The Day of Liberation
What breaks, what holds, and why it still matters
I celebrate March 4th as my Day of Liberation. This year marks fifteen years since my ex-husband dumped me in an Istanbul apartment. It’s the anniversary of the day I had to choose between whether I was going to continue waiting for a savior or march forward and learn how to lead and guide and grow on my own.
In many ways, I’m still learning how to do this life thing, but I know that March 4th marks the day my paradigm shifted in how I could live and work alongside horses. Being left alone to lead a busy horse farm felt impossible at the time but once the haze of anger and regret subsided (a multi-year/decades/still ongoing process) I realized that the path I railed against WAS my path.
In honor of my personal rite of passage, I’m posting a piece I wrote in 2019 that hasn’t seen the light of day until now. It’s an homage to March being Women’s History Month, a visit with Matilda — the big draft mare I wrote about a few weeks ago — and a study in how far I’ve come and how far I have to go.
I hope you find a piece of yourself within these words — and know that you are enough.
Let’s get started.
What Breaks
November 2019
I wake to a text from the morning crew, who arrived at the barn at 8 a.m. to start farm chores: “Matilda broke out of her stall during the night.”
My body aches. I am bleeding a half ounce per hour. I am nauseous. I am emotionally fragile and heartbroken. I’m sick in body, mind, and spirit. My aura might be the only thing intact, but I wouldn’t know because I can’t see it.
I have a doctor’s appointment mid-morning with a specialist that has taken me a decade to find. So much has changed in these ten years, but two things have remained constant: me and the farm.
My watchdog obsessions ensure all gates and stall doors are triple-checked each night so I don’t wake to the news that a loose horse is wandering the barn aisle.
My fears are grounded — Matilda got out.
This is an urban farm, an oasis of sheltered woods, but the perimeter isn’t fenced. A loose horse could easily find its way into a neighborhood or a busy street. The loss of any horse would be devastating for business and for my heart but the thought of a car colliding with a massive flight animal in the dark? The potential loss of human life? I don’t know how I could live with that.
This is why I check and double-check and why my bedroom is placed with my head toward the barn, a hillside between us, so I can wake to any irregular disturbance in the quiet, routine noises of the farm. But this morning, I heard nothing while Matilda went on her solo journey.
Before leaving for the doctor, I walk to the barn, exhausted despite the earliness of the day. Near tears, I assess the damage and make plans to house Matilda elsewhere until we can fix her stall.
I am drained. If I cough, I’ll start gagging because my stomach is empty. I watch Matilda walk in her paddock after she is rounded up and contained. Her body mimics my own as she moves. Something is off. Her energy is subdued. She looks drained and gaunt. I see the dull shadows of ribs against her side as she moves.
She pauses and regards me.
“I see you, sister, “ I say.
Matilda didn’t finish her breakfast grain or hay. I chalk it up to her being out for untold hours during the night, her unlimited scavenging of grass and clover around the barn.
Mostly, I’m mad. I want to focus on myself, on my own misery. Walking up the hill to the house, my legs are heavy, my body anemic. I want to sleep for three days, but Matilda breaking her door down, ostensibly by rubbing the giant muscles of her rear against it (there is hair caught in the wood, cracks, and in the hinges) has added more hours of work to an already long day.
I’m resentful that the barn keeps me from a normal life, whatever that means. It’s a theme that has followed me since my ex-husband hit the road. The only people who truly understand the work of a farm are those who have done it. The relationships that strolled through my life after the divorce were with people enamored with the idea of farm life, guys who sensed there was medicine in the call of keeping horses but, once immersed in the work, realized its relentless demands. On call every day and night, no guaranteed weekends, no paid holidays, no sick days — it takes someone willing to make a deep commitment, not just to me, but to the twenty horses and the scores of people who call this farm home.
You have to care for something more than you care for yourself.
I’ve found that you can fake that with humans, all those cycles of abuse and trauma that keep going, but you can’t fake that resolve with horses. They won’t let you, even with the luxury of closing their gates and stalls for the night and walking away. Sometimes they break the door down to get your attention.
I doubt my choice to do this with my life as I gather my things for the specialist appointment. My mother is going to drive me and shoos me out the door to wait in the car while she checks the dogs, the doors, the stove knobs. I joke about how people should want their barn manager to have OCD, but cautious care became pathological for me long ago. The rituals and double-checking that mark my life add an extra hour to anything that takes me away from the farm.
