Ranch Rat Stories

Hi my name is Brittney. I have been at *THE RANCH* every since I can remember. I am 17 now and am living on my own. I have enough credits to graduate this year, but I want to do my senior year. I work as a legal secretary at a law firm and do adjustments on horses in my spare time. I have a wonderful boyfriend that I have been seeing for two years now. I finally met my father just last week. My life has come together well. I will start college in 2009. If it were not for Grams and Pa ,we all call them that, at least every kid I have known, I don't know where I would be now. Not all my life has been horses. My mom, who I love very much, had a bad drug problem for 13 years. Well she has been clean now for 5 years, I AM SO PROUD OF HER, but during that time when she was using, I don't know what I would have done if not for the ranch, a place I could go and be loved and safe. I might have ended up like some of my friends, doing drugs, have 2 or 3 kids by different fathers, dropped out of school, or in jail. But I did have the ranch and all that went with it. I can tell you how it was there. Kids helping kids, kids helping horses, kids helping old people. It was all about helping anyone and everyone. It didn't matter what color your skin was or if you had been in trouble. The only rules were you didn't hurt anyone or anything. Fighting would get you thrown off for a while, so we all worked hard together. I know I will be a person to be proud of, and I will raise my kids the way the ranch helped raise me. Don't get me wrong, my mom, even when she was doing drugs, wasn't a bad person she was just not the kind of person I needed to teach me right from wrong, and all the family fighting was really bad. I have learned to deal with a lot of things at the ranch like new life coming into the world and death, which is always going to happen at sometime to everyone and everything. I learned that death is not always a bad thing unless it is uncalled for. Grams also taught us about God. She practices Native American Spirituality. She believes all things have a spirit and that all things should be respected for what they are. We are no better than the animals and plants we just have a bigger brain, 90% of which we don't use. She says if we respect other's they will respect us, be they human or animal. I don't know what to say except if it wasn't for this ranch hundreds of kids would not be doing good like they are now and I have been around long enough to know this. By the way, you will be hearing from some of my 7 brothers and sisters, and alot of my friends. But let me end with telling everyone the two most important things in life. Grams says if nothing else live by only 2 rules, one from the bible and one from Shackspeare. *Do onto other's as you would have them do unto you* and my favorite *To thyn own self be true*. That was a hard one to learn. Much Respect to all of you out there in cyber world. Hope you like it. I wanted to cry!