My Smart Mouth: Honest Mistakes

I think I may have unwittingly traumatized my kid this weekend. She’s stoic, so it’s hard to tell, but I have the sneaking suspicion that I’ll be hearing about this incident over Thanksgiving dinner in about ten years.

I’ll explain, but first I will ask you to not judge me too harshly. I think every parent or step-parent on earth has probably made a similar mistake at one time or another. You all remember that time your parents innocently popped Old Yeller or Watership Down into the VCR, right? Or, maybe they took your two-year-old self to the movie theater to see ET and you had nightmares about ET hiding in your bathtub for the next twenty years? It happens. Mistakes are made. Nobody’s fault. Right?

My stepdaughter is eight years old and is starting to branch out in her taste in entertainment. Lately we’ve been digging deep, looking for movies to watch as a family that will entertain us all and that we haven’t seen 50 times. Her six-year-old brother is still content to watch the same animated movie over and over, but he’s the only one, so he’s along for the ride. Luckily, he wasn’t along for this one.

Sis and I both really like horse movies. Like, REALLY like them. I consider it one of my greatest child-influencing accomplishments thus far that her favorite movie of all time is The Black Stallion, produced by Francis Ford Coppola and released in 1979. (If you haven’t seen that movie you should, because it’s a great movie, and not just for little girls obsessed with horses and ponies.) So, when I come across a horse movie I’m always excited to watch it with her.

It started innocently enough. I was scrolling through Netflix and found a movie called “Of Horses and Men.” Sounds promising, right? It said it wasn’t rated. After reading the description, I assumed it was a documentary-style movie, thus the NR rating. This is what the description told me: “This action drama lets viewers imagine the world of humans through a horse’s eyes, spotlighting the ancient two-way bond between the species. Deep in the wild, events unreel that will test both the horses and their complex human partners.”

It sounded good to me, so I added it to my queue (yes, I am living in 2010 and still get DVDs in the mail) and when it arrived I waited eagerly to watch it with Sissy.

Upon starting the movie, it quickly became apparent that it was a foreign film from Iceland. At the first sign of subtitles, Dad and PeeWee both wandered off, but Sissy and I were already captivated by the immediate appearance of an adorable Icelandic pony. She assured me she could read the subtitles and wanted to keep watching.

Ok, so it might not be a kids’ movie, but it’s a movie about horses, surely it’s family friendly, I thought. A feel-good movie, no doubt. It should be fine.

I was wrong. So very wrong.

It started out alright. A man catches and saddles his adorable little gray mare, and starts off at a brisk trot down the road. Neighbors come outside to watch them pass by, wave and shout admiring comments. Tourists sitting outside a bus marked “Horse Tours” watch with binoculars. He is very happy with his horse’s performance. He sings a happy little song, on the way to a pretty lady’s house for lunch. Trot, trot, trot. Ponies are cute. This is going to be great.

At the pretty lady’s house, his little gray mare is restless as she waits for him, tied up outside. Nearby, an equally adorable little black stallion belonging to the pretty lady scents the air and tests the smooth wire fence for weak points. The proud gentleman finishes lunch and prepares to mount his mare and leave. Little does he know, he is not the only one planning to mount his mare today. As he starts off down the road, the little black stallion pops the gate open and eagerly begins crossing the field. The little gray mare stops in her tracks, despite the disgruntled rider’s efforts to get her moving.

Being a ranch kid, I understand what is about to take place and feel the first stirrings of misgivings. I glance uneasily from my stepdaughter back to the screen as exactly what you think is about to unfold, unfolds. For some reason, the rider does not dismount as nature inevitably takes its course. The pretty lady is aghast. The neighbors are aghast. A watching tourists drops his tea cup. The proud man is no longer proud. I am uncomfortable.

My stepdaughter is giggling, but mercifully does not ask any questions. I decide it’s gone over her head and it’s fine.

It is so not fine. The humiliated man returns home. He is angry. He rummages in a drawer and pulls out a rifle shell. I think, surely not…he’s not going to…?

He does. The humiliated man strides outside and shoots his adorable little gray mare dead, in front of God, my Stepdaughter and me, then falls weeping to his knees. Things have taken a very dark turn, very quickly. Sis and I sit in stunned silence for a moment, but before I can decide what to do, an apparently all new storyline begins, with an even CUTER dun pony, and Sister shouts “look at this pony, it’s just SO cute,” so we keep watching.

The dun pony survives. His rider does not. In the course of the first twenty minutes or so an innocent pony is executed, a man keels over and dies from drinking grain alcohol, another is whipped across the eyes with barbed wire and blinded, a farmer has an almost certainly fatal accident in his tractor and we see a whole bunch of really cute ponies. Apparently, people in Iceland are as hard as their ponies are adorable.

When the vet comes to geld the little black stallion, Sister asks me what they’re going to do to him, I say “they’re going to geld him.” She says “what does that mean?” and I contemplate the series of mistakes that have now brought me to the brink of explaining the birds and the bees to an eight-year-old. (Seriously, though, who explained it to me? No one, as far as I recall, but I also don’t remember ever NOT understanding how animal reproduction worked.)

We pause the movie as I consider my options, which are to:

A: turn it off and pretend like

none of this ever happened

B: have a very candid

conversation, or

C: lie and make something

up.

Thankfully, at this point Daddy steps in and announces he’s taking the kids sledding.

“I’ll tell you later,” I assure my Baby BFF, already knowing from past experience she’ll bring it up out of the blue in three weeks, after I think she’s forgotten.

“Hope, remember when you said you’d tell me what ‘gelding’ is?”

Um, yeah, about that…

At least I probably have a few weeks to figure out what I’m going to say. Luckily, she didn’t want to watch the rest of the movie after sledding. She said she didn’t want to see anyone do any more horrible things to “the cutest ponies EVER!” She didn’t seem too concerned about barbed-wire-to-the-eyes man or grain alcohol guy.

Yep, I’ll definitely be hearing about this one in ten years. Lesson learned: vet unrated movies first before watching them with the kids, and don’t go to Iceland.

Unless you’re also hard as hell, and really like really, really cute ponies.