And yet, still, despite my checking, a door has broken. My horse got loose.
Almost to the car, my phone buzzes.
“Good morning, Kim. I hope today you and your doctors resolve this problem for good and put things behind you. Talk to you soon.”
A text from my ex-husband, Mihran.
At any other time since the divorce, his message would have filled me with regret and anger. The story that fueled me for so long was that he left me alone with this place, with the farm, that the careful plans I had drawn for our success and future had to be blueprinted again across the skeleton of a horse business designed to be run by two people.
A few months before, Mihran asked me to call him as I was pulling into the driveway, my truck weighed down with the last of my things from a boyfriend’s house — another relationship ending, another heartbreak. The timing was uncanny. We had never spoken on the phone since the divorce. We talked for hours, and he asked for my help restarting his own horse business.
Not long after that, Mihran stopped by the farm for tea and advice. He traced the trajectory of his life since we parted, the years he’d lost, never settling on a path, unable to find a foothold or the motivation to create anything lasting.
As Mihran left my farm he mentioned he was going to meet his accountant for lunch.
Soon after, my phone buzzed again. A message from my now ex-boyfriend.
“Is this your ex-husband?”
Mihran didn’t know what restaurant he was going to as he left the farm. But he found himself, or rather the ex-boyfriend found him, in the same tiny dining room of a Middle Eastern restaurant a half hour away from the farm. The ex-boyfriend put together what he heard Mihran saying in conversation with the accountant, snapped a photo on the sly, and sent it to me for confirmation.
“That’s him,” I messaged back. “Coincidence is like God’s compass.”
Tom Dorrance, a founder of a method of horse training that the world now calls natural horsemanship spoke about how most horse training comes down to: feel, timing and balance.
Feel is one of those vaporous words that doesn’t make sense until you’ve felt it. The closest we come to it in daily life is gut feeling, intuition. On the horse, it’s a sense of the whole creature you’re working with, a mind-body-spirit connection. Feel, timing, and balance are the root of communication with horses, but they are also the root of life, like if the tree of life was a sensation or a scent that could not be described with words.
I don’t ignore timing, feel, or rhythm near the horses or with people. I am careful to honor convergences. My friends who trust science more than magic can argue with me all day long. I understand their math, but too many things of importance in my life have beaten me over the head for attention until the lesson gets through by blatant chance.
I didn’t know what the two people from my past coming together in a restaurant meant or why it mattered, but I later said to a friend as I related what occurred, “I’ll know what it means when it all comes together.”
At first, seeing my ex-husband and ex-boyfriend collide in a random restaurant felt like an eerie loop of regret and longing. The kind of thing that, for most of my life, would have spun me into a spiral of self-doubt. But the more I thought about it, the more it became something else, like a reminder of how life pushes forward whether I like it or not.
I will write myself back into faith.
For as much as I wail against the trials the barn continually brings me, the truth is that I know that the other side of that is grace and faith. There is a power larger than me in control. When I finally give up control, the greater magic starts to happen. But it is so hard for me to remember this when my body hurts and my heart is broken and I feel absolutely alone.
On paper, the thing I crave most is a partner, and weirdly, the separate threads of that longing have always brought me closer to the barn and the horses.
My search for a partner, a husband, in many myriad ways, has created our community and my life. It’s like the famous Arthur Ashe quote that has been meme-d so many times I want to punch its self-help tyranny in the face, “Success is a journey, not a destination. The doing is often more important than the outcome.”
It galls me to admit this premise is true.
What I received was a relationship with a farm.
Horses speak plain language. They don’t muck it up with complexities. It either is or it isn’t, there is no middle ground, no in-between, that murky place that humans go to with their endless thinking.
As for Matilda this day, I go to the doctor’s appointment and come back with no real answers, but my mind has shifted into a different resolve. I’ll change my diet, cultivate what true relaxation feels like without another person’s needs clawing for attention in my heart.
I will focus on me and on the horses.
It is ten years since Mihran walked away in Istanbul, and I am just beginning to see that I have survived, just fine, by myself. It’s when I go searching for another person to complete me that things become unbearable.
I spend some time after my visit with the doctor staring at Matilda. She eats lunch slowly, her warm mouth pushing the food around in her bowl. Her head hangs low, her ears droop to the side. I lift her tail to take her temperature and find the squamous cell tumor that has grown on her vulva for years is red and inflamed. The hairs along the door in the stall she had broken out of tell a story I’d been too self-involved to hear that morning.
