Horse People, Please Read and Reply

So… this is what happened today..

I’m young. 20. Yeah. Sure. I’m practically an adult, but I’ve been at my barn for 5 years. My mom doesn’t come out anymore because of drama with one of the boarder’s mom. Years ago. She’s always been the one to complain about my older TB being too skinny, too.

I admit I neglected him for awhile when I was blind, going in and out of hospitals. He wasn’t the only thing I neglected. I didn’t go to school the second half of my junior year of high school. I didn’t do anything that summer. I didn’t see anybody, or do anything particularly productive except.. try to figure out what was wrong with me and then get surgery and heal.

This lady has scolded me, yelled at me, accused me of abusing my horse, has rallied the other ‘five star’ members and tried to get me kicked out of the barn, got into screaming matches with my easily angered mother that takes things very personally— and who will now not go near the barn cause she despises this lady, and after a year, I thought we’d finally have some peace. I have no ill feelings, actually. I deserved to be scolded, and I realized she was yelling at me out of concern for my horse. I know all that.

My horse just went through a serious episode. He is seriously underweight and is on a special diet. He usually goes badly underweight during the winter and gets back to a healthy look during the spring/summer. But he ‘fell the wrong way’ and the vet thinks he ruptured his medial patella. We don’t have a trailer and sent out a call for emergency help to get Chance to the vet. Two people were kind enough to offer the uses of their trailers, and neither would take monetary compensation for their services, so I opted to clean their stalls and scrub and fill their horses’ water buckets. 

Today, I had to wait between giving my horse his food and his medicine, so I had a LOT of extra time. I cleaned my stall, the three horses’ stalls that belong to the people I am indebted to, and then I just started going down the line. I didn’t even go IN their stalls/runs, just slipped the rake through the bars of the fence and scooped up the poop that way. Keep in mind this lady is NEVER out here. Her daughter, whom I have a pretty normal, friendly relationship with, is the one that cares for the horse. The horse is hers’, she rides him, and the mom just watches and tells her what to do.

I got a call from said lady about how I have ulterior motives, and to never go near her horse, or her stall, or them, and to cut the crap about wanting to help, and she continued on by threatening to call my parents (yeah, cause that scared me, let me tell you), and then said she was filing a complaint, she would see this to the end, and I would be punished.

I sincerely apologized. Kept a calm tone. Said I wouldn’t do it again. Told her I understood that I had overstepped my boundaries… and I am sorry that I panicked them. Sunny is perfectly healthy, but by cleaning his poop I was interfering with their monitoring of his special diet. I told them exactly how many piles of poop I scooped, the condition of the feces, and apologized profusely. I did understand what she was saying, but it could have been delivered in a better way. In a less dramatic way.

I explained why I did it, that I was sorry I didn’t consider her thoughts and I know I should’ve asked first, but at the time, I was there, the poop was in my reach, I had a rake and a wheelbarrow, all of the other stalls were done, and he had six piles of poop just staring me in the face, and I had nothing but time.

She didn’t care about my reasons, didn’t care about anything I said, did NOT accept my apology (I put this in capital letters cause that’s how she said it. :P I do NOT accept your apology), and said she didn’t care about my ‘sincerity’ because of how she had watched me the past five years, and I had “some pattern of behavior. I had never looked at Sunny before, and now I was cleaning his stall. How convenient.” Her accusing attitude just really seriously pisses me off. I try, I TRY to be civil… and she does throws accusation after accusation and hostility after hostility at my face.

I make mistakes. I have a hard keeper of an old geezer Thoroughbred with a serious leg injury. I have done him wrong in the past during ONE winter, and have not spent much time with him since starting college. I’m in my second year now. I will take whatever punishment she dishes out at me with the council of our barn for overstepping my boundaries, but answer me this:

How would you feel about this? What would you do in my shoes or hers?

What’s your view on this? Do you have problems like this?