The other night, my husband and I sat on our kitchen floor and shouted obscenities. Not at each other, thankfully, but at life, at the latest wrench thrown in our feeble plans. Patricia had told me earlier that day that Tebogo would be ending the Thoroughbred training and sales part of the business by January 2015. So in other words, time to start looking for a new job.

When I was kid in elementary school, I used to draw horses. And trust me—I was not a gifted artist. But on the inside of every notebook, on the margins of math tests and the errant post-it note; horses were popping up everywhere. They weren’t the horses I knew, but the horses I hoped to know.

I was a scrappy short-stirrup rider who refused to count strides and had never been to a jumper show, but I would draw my fantasy grand prix horses, soaring over wide square oxers.

Sometimes the hardest voice to hear is your own.

Before I came to Tebogo, I was a big fish in a little pond. I had a false confidence in my riding because I didn’t grasp just how much I didn’t know. Within a few weeks, I was unceremoniously humbled. My dream horse got hurt. I was riding some very green beans that did not hesitate to highlight my shortcomings as a rider. And for once, I hardly knew anyone.

There’s nothing like the joy of wrestling a frozen halter in the pre-dawn hours of a frigid January morning or the simple pleasure of icy mud splashing over the top of your aging rubber boots.

One of the many things my mother taught me was that life isn’t fair, so this should come as no surprise. But, I find myself filled with a fierce jealousy when I hear people my age talk about their mothers, grandmothers. I feel in some way entitled to a mother. That her presence on this earth is a given, a standard, a keystone part of the great machinery of life.