PrintShe earns a national dressage honor while also homeschooling her children and volunteering in Haiti.
Many adult amateurs juggle a career, raising children and riding their horses. It’s never an easy task, but Dixie Montgomery has taken it to an entirely different level, having raised and homeschooled 17 children.
She also runs a non-profit organization called HOPE in Haiti, but she still makes horses an important part of her life, earning the Dover Saddlery Adult Amateur Medal national reserve championship for 2009. Montgomery, Monroe, Wash., and her Dutch Warmblood Wester scored an average of 68.29 percent at second level to take the honor.
Montgomery said that while still in high school, she told her mother that she wasn’t going to get married, but she would have 10 boys.
“I have always had a love for children, and especially for those who were less fortunate,” said Montgomery. “I remember going to an orphanage in Tijuana [Mexico] when I was in high school, and my heart ached for those children so badly. So seeds were planted long ago, although I’ve never been much of a visionary and had no idea what my life would hold. I still don’t.”
It’s usually not a good policy to pick up hitchhikers, but Montgomery did exactly that one day. Fortunately for her, this individual was not a shady person, and he invited her to a Bible study. Montgomery eventually moved in with his sister and later met their brother Dick when he returned from serving two years in the army as a medic. She became good friends with Dick and at age 23 married him.
A House Full Of Love
“My husband and I are both Christians and have always wanted to help others, especially children that were unwanted for one reason or another,” said Dixie. “Only one of our adopted kids was a baby when he came to us, and we refer to him as our Haitian souvenir, as we were living in Haiti at the time. He’s now at school in [the United States Military Academy] West Point [N.Y.].”
Their other children ranged in age from 3 to 14 years old when they came to live with the Montgomerys. “We never planned our family, just continued taking in children when there was a need,” said Dixie.
She still has teenagers in the house as her children range from 15 to 32 years now. “We have a Korean daughter, Viet-namese son, three sons and a daughter from Haiti, an Ethiopian son, a Russian daughter, and the others are from the Washington area,” she said. “Our biological children are all mixed in age-wise.”
Dick, a paint contractor, taught the children the value of honest work, and they helped in the painting to earn their own money.
“He always told them that it provided for us, and they could learn how to work along side of him,” Dixie said, adding three of their sons have now taken over the paint company.
Dixie doesn’t work outside the home, but she considers herself “one of the hardest working non-paid women out there.”
Life in the Montgomery home was not easy or low key.
