How bad could it be?

     By mid summer of last year things were pretty bleak for Jonathan and I in SC.  Our business had shrunk for various reasons outside of our power and we were beginning to freak out. Well, I was definitely freaking out.  The bank account was crazy low, very little was coming in...something had to happen.  I began to hatch plans.  I started with a website that specializes in jobs available in the horse industry.  By using a few different states, I began to narrow down possibilities that I felt Jonathan and I could handle without making us miserable.  All of them were fairly far away from Aiken.  Ugh. Moving, again.  The thought really freaked me out, but I was so sick of living in Aiken and our money struggles that I pushed aside my anxiety.  The one job that we kept circling back to was in Massachusetts. We would be working for a semi-retired older professional, who was in need of a couple who could do all aspects of horse care, plus riding, for some older horses of her own and a few for a private client that she would be teaching a few times per week.  It sounded relatively easy as far the amount of work, but I knew there were always going to be catches with this type of position. One giant catch was that this particular older professional had a tough reputation. And by tough I mean she could be nasty and very difficult to work for (I had multiple people tell me this before we made our decision).  "How bad could it be?", we asked ourselves.  After quite a few telephone calls back and forth with this woman, we decided that we'd give it a shot and take the plunge to move up to MA, at least for the winter months and then see where we were come spring.  We packed very little just taking our winter clothing, essential kitchen/cooking items, our two dogs, two cats and two horses.  We equipped our home in Aiken with a proper ADT system, locked the door one morning at the end of October 2018 and literally drove away to the unknown.


    It was within the first week that knew we had made a very poor decision, but we also knew that we had no immediate recourse so we were stuck.  The lady was one of those people who you couldn't predict how she was going to behave any given time you saw her throughout the day.  Sometimes she was very pleasant and cheerful (it was rare, but it did happen), other times (most of the time) she was horribly mean, degrading and so manaically micromanaging of everything we did in the barn that it made me want to go sit in a corner and cry. I have NEVER been treated so terribly in my life.  She would see me sweeping the barn aisle and storm down to me, rip the broom from my hands then proceed to sweep dirt all over my legs while shrieking, "This is how you sweep!!!!".   If she saw that I had just wrapped a horses legs she wouldn't even stop, but as she walked by she would sneer, "Re-do those wraps!".  I was given "riding lessons" with her, but she never let me go past a trot and NOTHING that I did on a horse's back was correct. NOTHING.  Despite my 30 years of being a decent professional rider, in her opinion I wasn't capable of riding her ancient school horse correctly at the walk.  It was brutally humiliating and really wore me right down to the core.  I started to believe that I was a bad rider, that I should just quit, that she was right and I'd just been fucking it up for years.  She was breaking me down.  I couldn't do anything right in an industry that I'd been making a living in for decades.  Jonathan in some ways got treated better, because she just ignored him. She told him what to do through me, because she said she thought he was mentally handicapped. Wow. Just another little claw into my already fragile mental state. Not one thing about this job had proven to be anything but awful for both Jonathan and I, which was great for our relationship let me tell you.  The two of us began to fight a lot.  Our frustration and anger came out towards each other, which had never happened to us in 26 years of being together.  In my wildest dreams I couldn't have imagined how much of a nightmare taking this job would be.  Yet, there we were.  Everyone of my friends that I called to complain to said the same thing...LEAVE!  But it was more complicated than that, because we needed the money so desperately. We kept telling ourselves to just take in the paychecks and save, save, save until we figured out something else.  She started giving us extra chores, like taking her garbage to the dumpster and picking up sticks and pine cones in the driveway.  On the day before Christmas I got a text message from her instructing us to "scrub and disinfect the entire barn".  Who does that to their employees on the day before Christmas????!!!!  You know what?  We did scrub and disinfect the entire barn that day.  Why?  Why did we do it??  Because it was our job and we didn't want to give her any extra reasons to berate us. We trudged out of the barn that night with aching shoulders, broken spirits and cold, stiff fingers.  It was an awful cycle of constant degradation and this woman was an absolute professional at it. Just when we thought she couldn't possibly do anything worse to us she began to mess around with our paychecks. One week would be a little short, with no explanation.  Then she went away for a couple of weeks, without leaving us any checks at all. I questioned all of it by text, phone, or to her face but it was always a vague answer.  We would eventually get the checks, but it was when it was convenient for her.  The job was a total disaster, but with money coming in we were hanging on by a thread.  When she started messing with our pay, we both started to lose it. Neither of us was willing to go back to SC, so we needed an immediate alternative plan. I'd been looking all along for a different job in the Northeast, but nothing was coming up with the right components.  The line we were treading to hang onto our sanity was becoming thinner and thinner.  To be continued...