My own business. What a treat! What a dream! I couldn’t have done it without the most generous sponsor. She believed in me and helped me out a ton the first year (and when I needed additional funds she was there to support me). She told me, write a business plan. So I did. It took forever but it really made clear to me what path I wanted to take.
I won’t dwell on the first 18 months that Abingdon Park existed. There are not many great memories from that time. A few. But not a lot. It was hard being on my own. I didn’t live there so I had to drive in twice a day, or spend the entire day there. The owners took me in like a long lost little sister at first but as time went on it became clear that we were VERY different types of people. It all came to a head one day in May 2009. She kicked me out, I was gutted because I thought my dream was toast. But then we had a post-kicking-out meeting to try and resolve things. Things got heated. She told me that if she was going down (I won’t tell you what for – sorry) that I was going down with her.
All of a sudden my heckles were raised. My back was up and fire filled my eyes. I just looked at her and said quietly “I don’t think so.” She threw down a $20 and stormed out. Her partner just gazed at me and shrugged her shoulders. I knew she didn’t have the guts to stand against her. From that point I became a new person. I started to become ME again. Remembered who I was and what I wanted to accomplish in life. I found a new base of operation fairly quickly and rescued my ponies from the various barns that had helped me out by taking ponies on a moment’s notice. I am thankful for all the people in my life who have been there when I needed someone. God truly puts people in my path for a reason. I am thankful for my parents and my brother who came with their trucks and their compassion.
The new barn I found was really pretty but really run down. The best part about it was that I met Tony there in January 2010. A year later I moved into the little “barn house” that was there, with Tony. It had spiders. Tarantulas. Scorpions and massive centipedes. One day we saw a foot long centipede come out of the closet. Ali (10) and I screamed and stood on top of a chest of drawers while Tony literally took the walls down until he found that M-F’er and killed it. Another day I was reading in my bed and a scorpion fell into my hair. I have a ton of stories like this. However, the place was for sale and Tony and I wanted a place of our own. It took a couple more years (and a wedding) but eventually we found this place on Zipper Road in Pilot Point. A dream became a reality as I watched my husband, my Dad, and some friends build my arena, tack room and paddocks and clean out the old Hay barn. The meter high weeds were mowed, multiple trips to the dump happened and eventually we were ready to begin again.
After a miscarriage and almost a year of “trying again” I finally became pregnant with Skylar. And Tony left for Haiti. A mission he had agreed to before we knew I was pregnant. That was the hardest year of our lives. He hated being away (and hated Haiti) and I hated being on my own, pregnant and then with a newborn. That winter I was pregnant was ridiculously stressful. I have an awesome picture of my Mom in all her winter gear, dressed to help me out cleaning stalls. One of my barn families was ready to help at a moment’s notice and came out during the terrible ice storm we had that year, despite the roads and the weather. God Bless them. My Mom and I ended up eating hamburger buns (toasted) because we couldn’t get to Walmart and we had no groceries in the house! We had to get water from the house using a wheelbarrow and a “water bladder” – we unhooked the washing machine and used that hose because everything in the barn had frozen. I’m telling you, these were some of the best memories despite it all! It was quite an adventure.
I realized I had it all. ALL my dreams had come true. A house and a barn of my own, a husband, a child, my own business. What more could I want? For a long time I was happy and satisfied. It was HARD but it was worth it, because it was mine.
And then my world fell apart. In 2019 my Mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
Nothing has ever been the same.
To be continued….