Matilda is battling a massive infection.
The vet prescribes antibiotics, and I began what will become eight months of daily care — cleaning the wound, managing the bleeding, monitoring her health. One summer afternoon in the future, I will stand for six hours in the heat, washing the endless stream of blood from her body, my arms stained copper with her life force. Matilda will baptize me into a new sense of purpose.
It is then I will realize: I am married to this barn.
And I am okay with that. I welcome it.
The children I didn’t have are multiplied into legions of children who need me. The hurting adults, the kindred spirits, the fractured enemies — they are my family. Their stories feed me.
For so long, I dreamed of something else. But I am starting to see that surrendering isn’t about giving up — it’s about giving in.
And learning to savor the beauty of what is already in front of me.
I don’t have to live in fantasy anymore because my reality is enough.
Years ago a horse trainer told me that marriage was about showing up and trudging along together. It didn’t seem very glamorous at the time — trudging. But in the horse herd, togetherness is glued by shared trust, by mutual awareness and watchfulness.
The horses show love for each other by showing up.
I’m learning their ways, but first I have to learn how to show up for myself.
What Holds
March 2025
In 1972 — two years before I was born — it became illegal to deny a woman a bank account or credit card without a man’s signature. In the great wheels of time, it’s been pretty recent since women were given the right to vote.
My grandmother tried to save money to leave my grandfather. The bank informed my grandfather and closed her savings account, transferring the balance to his checking.
I like to believe that I am informed, aware, and capable, but the world I was raised in did a great job making me believe I was nothing if I didn’t have a man beside me. Cellular memories, like generational trauma, run deep.
My mother has an ongoing theory that people change the moment a marriage certificate is signed. It happened to her and she’s watched it happen to me in the past, this phenomenon that no amount of vetting prepared me for, this insidious belief that marriage grants ownership and not partnership.
Now, standing on the other side of it all, I see the weight I carried wasn’t just mine. It was inherited, reinforced, and passed down like an heirloom I never asked for. But the things about old stories is they only define you if you keep telling them the same way.
I spent years believing my strength would be measured by whether I could hold everything together, by whether I could make love last, by whether I could be enough to keep someone from leaving. But I don’t believe that anymore. Strength isn’t about holding. It’s about knowing what’s worth holding and what’s better left to break.
Fifteen years after being left in that Istanbul apartment, I see what that moment gave me. I’ve learned how to lead and how to build a life that doesn’t hinge on someone else’s presence or permission. I’ve learned that commitment doesn’t come from clinging, but from showing up, day after day, for what actually matters. More often than not what matters equals hard, unglamorous work.
The horses taught me well. They don’t care about promises, they just want presence. Horses don’t need declarations but they, like us, just need consistency. They continually show me that true leadership isn’t about control but it’s all about trust, timing, feel, and the willingness to face uncertainty — to soften into my resistance.
I wrote a thousand different musings in Ten Times I Said No To Love about the ways I talked myself out of making the leap into partnership with a human again. I thought I was better off alone and I braced against my history repeating itself. What I didn’t get until Christopher came along was how true partnership isn’t about surrendering yourself to someone else’s needs but standing beside them, fully seen, and moving — trudging — through the trenches together.
Christopher was raised by a woman and had a vantage that showed him equality wasn’t an ideal but a fact. He was also born with no use for preconceived ideas. He observes and makes his own choices about right and wrong, like a horse standing just out of reach of the halter before he allows himself to be caught.
And like the horses that came before him and that he unwittingly inherited when we merged our lives, he doesn’t ask for control or demand submission. He meets me where I am, steady and unshaken. He doesn’t need to prove himself — and by exchange, neither do I.
I don’t need a signature to show I belong here, but it was easy to sign the marriage certificate with him.
First I had to build a life with my own hands and trust that it would hold.
I am grateful for the women who came before me — bound and unbound — who fought, endured, and carved out a path so I could stand here, unshackled, shaping a life of my own making. And I’m grateful for the mares who made me in an industry that is biased toward pliable geldings over those who refuse to be tamed.
Happy Women’s History Month to you all. And may each of us find, in our own way, our personal Day of Liberation.
Love,
Kim
Thank you for sharing this. I so needed to read this today 🐴❤️
“But the things about old stories is they only define you if you keep telling them the same way.”
Thank you for reminding me that I have control and I can change in whichever way I choose. We are often so engrained with expectations from our family and our past that we forget we can make a change. 🖤