Emotional Recovery?
My wife has been training horses since she was 8 years old. She was severely abused and neglected by her family, so horses were her surrogate family, which means that learning about and spending time with horses has pretty much been a way of life for me.
I have neglected my programming career to chase the dream for about a decade now, and we have made a living from making and selling tack, training horses, giving lessons, stable management, herd management, and nutrition consulting, ... until...
We made some really bad decisions and then really drove them home hard, rather than abandoning them, and the next thing you know we're in the middle of a bucket-scraped stony clay hard packed field with my wife getting on the back of a known bucking off-the-track-thoroughbred, because the owner who displayed wealth like a rock-star never did arrange to have their horse boarded somewhere with an arena, and we really needed the $300 a month.
She got up, and she got back on the horse. She then went on to work an 11-day 16-hour-a-day job at a food booth at the state fair. She worked a few more fairs later, until someone pointed out that her ankle was "squeaking"
It would seem that the plate screwed to her ankle keeping it in place had oddly developed a bone infection 9 years later. They took it out, but her white cell count was still crazy, ... then she remembers... The horse...
It broke her pelvis. Suddenly I remember a whole summer of her breaking out into tears, because all of her saddle trees on all 4 of her saddles were somehow broken. No. They weren't. Her pelvis was broken. After 6 months of walking around with a broken pelvis, the bone infection had raged on so much that her pelvis had turned the consistency of Styrofoam, and we're uninsured.
Next 3 months of life in an external-fixator. A whole year in a wheelchair, while totally broke.
As she's laying in bed, doctors tell her she may not actually survive. When she told to make long-term goals for her health - because that's part of the process - she said she wanted to be able to stand, and walk short distances on her own in a year - they told her to be more realistic.
At this point, my wife is 26. Within a week of getting this news, the owner of the horse in question started posting pictures of my wife all over Facebook, about how my wife had supposedly ruined her horse, and stolen from her. Facebook is Facebook, and the local horse community took it upon themselves to take a huge dump on my wife, without ever considering to ever look into it, even a little.
Of course the claims were baseless, but it didn't stop it from ruining our reputation.
Years have passed.
My wife has never really recovered. She walks, she works (sometimes), she's pretty capable... But it's not there anymore. She wants to see her horses, but not enough to leave the house.
I know part of it is the social life. I can't stand the local horse community. I don't have a problem with women - heck, I married one. I just have a problem with women who are mean to animals, and that pretty much sums up the horse community around me.
I guess what I'm asking is...
Are there places online where my wife can find healthy community, where she can't in person? Would you recommend any? I am debating suggesting Reddit - but I'm new to this as well.
What kind of life is there, for someone who can't train horses (as a career) anymore? I'm trying my hand at eCommerce and the like, but I (sometimes) manage to keep us afloat by fixing someone's super old web-site that only I and maybe 20 other people know how to fix now.
How do you keep motivated?
Submitted March 13, 2019 at 03:18PM by imnotrealanyway
via reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/Horses/comments/b0ri1m/emotional_recovery/?utm_source=ifttt
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