet. My brother wasn't born yet. When he was born, he ended up becoming quite sick. Life was really good for me as a kid, exemplified by the fact I had my own pony. It was a really amazing childhood. And so when I got to the barn, it was just like, just barn time, you know? Even as a little girl, it was the one time that I could just focus exclusively on this one pleasurable experience without any other thoughts coming in. Because even, even socializing as a young person, I would say from age six, maybe even five, you're aware, like, “Oh, Cindy's spending more time on the slide with Martha,” and you already start to get in your head about it, especially as a young girl, I think. But at the barn, it was just step by step, right? Catch the pony, groom the pony, get them ready. And then, you know, do the best that you could together as a unit, come back, brush the pony, and then think about the pony, smell like the pony, the whole ride back. And, and that, that was it. It was just like pure, unfettered access to quality time and, and imagination. I thought that my pony had wings. I felt like we had wings when we were together. So when I am at this barn, I've changed, my body’s changed, my mind has changed. All those things have changed. But the smell, the smell of the hay hasn't changed. The food that, you know, my horse ate then is the same. Horses, they don't change, right? And that is so grounding. I don't talk when I'm here. It's all body language and weird little sounds that I've made up, the language I've made up with my horse. So even conversing with someone in, like, complete sentences feels a little odd. I'm just here for the magic and the pure presence, because when you're with animals, if you let your mind slip and you have too many other worries, you could get really hurt. I've been kicked. I've been bitten, I've fallen. I've been thrown. And all that stuff is more likely to happen if you're not 100% focused on what you're doing. It's the closest thing I have in my life to a cathedral. It really does feel like some form of worship or recharging. My faith is restored when I come here. My faith in my own ability to show up and be present for people, but also my faith in humanity. Because I do look at these animals and I think, “God, they've been domesticated for a pretty long time. They're still around. Even in these horrible climatic changes, they're still managing not to die off in hordes,” you know, and uh… it seems like they still want to spend time with some of us.
Nora: It sounds very meditative. And when you're taking care of other people, which adulthood necessitates, right, you have to take care of, like, all the relationships, all of the people in your life, that can easily become, like, very depleting. Why isn't this? Because you’re just caring for this creature.
Courtney Maum: [laughs] Yeah, that’s such an interesting- that’s so funny that you mentioned that because I was thinking of this. I find myself a little scared of how much, there's so much tending. Like I have to tend to my creative work, I have to tend to my marriage, which I haven't done a very good job of recently. The plants are kind of withered. I don't really tend to myself, like my grooming’s not so good. I think I've had “shave legs” on my to do list since June. But the tending to this animal, it’s nothing but joy.
We’ll be right back.
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[All the animals yelling] – Donkeys bleating, horses neighing
Nora: Courtney just turned on every single animal at the same time, they all activated. That was bananas.
Courtney Maum: I need time for me. I need time. Something I'm missing deeply right now is the space and time and setting within which I can go feral. And I get that here at the barn. You and I have shit under our shoes right now. We're sitting on a hay bale with all these creatures in the mud who are dirty, and everything's kind of dirty and wild. And this is for the moment where I can go every day and reconnect with my feral space, nourish it a little bit, and prove to myself that it's still there. I can't live without a horse anymore. Like, I can't. I actually can't. Like, it's a touchstone that I need now. It's a mirror for me that I can prove that I'm still there, that I haven't eroded all these other identities, or that the other identities, rather, haven’t eroded my principal identity, which I think of as a creative, as an artist. You know, not a mom first, not, I don't know, whatever it is people think of me. I think of myself first and foremost as a, as a creative person.
Courtney Maum: That’s everyone. Hi pretty girl. So she's my rescue. 27.
Nora: She's 27! Oh my God.
Courtney Maum: She's the Sharon Stone of the equestrian world. [Nora: Look at you go!] An ex-racehorse born in Kentucky. [Ambient outdoor noises.] Oh yeah. Right, Abuelita?
Nora: Like their heads are just so big.
Courtney Maum: Yeah, yeah.
Nora: Their heads are so big. It just sort of freaks me out a little. Ya know? Ya know?
I’m not, as you might be able to tell, in my element. But seeing Courtney here… I get it! I get it for her! I see how she is thriving.
When Courtney started coming back to the barn, it wasn’t just the act of riding horses that helped her reconnect to herself. The relationship she built with this horse, Abuelita, is a part of her healing.
