BONNIE MARIE BARLOW

• Species: Morgan horse
• Sex: ♀
• Age: 26
• Height: 6ft 8in (or 2.03m)
• Weight: 220lbs
• Siblings: 1 sister named Sara, 2 years older
• Profession: Farm mechanic
• Subculture: Punk
• Home: A small mountain town called Summerset

Bonnie is a fursona and occasional roleplay character. She is down to earth and, although academically capable, prefers to enjoy life in the moment - and for her, that means doing something enjoyable and/or practical rather than spending too much time studying. She works as an agricultural machine mechanic.

Trust & Confidence

Baby

Bonnie was born in a small mountain town, and was the second of her parents’ two children. The town had a mostly upper class population and her parents were a little lower in class than this. The town itself was not unduly isolated, and travel in and out of town by car was easy.

Her mother was very mild-mannered. Her father’s disposition was not too different: he was a quiet, stoic type who took his responsibilities as a father very seriously. He could have a tough exterior and was known to be a hard worker, but those who knew him saw a caring side too.

Bonnie’s parents were unmarried at the time Bonnie was born, although they married at a later date.

Most of the population had no qualms with Bonnie’s parents for having children outside of wedlock, although a small number were more moralistic about this and tried to guilt them into marrying.

The family experienced a life-threatening emergency during Bonnie’s birth: she was born with her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. She couldn’t breathe so had to be rushed into emergency care.

This was easier said than done. The nearest emergency room that was open at that time of night was outside of the town. Needless to say, she survived. Her parents both looked quite ragged by the time they returned home.

News of this incident spread around the town, and this divided it somewhat. Her parents explained to their friends what had happened and some of the town residents heard the incident by rumour, but others who heard of it refused to believe the story and chose to believe a nastier instead: that Bonnie’s father had beaten or abused his wife and their foal. Some townspeople went so far as to call Child Protective Services or tell the parents that they were going to hell. Thankfully however, in time all of this calmed down, and most of the population came to acknowledge that the late-night emergency room visit had been nothing other than an unfortunate medical emergency.

Bonnie’s mother sometimes found the responsibilities of motherhood overwhelming but did her best, and despite a couple of incidents (in addition to the emergency at the time of Bonnie’s birth), she raised Bonnie successfully. Some of the townspeople were very keen to give her unsolicited advice but she mostly preferred to work things out for herself. It felt to her as if she was wasting others’ time if they spent too long helping her.

Bonnie learned as a very small baby that her mother responded well to being appealed to. Her mother often accepted the invitation to cuddle and play with her, so despite her mother’s introversion, Bonnie herself learned to be outgoing, at least in early life.

Despite Bonnie’s parents’ natural quietness, her parents were socially active within the community and beyond - they had friends outside of town who would sometimes come and visit. Some of these friends had children of their own and this meant that Bonnie’s parents always had a source of help or advice from people they felt they trusted and could relax around. It also meant that Bonnie and her sister, Sara had at least a few play mates while growing up, although those friends did not live close by and face-to-face contact was very intermittent.

Freedom & Self-Determination

Toddler

Bonnie grew into a toddler. Part of this meant that she developed a clear sense of being a separate self from her mother, and it also meant that she noticed her father and older sisters’ presences around the house.

A combination of her natural need to establish herself as a different person from her mother (as all toddlers do), combined with the outgoing personality she had already learned and the affinity that gave her with her father, meant that she took the opportunity to explore the world around her.

Bonnie was as curious as could be and explored as much of the house as she could get access to - and it turned out that she could get a long way.

Sara was not as adventurous, and generally stayed close to their mother, so Bonnie tended to exploring alone. In its own small way, this contributed to the independent, perhaps even vaguely distanced, spirit she developed growing up.

Bonnie especially liked the attic and crawlspace: there were so many treasures there for a curious mind like hers to discover. Of course, most adults would have called those treasures junk, but to a toddler they were exciting new discoveries!

Bonnie’s parents got married when she was around 18 months old.

On one occasion when she was 2, Bonnie explored the basement. She fell down the stairs and sprained her shoulder. Her parents were out in the yard at the time and didn’t hear her cries at first, although it didn’t take them too long to come looking for her and when they did, they picked her up and made sure that she was okay.

