My first broken heart was not at the hands of some clumsy pubescent boy. Rather it was the result of the trampling only a horse can dish out. It wasn’t his fault either (that’s horse corollary number one, by the way: It’s Never the Horse’s Fault: see Lessons post below). It just so happened that he couldn’t really do his job anymore (I think that’s why people dump boyfriends, too, isn’t it?) and my parents could only afford one horse. Believe me, I tried to convince them that we could have two horses. I could take care of two horses. Really. I could. I could help pay for his food. I could do more petsitting and babysitting (in that order, please). But it was not to be. And so I had to break my own heart and find a new home for my best friend. I remember perching on the top rail of his fence, Doc watching the street behind me as I petted his shoulder and sobbed, wondering how a person could possibly sell her best friend. It seemed wrong. It still seems wrong. Even though Doc got a nice home, it felt wrong. I remember my dad driving away, my mom and I both crying as we sat on the truck’s bench seat, me squeezed in the middle. It didn’t matter that his new owner said we could come visit him any time, just like it never feels any better when you’re being dumped and your boyfriend—ex-boyfriend—tells you he still wants to be friends.

But if the sole purpose of dating and breaking up is to learn life lessons, I suppose my first heartbreak taught me one as well. My next horse Spot was the first beneficiary of this lesson, and so she was issued the promise which was that I would never ever sell her and that I would keep her for the rest of her life. This seems like the sort of promise that only a 14 year old kid could make (or perhaps at 22 year old at the altar) but here I am nearly 16 years later and Spot nickered at me just this evening. Of course, it helped a lot that my parents seemed to support this commitment I made to Spot, taking care of her during my first year of college. Paying for college so my only responsibility was to pay for my horse. Letting me bring Spot home after college while I got my teaching credential, got married, and moved to the Bay Area. But even had they not helped me, I still would have found a way to honor my promise. I'm good with promises as long as they don't involve what time I'll be home from the barn.

Having made a life-long commitment at the age of 14, the idea of commitment has never scared me the same way it seemed to scare my peers. I learned the hard way that if you really care about someone, you didn’t let go of them, no matter what. But being comfortable with a high level of commitment didn’t make for easy high school relationships. I was destined for teen years fraught with heartbreaks. But that was character building, right? And it makes for fun storytelling. Especially to my high school students who find it humorously pathetic when I tell them I’ve never dumped anyone. Well, anyone except a horse.

And so, now that I’m a big girl and I pay my own bills (my husband might dispute this), I strangely seem to have ended up with a collection of horses. Three adorable horses. Which more than proves, thank you very much, that I could have taken care of more than one horse. And even though Spot is the only one who actually got the verbal promise that I’d keep her for the rest of her life, I think the other two can rest assured in my record of never having dumped anyone. If I decide I love you, then apparently you’re stuck with me. Unless you're the one doing the dumping. Fortunately for me, although horses are pretty good at breaking hearts (that’s another story), they never really seem to do it by dumping you. Well, at least not in the figurative sense (that’s a story for another day).