Courtney Maum: I kind of stole her, I guess. [Nora laughs] My polo club had closed, and I'd fallen deeply in love with polo ponies as a kind of breed. Polo as a discipline. But I don't have polo money. So I'd always kind of gotten in the back door by helping the grooms or exercising the horses or sometimes doing social media or press releases for barns. I just always found a way to cut the cost. And, um, so one of the ways to cut the cost was to go to the farm of a man with substance abuse issues and work with his horses. And it was okay in the fall, because he was still getting paid to play. But there did come a certain point where, when he was not being paid to play, he stopped buying food for the animals. And it was very Darwin at his place. It was like, “Well, whoever makes it through winter on the bark and whatever water falls from the sky, we'll see you in the spring.” And I really fell for this one horse, Abuelita, who is the oldest, nastiest, you know, meanest, most dangerous horse. And yeah, I basically just extracted her from the situation. And I had to take her off the property, because this guy wouldn't agree to a sensible price, like she had so many problems, there were going to be so many medical bills. So I sort of had to extract her so that she wouldn't die, and I got her to a safe place and then had to just bully this man into getting a bill of sale. Because I was worried if during the winter I put weight back on her that he would come back when polo season started and just reclaim her after I'd put health into her. So I got the bill of sale. And then she had been not just neglected and, like, starved, but she'd been abused. Like, she, she'd been um... let's just say she has a lot of actual scars. She has emotional scars, but she has a lot of scars. And she's old as the hills, which meant for me that a lot of the trauma that she held inside of her and the mistrust of humans was maybe going to be impossible to undo. Long story short, I just spent a lot of months no riding. Not really futzing with her. Just letting her get some weight back, strength back, get a little bit more used to me. Walk around, let her eat hay and grass. And then maybe two or three months after that, we started doing what we call ground work, which is just sort of trust building exercises on the ground. So I'm not, I'm not on her. And that was incredibly hard. She's a bad listener. She doesn't respect other people's space. And yeah, eventually she got back to a weight where I could ride. And so I am, I am riding her now. And, you know, you met her today.
[sounds of Abuelita trotting]
Courtney Maum: I love her. She's just great. She's great. And I think that we've developed a bond. She no longer tries to murder me. She hasn't in a really long time. [laughs] She's really started to trust me. I think she finally sees that, although I'm a little bit of a foolish person, not the best rider at the barn and not the most natural horsewoman, there's a lot of things I still need to learn, she, I think, has decided that I have her best interests at heart and has rewarded me in many different ways for that.
Courtney Maum: This is where I catch up with myself. This is where I touch the very core of myself. And I'm like, okay, “You're not getting the creative time you want, but that creative potential is still there.” This is, this is actually where I feel kind of creative and free and weird and full of imagination. It's like this to me, a sensual place. [Nora: Yeah]. Because I'm very much in my body and I'm not when I'm writing, I'm usually in someone else's body thinking about fictional needs. It's deeply relaxing to me here, too. The human heart, even with the proximity we have now, we're in a hayloft above the animals. We're still close enough to their electromagnetic heart radius that our hearts are slowing down. They should be slowing down a little bit to match the animals, you know.
Nora: I highlighted that in your book. Oh, I was like, “What the fuck are you talking about?”
Courtney Maum: It's true. It’s true. And that happens with a lot of animals. It's not just horses. It's one of the reasons elderly people are– it's a good thing for them to have a cat. I was at a… an art program recently for Guadalupe Maravilla, who's an amazing artist, and he believes deeply in mysticism and new age forms of healing and, and, or new age old age really reclaiming past practices. And he was saying in his culture – he's Mexican – cats are seen as deeply sacred animals because they vibrate, and the vibrations are deeply healing, which I tell myself now, because my cat is so loud, his purrs keep me up at night. But recently he was like on me last night and I was like, “You're a sacred being.”
Nora: “You're healing me, you’re healing me!”
Courtney Maum: “I’m like getting no sleep. But you're a sacred, sacred gift.” But, yeah, I just, I could sleep here.
Nora: This is where you disappear, though?
Courtney Maum: Yeah. But I disappear to find myself again, though. It's like where I … like cells, you know, when you sleep and your cells … regenerate! I think this is where I go to regenerate. And I cannot tell you– oh, my God, if I have to go more than a day, two days, if I can't get here, I go nuts. This whole week I've been so cranky, because it's been really rainy and I couldn't, I couldn't get here because I have this full time outdoor board. So if it's torrential rain, I am tacking up my horse in the torrential rain. It's a little complicated. And I was just like off my rocker, insulting people. I was just such a raving bitch because, you know, I guess it's like a drug. It's basically my mood stabilizer. And if I don't get it, I am destabilized at this point. I don't know how I went so long without returning to it, honestly.
That’s what the horses have done for Courtney. But what about what they’ve done for Courtney’s relationships?