Being a toddler Bonnie needed to do a little more than just explore: she needed to exert her will. She did so, often defying her parents, but she had no particular felt need to do so beyond the assertion of her own independent will. Ultimately she loved her gentle, loving mother and practical, interesting father. Being the younger of the two foals she loved Sara too, for Sara was four years old by this time and that made her all the more intriguing to Bonnie.

Ambition

Young childhood

As Bonnie grew out of her toddler years and became a more coordinated small child, she and Sara found more common ground and started to get along better. Sara continued to prefer to keep close to their mum and be easily upset, but as Bonnie got big enough to be interesting for Sara to play with she stepped away from their mum to play with Bonnie more.

In particular, Bonnie’s sister had always liked to dress up dolls in outfits. She also liked dressing Bonnie up whenever she got the opportunity. After all, dolls just sat passively there while Bonnie would move around after she was dressed.

Free will was still something of a testy point with Bonnie, although this was coming to an end. It might be going too far to say that she was learning the art of compromise or of the concept of win-win scenarios yet, but she was at least starting to feel the confusion that would lead to her understanding.

Bonnie didn’t like being forced to dress up, and yet she enjoyed new experiences, including the imaginative adventures that dress-up games had to offer. She responded to this dilemma by resisting Sara whenever she tried to dress her up. However when Sara wasn’t around and she got the chance to get her hands on those same clothes and accessories, she would dress up in secret and play and parade to her heart’s content.

Bonnie started going to elementary school when she was 5. It was a small, local school and she already knew most, if not all, of the other children there, as well as the teachers. During this time Bonnie also got to know the other kids better. She got along with some better than others.

Some of the children, perhaps due to the upper class snobbery to which they had been exposed ever since they could talk, would be cruel about Bonnie, and worse (at least as far as Bonnie was concerned), Sara. Bonnie found this completely unacceptable and argued back to defend her. Usually this ended with a trip to the headmaster’s office, a stern talking-to, and a week-long grounding from dad once Bonnie got home. If Bonnie’s mum was the first to hear of the incident, she would usually let Bonnie off the hook.

Productivity

Older childhood

At age 7 Bonnie’s schooling got more formal, structured, and challenging. This was where she had to start demonstrating her understanding rather than purely taking in information. It became apparent that she had difficulties with this, and the issue was soon revealed to be a problem with her vision that had gone unnoticed by herself, her teachers, or her parents up until this point. Bonnie had never known any different so had never thought to tell anybody about it. To her, it was just normal for distant things to be blurry. She was prescribed a pair of glasses, which she began to wear.

Bonnie had always had her share of teasing and had never quite learned how to overcome this. Her family either hadn’t had the resources to teach her how to resolve conflict (her mother, being as mild-mannered as she was, did not have good conflict-resolution skills so could not teach these skills to Bonnie), and Bonnie had not mentioned to her parents the teasing that Sara had suffered, and in which she had involved herself (at least, the events that hadn’t ended up in the headmaster’s office).

The teachers had not helped with this situation either, to help the family to support Bonnie or Sara.

Whenever teamwork was required at school Bonnie would try to take charge. Her classmates didn’t like this but Bonnie had a practical spirit and a way of getting things done. The classmates who got along with her better tended to thank her for this, while the bullies, if they found themselves in her team, tended to leave her alone for the day.

This became more of a problem for Bonnie when she started to wear her glasses to school, and the problems got worse still when she moved to the town’s middle school at age 11. Some of the school’s bullies singled her out over her glasses, saying that they made her look nerdy.

The culture of the school didn’t fit with the culture she had experienced at home, growing up. The mountain town’s culture was more upper class than that of Bonnie’s own family so they had never fitted in, and when she went to the school she felt the same. She experienced the same problem of class divide and that was why she and the other pupils kept each other at arm’s length.

Bonnie had always experienced a sense of distance, a lack of closeness, between herself and the other children. This was partly due to social class discrepancy, partly due to the emotionally reserved culture of her family, and partly due to the natural tendency of children to tease and their particular teasing of someone Bonnie held so dear.

As far as her academic studies went, she did reasonably well once she had her glasses. She wouldn’t make the honour roll but she also wasn’t academically bad enough to be noticed. However, she hated homework and tried to avoid doing it unless she was forced to. As far as she was concerned her school day was enough - she didn’t want to do more when she got home, especially if it was a repetition or extra practice of the work she had done during the day.

