Growing up on the ranch and then going to school with a bunch of town kids, I never felt like I fit in. It was like I was living two different lives. One was the tough ranch girl that rounded up cattle and changed tires on the side of the road, and the other was a girl who was on the tennis team and went to coffee shops to do homework.
I never really told anybody at school about what I would do every weekend or how every day I would go home to do chores like bottle feeding a calf or fixing a fence. There was always a disconnect from the other kids at school because they didn’t know what it was like to have a job taking care of a ranch 24/7. They didn’t know what I meant when I would talk about pulling a windmill well, or how I had to skip tennis practice to go round up some cattle that got on the highway.
So instead of trying to explain to other people about my life, I would just never talk about it and I would try to act like I was a city kid. I think I pulled it off pretty well because most people would be surprised if they found out that I was working on the ranch one weekend. They would be confused at how the girl who wore glasses and had converse tennis shoes was riding horses and rounding up cattle to medicate over the holiday break.
So you could say that I spent a lot of my life letting people believe that I was a normal girl and that I did normal things, like waking up at noon and watching cartoons in the morning. But it was a facade that I put on because I didn’t want to have to explain ranch things to people who lived in town. I didn’t want to have conversations where it was like I was speaking a different language to the town kids. They just never understood the amount of work it took to keep a ranch going. They never understood why I had to wake up at 4 in the morning and work until the sun went down. And they couldn’t understand because they had never experienced what I lived every day of my life.
I don’t fault them for not understanding, I just wish that I could’ve spent more time with friends instead of hauling cattle to different ranches. I wish I could’ve spent less time giving calves shots and more traveling across Texas playing tennis instead.
But I was given the life I had, and I know that the experiences I got from working hard my whole life has made an impact on me. So now when I need to wake up early to work on music, I can because I did that same thing on the ranch. When I need to pay my musicians for a gig, I can because I have my own heard of cattle and I can sell a cow to get some money. My life hasn’t been easy, it’s been a wild ride of ups and downs, but I am thankful that it has taught me how to work hard and to keep going even when it gets tough.
Do you feel like you’re living a double life sometimes? Do you have any questions about ranching? Tell me about it in the comments!