Mentors

Food for thought: You become like the five people whom you spend the most time with.  Interesting isn't it?  For most children that means the habits of their parents and the tendencies of their best friends.  For teenagers that generally means whatever group of friends you have.  Or if you were as lucky/unlucky as I was, you might have also had a mentor.

I didn't plan on having one, but it did happen.  I met her when I was fifteen, at a meeting.  She was asking  for volunteers for her therapeutic riding center (for those of you who don't know, that's where physically and mentally disabled people can learn to ride horses.)  The next morning I called her and set up an interview and the rest was history.  For more than two years I worked for her, volunteering the first year and then at sixteen years old I was making $12.50 per hour.  That alone ruined me, I only went out for jobs where I made at least $12.50 per hour after that.

I loved that ranch.  On normal days my mom would drive me out (I couldn't afford to get a license at the time) I would work for four hours or so, taking care of the horses, training them, riding them, cleaning stalls, cleaning tack, feeding them.  Indulging my country girl lifestyle, being a real ranch hand.  The other half of the time I was teaching the disabled children.  It was amazing.  My initial draw was for the horses, something I didn't have in my life but felt desperately drawn to.  I ended up loving teaching this disable kids how to ride horses.  Every day I taught two lessons, those were my students that I shared with another volunteer.  Every lesson we groomed, trained and rode the horses.  It was wonderful.  Six years later I still have my old students come up to me and talk to me.

In the beginning I worked for four hours a day, three days a week.  When summer took off, I would work ten to twelve hours a day, five or six days a week.  Riding lessons, summer camps, field trips, pasture cleaning, everything.  It became not just a place to be with horses and teach kids, but a place where my friends were as well.  One of the staff members and I became very close, I eventually became friends with her brother as well.  I reconnected with girl whom I was friends with when I was very young.  My best friend at the time started coming out and volunteering with me, and I made two new friends who were my age -and many who were adults and older women.  The other two girls I met are now two of my closest friends, one of them is the Maid of honor in my wedding, the other is a bridesmaid.  Just imagine how different it all would be if I never made that phone call?

Back to that mentoring part; how could I not admire the woman who made all of this possible for me? Who ran a non profit business out of her own home and ranch to help these children? Who helped me and my friends to have not just a great work environment, but a new family.  Not to say I was the only one who put her on a pedestal, but we did.  She had what I envisioned to be the perfect life: She was married to an amazing guy, she had two awesome kids, she had a great ranch with a beautiful home that her husband built for them in the mountain and they always seemed happy.  Everyone loved her, I wanted to be more like her.  My job eventually worked into something much more, my mentor and I set up a club for the kids at the ranch, to come and have fun any time they liked.  We were actually able to get a horse to rehabilitate with the kids to help give them a sense of accomplishment.  I went with her everywhere to give speeches about what we were doing, to raise funds and awareness, to help these kids.  The project gained enormous attention in the community for the two years that it ran, for the first year it was everything that we wanted it to be, but the second year everything started to change.

The ranch neighbors were complaining about the dust on the dirt road that everyone needed to take to get up to the ranch, the county got involved and two months later the ranch moved.  The barn, the arena, the horses, everything went with us.  The business was moved to a very public ranch next to a highway, it was loud and obnoxious.  Our secluded hideaway of a ranch was gone, but we still had hope.  We cleaned up the shack of a house for their family to live in, we ripped out dead vineyards, tilled ground, planted trees, rebuilt barns, built fences and pastures and arenas -essentially started from scratch and had the whole place up and running in a matter of weeks.  We thought everything would go back to normal, but it didn't.

That summer, we got invited to go to a state horse event.  An event that brought a third of the country's horse people and trainers all together in one place -an event that had contacted us and wanted us to be presenters.  We were ecstatic!  My mentor picked me and three other girls from the ranch to ride up with her and stay there for the weekend to help her take care of the three horses that we took and help give the presentations.  It was on that weekend trip that we discovered that she was divorcing her husband.  That he had already bought a new house and had taken the kids and moved out, and this all came about because her new boyfriend showed up at the event.  The man who had donated four of our beautiful horses over the last two years, now we knew why he was so generous.

To a lot of people, divorce is no big deal.  But to us, it was heartbreaking.  This was the woman that could do it all, the woman who we all wanted to be, who had the ranch, the family, and the career that was making a difference.  The woman who apparently was cheating on her husband.  It hurts, to have a mentor ripped away from you like that.  I was confused, not sure how I was suposed to react to the news.  I knew that I didn't have all of the details, that it takes two people to come to a decision like that.  But I also now knew that my mentor was not who I thought she was.  She had lied to everybody, she had ripped her own family apart, and little did we know at that point, she had lost half of our funding for the disabled children's scholarships to ride at the ranch.

That weekend was the last weekend we truly had with her.  Next Monday when we returned to the ranch, we discovered that the funding was gone.  And she had hired three women to be our new bosses.  Three evil women.  One was tough, which wasn't an issue to us.  Except that she was rough with our horses, and that wasn't okay.  One was mean, and we all hated her.  She knew nothing about horses and routinely put us, the horses, and the kids in danger with her ignorance.  The other boss was fine, except that she was stupid.  She didn't know anything and constantly forgot what to do.  At the end of that month, we had lost over half of our employees.  Lessons were cut short, kids weren't able to come for lessons anymore because their scholarships fell through, new employees were picked up from the local high school.  Some of them were good, but most were there on community service requirements.  My remaining coworkers and I spent the rest of the summer trying to clean up their mess.  They were lazy, and one left the gate open one night.  That night, four of our horses got out onto the highway and died.  Because one person was lazy and didn't check the gate, four of my favorite horses we slaughtered by two big rigs.  That next morning was awful   With only eight of the original employees left, I gave my notice.  My mentor wasn't even around anymore, if we were lucky we saw her maybe once of twice a week.  Three of my friends had already quit, and the two who were left were considering it.  But I wasn't waiting anymore, my dream was over.

It took a long time for me to be able to trust people again.  In a way I don't really think I've recovered from that, because whenever I depend on someone to do a job with me I always assume that they're going to fail. Even if I like them and know them, I expect them to leave without finishing what they've started.  Because my mentor lost everything by turning her back on people.

Now I have no mentor.  I've decided that I don't need one.  I'm an adult now, I talk to my parents if I need their advice, but I have friends who are struggling as I am and my hunny and I are doing fine figuring things out on our own.  Life is in my own hands, and I know that I still want a ranch of my own, with a family and a house and horses.  But I'll do it my way.

I ran into my old mentor a few days ago.  It was like no time had passed, she was happy and chatty, she'd married her new boyfriend.  The ranch had closed last year, there wasn't enough money or employees to keep going, and the landlord doubled the rent on the ranch.  The only logical thing left to do for her was walk away.  I was sad for her for a moment, but I know that's just a chapter in her life that's ended and she's on to the next.  So we said goodbye, promised to get together and catch up over lunch sometime, and went our separate ways.  I still pray for her, she is still very much a good person who's just made mistakes.  I miss her, but I'm in a new chapter of my life now too.  And there's no going back.  The future is much brighter than everything we've had before, so I've moved on.

There are people out there who need mentors, who need to fill a hole in their life with someone who will guide them.  To them I say good luck, but beware -because nobody's perfect.

Love,
Alice