I told of all the ways I relate to my mom. I said there is this weird mix of terrible sadness for the suffering of a young woman, grief that comes from nowhere for someone I hardly remember, and anger at a person who made my self her own.

I have been wondering how it was that I learned to sacrifice my identity for union with others. A pattern of mine now, loving in some kind of parasitic way that eventually becomes reciprocal; and when it does, when it goes on too long and I start to feel like I don't belong to me anymore, I run. Thing is, it's hard to tell what was ever me. I've measured my life by the melding with others. We all do that right? Women do. Some not as much as me; though because of my own expertise, I recognize it easily in others. Funny, I don't respect them. So I was thinking about whether I became that way because she died or because she lived. I decided it was her living that taught me I was loved best when I was like her, and then her dying before I had a chance to become my own person.

Eternally ten.

She wanted me to be her; she wanted me to live the way she never would. Simply living vicariously through me, something very natural for parents to do. Maybe. You know I had two horses of my own when she died. Lucky and Daisy. Still have scars from both of them on my body. Every day I see the one on my lip from that time Lucky tossed me onto the old wooden gate by the grape trellis. Everything she was had to do with horses. Everything. Pictures on her bedroom wall. Jewelry. Bridles hanging among her clothes. The very first book read aloud in my voice was one she chose called The Little Pony. Later she gave me Misty and The Black Stallion series. Her car was a Ford Mustang. In me she lived through 4-H. I was the youngest person in my group at six, which was too young to understand the anatomy of horses, too young to learn how to judge them in shows. She bought riding lessons for me on a show horse so tall I couldn't mount it on my own. No wonder I'm afraid of falling - geez - that horse responded to the slightest pressure and me, me I was used to stubborn ponies and forgot and kicked that big horse hard in the belly and it responded with a full run. I was left a heap in the dirt of the corral. There was that Christmas when I asked for everything out of the Penney's catalog, just like every other Christmas, and I got it all plus a brand new saddle with blanket too.

Of course I loved horses. I loved everything she did even if I didn't really like it. I never felt the passion. She could try again through me, and my childhood wouldn't have the tragedy of hers and she wouldn't make me marry but would make me go to college, and unlike her dream denied I would become the veterinarian in this second chance. For or against all that, the little girl loved constantly like the mother had never known. In that way she needed me essentially; I was everything to her like I will never be to anyone again. What I think is that if I could still have that relationship, I wouldn't try so hard to recreate it in others. That's the rub: I want so much to be the one essential person in somebody else's life. But really, no one should ever be that necessary for another's existence.

I was just beginning to find my own path when she became sick that second time. I had moved away from her room painted light blue with framed paintings of horses on the walls, to my own in the attic which she helped me paint deep purple, my favorite color at the time. She helped me paint it my own color. This is my clue that she would have supported my own growth. To what extent I will never know, but I know she did that little bit. Then she was sick again and told me one evening while tucking me into my own bed in the purple attic that the cancer was in her back now and she didn't believe she would get better. After that, the darkness of that triangular space was terrifying and I ran from it down the stairs, certain that some evil creature would reach out of it to clutch my skin and rip it from my skeleton. I moved back to her room where in the mornings as she lie sleeping I would reach out to touch her, seeing if she still lived. When she moved to the hospital, I slept there still like a mummy with my arms crossed over my belly. And when she never returned, a group of family came and changed the room so that it would be mine and not hers when she was with me. But all that horse stuff, which had become legally mine, I would not surrender so that now I am able to sift through boxes of it to reconstruct her life, understand mine.

My g-ma said, when I took her to see what I'd painted on mom's grave, that maybe we should bring one of those little plastic horses my mom loved so much and stand it on the brass plate. G-ma said: She'd've liked that.

On a calendar I saw today: To see a horse is to see an angel on Earth.