Courtney Maum: I think because I spend so much time with horses now, I don't have time for the bullshit friendships anymore. So there were some people I had to lose, because I started noticing, like, “God, this person who texts me all the time, like, I don't enjoy anything about our relationship. In fact, it's very stressful, brings a lot of toxicity into my life.” Or maybe clients or colleagues– like I used to work with all these agencies and I would think, “Gosh, I don't need to be feeling this way in my stomach every time I see an email from you. If I actually can forgo that, that's fine.” My husband will tell you like, oh, my God, go to the barn, get your barn time. Does he understand the joy that it brings? Does he palpably understand the relationship that I have with the horses? That I don't know. That I don't know. I don't know. Can you witness it? I'm not sure if people who don't love horses can witness the joy that it brings us horse people. I'm not placed to answer that because it brings me joy. And I can watch a little girl with a horse and be absolutely even talking about it, this invisible person doesn't exist, I’m moved to tears, because I know the joy and empowerment it brings now, whether … you know, like I brought my husband to one of my early polo games when I was just learning as an adult. I mean, I was moving at like a fast trot and I thought I was king of a fucking world, you know? And to him, it just looked like a middle aged lady swatting at a ball. And so, you know, I don't know what it feels like to me– I'm not sure if it's always something he can witness. But I think he can certainly tell in the way I am when I come back from the barn, the true joy that I have, how happy it makes me, how much joy, Abuelita, and pride she's brought in my life.
Courtney is still a middle-aged woman, and she will be until she becomes an old woman. She is still a writer. She is still a parent. And she is, once again, a horse girl.
In “The Secret Garden,” Mary ends the book as a new version of herself. Mary brings the garden back to life, and the garden brings Mary to life in a new way. Tending to the plants, communicating with the animals who inhabit the garden… it all makes Mary kinder and gentler. And she grows along with the garden that she is growing.
Abuelita is Courtney’s grown-up secret garden, an experience that is all her own and not about her. She has claimed a space in her life that is just hers. And yes, what a privilege. And also, it shouldn’t be. We all need this. Maybe not horses. For sure not horses for me, thank you. But we all deserve a thing, a moment, a place, an activity that returns us to ourselves. That nurtures us and helps us get out of our silly little human heads with all of our dumb little thoughts and our big, stupid worries. Something that offers us shelter from a world that is big and scary and where bad things do happen. Preferably, for me, that would be a literal garden locked with a literal key by an elderly widower. But it could be anything. It could be sewing or a clear calendar, or taking yourself for an afternoon to the movies and not letting anyone know where you’re going. I could be volunteering, it could be… horses.
Courtney Maum: Horses, they just want to have food, water and shelter… and some friends. Which, we lose track of that as humans, where we start to think like, “I need a foot massage or I need a… a ring light, right?” Or whatever the fuck. “I need an organic mayonnaise.” We lose track of this, of the fact that we need food, shelter, friendship, water. Everything else is a cherry on top. Money, unfortunately, right, comes in. If I spent all my life just online, I might have suicidal ideations. It's pretty easy to convince yourself that things are very bad. You can get that with two clicks on Google, right? And find lots of proof to back it up. But if you spend time with animals and, you know, I'm very lucky I live in a rural place, I have access to a horse, I'm super lucky. But, a lot of people get this with their dog. They get it with a cat. The way your animal looks at you, the love, the unconditional love and the trust that they're putting in you. How happy they are about a walk. These are little reminders, like, “Chill the fuck out!”
Before we left the barn, Courtney asked if I wanted to see Abuelita run. I said yes, but I also tucked myself into a corner with my recorder and I watched as Courtney led this formerly wild horse to the center of an indoor arena. Courtney unclipped Abuelita and sent her off and she ran in circles. She kicked up dust into the fading sunlight. She bucked like a horse in a western. She danced. I hid in the corner, shaking and trying to record.
And Courtney stood in the center of all of it, smiling.
Courtney Maum: But there is still so much, I don't know, when I'm with the horses, when I go to the barn, I just think like, fuck, nature?! Mother Nature is just this crazy genius artist. This is so beautiful. These animals are so beautiful. Oh my gosh, I'm getting to walk down a road listening to this, the footsteps of this horse. Like, how lucky am I? This is, this is incredible. And all the other problems fade away.
[sounds of Abuelita sprinting in the arena, thundering hoofs against the ground]
Courtney: “There she goes!”
CREDITS: Nora McInerny, Marcel Malekebu, Jordan Turgeon, Claire McInerny, Megan Palmer, Larissa Witcher, Eugene Kidd