Lesley and her husband, Leslie, with their son, Liam.
If you’ve been following my blog, you know that I’ve been describing the challenges I face as I strive to be a super woman, mom, wife, business person and rider. This week I will talk about my quest to be a super wife.
My husband is my prince charming. We have definitely had our share of screaming, throwing whip fights, but overall, he was and still is, my dream partner. In exchange, I try to do my part to be the most perfect wife for him. I am fairly sure I have the Madonna-whore thing (Wikipedia it kids) licked, I have taught myself to cook and even make better Sheppard’s pie than his mom (sorry Margaret),and, of course, I have bestowed upon him not only an heir, but a most gorgeous and intelligent one at that. So, pretty much over all you could say I’m a ‘Super-wife’… well… almost always…
Recently, Leslie and I both became crippled. He had a fall in bad footing on a young horse and tore his ACL badly. Three days later, as I was trying to ride everything, one of our four- year-olds threw me off and gave me a wicked bad bone bruise and tore my calf muscle. We quickly became a right pair of limpers. After a few days off for both of us, I was able to start riding again, we got Leslie’s knee drained and injected, had a specialty brace designed for him to jump in and off we limped to our next event in Georgia.
When you are married to another rider, you get used to looking after one another and taking turns playing nurse depending on who has most recently been whacked by a horse. With us both hurt, you can imagine the difficulties we ran into. Naturally, the hotel we had booked into for the show had us on the second floor with no elevator, so with the four-year-old and all our luggage, it took us about an hour just to get into our room. For bed, we had an ice boot type deal for his swollen leg and a heating pad for mine, and as we ever so gingerly shimmied our naked selves equipped only with heating pads and ice boots into the bed, I turned to him and said, “I have seen our future and it doesn’t look pretty.”
Leslie was surprisingly able to ride just fine with his leg; it was the getting off that was the tricky bit. If the horse moved a bit and Leslie’s knee went sideways, he would fall to the floor in tears, and I doubt you will be surprised to hear that our fit three-day horses rarely stand around like Mexican beach donkeys when they are at the events, so, to say the least, it took a bit of planning to organize the dismounts. Dressage and show jumping wasn’t too bad, as he was able to ride the horses back to their stalls where they would be settled, and our girls could grab hold of them and I could run over like the dutiful wife with a high mounting block so he could get off slowly and I could guide his feet onto the block. Cross-country, on the other hand, was not so easy as it was a CIC and thus a vet box so no riding back to the stall.
I was ready though. Even though I too had to ride, I was so ready. I am Superwoman after all. I had our head gal at the stables getting Leslie’s next horse and my horse ready to go, had enlisted the help of a friend’s two grooms to be at the box to hold the horse still and walk it out after, and had finagled our good friend, fellow Rider Jon Holling, to help me get Leslie off the horse. Oh ya, it was like a Broadway production, this.
Most of you may think that with a busted leg the most natural thing to do would be to sit the event out, and if you were going to give it a go, to just run a bit slow and get it done, but those of you would not know my husband. He is a gold medalist after all, and he is fierce. He rode those ponies that day like there was nothing wrong with his leg and like there might even be prize money in it (HA!), but you could tell as he galloped across the finish line that we was hurting and a bit spent. So, off we all rushed like a finely tuned Indy pit crew and the girls held the horse tight one on either side and we brought the block over and there was Jon Holling ready to just about catch Leslie if he had to and I do a little checklist that all looks ok and I give Leslie the nod to get off. He gingerly steps onto the block and Jon and I ensure he is steady and like the Queen of England Leslie says to the girls, ‘OK! You can take the horse away!’ and, naturally, all kinds of people have slowed to watch us in our grand spectacle, and then it happened. As the horse stepped away one step, then two, all of a sudden Leslie shouts, “Oh $uck!!!” (which is not normal for him. I am by far the curser in the family) and jumps off the block, and the next thing you know off goes a gun shot and Leslie is rolling on the floor inflated. Yep, with all our pomp and circumstance, all our holding of the horse, grabbing of his legs to steady him, taking him by the waist off the horse, we forgot to detach the cord for the blow up vest. Hurt leg. Epic fail. Superwoman? I think not.