Child to Adult Transition

Adolescence

By the time Bonnie reached her teens she had grown tired of the social problems that she’d had to deal with in middle school. She specifically sought out a more down-to-earth school and believed she’d found it when she heard of an agricultural high school out of town. She enrolled and started to attend at age 14, full of the hope of finding like-minded people and people who had a healthy disregard for looks. As she saw it, perhaps she would even make friends there.

That isn’t how it worked out. She found the social culture of high school just as tribal as middle school had been. In addition to that, everyone at that school was in their teens and had begun to put a great deal of importance on attractiveness. A few of her fellow students took issue with Bonnie being a morgan horse. In the school’s culture, if a given student was a horse, it was preferred that she be a pretty breed such as a paint, grey, palomino or appaloosa. Morgans just didn’t cut the proverbial mustard.

Bonnie was a slow developer when it came to puberty and remained physically undeveloped until the first summer of this school. This gave the more vindictive girls an excuse to pick on her, so they did. Bonnie started taking an interest in guys but usually experienced rejection as most of them preferred the more confident, physically developed girls.

However, Bonnie’s experiences at the agricultural school weren’t all bad, and she did indeed find her first genuine friends there. She was not the only unpopular kid. There was also a pony mare, two draft-horse brothers, a silver stallion, and an otter. They found each other, and once they had gelled as a group, provided each other with moral support and met outside of school to hang out. Bonnie even dated one of the draft-horse brothers, a silvery-grey stallion named Joshua, for a few years.

Having friends helped, but didn’t fully alleviate the stress. To blow off steam Bonnie listened to punk music. She also fixed small engines for money, and went for long walks in the woods with Joshua.

Her desire for independence and freedom had taken hold again, and she decided that she wanted transport - and that a truck would do very nicely. She saved the money she made from fixing engines until she had enough to buy one. When she did, she drove a lot, often with her boyfriend.

Bonnie also looked out for role models. She tended to seek these in piecemeal fashion, taking a little bit of role leadership here and there. If somebody did something helpful or kind then she would note it and aspire to it herself, but she didn’t pick out any one particular role model from among the people she interacted with directly. With that said, she idolized Ian Astbury, the lead singer of the band The Cult. Bonnie particularly loved his musical talent. She deliberately avoided reading anything about him so that she could continue to idealise him. This was semi-deliberate on her part as she valued the escapism of being able to see him as a perfect rock god.

Bonnie developed a particularly antagonistic relationship with a border collie girl who constantly told her to kill herself. This girl also spread a rumour that the draft-horse Bonnie was dating (and clearly in a romantic relationship, by this stage) was her brother. She tolerated the border collie’s abuse for a long time, until graduation rolled by. Then she told the girl to “go fuck yourself”, spat at her, and walked away. She never had to deal with her again.

Bonnie graduated with no academic difficulty with a specialism in tractor repair.

Closeness in Relationships

Young adulthood

By age 18 Bonnie and Joshua had been going steady for a long time. They moved into a small apartment in her native mountain town with her boyfriend. Joshua worked at a pallet manufacturing plant and she found a job working as a mechanic in an international harvester sales business.

They remained quite self-sufficient for 2 years. They worked a lot and had fun while not at work. Joshua had a best friend who would visit their house often, and he had a girlfriend of his own. While the two guys caught up Bonnie and the girlfriend would spend time together, although they didn’t have much in the way of chemistry as Bonnie felt they were too different from each other.

When Bonnie was 20 Joshua declared that he would like to have a child. Bonnie herself didn’t, so they drifted apart. They eventually broke up on amicable terms and continued to be friends thereafter.

Bonnie hasn’t developed a desire to have children herself. Perhaps one day she will find a stallion whom she wants to have children with, but this has not happened so far.

In the current day she owns a small house with 3 acres of space and runs a small farm situated just outside of the town. She keeps chickens there, along with two feral Belgian draft horses - a mare and a stallion.

Passing on Responsibility

Middle age

Bonnie has not reached this stage of her life yet so it is unknown what her life story is for her 40’s and onwards.

End of Life

Old age

Bonnie has not reached this stage of life yet.