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Photo submitted by Tesa Klein
@junkinwildflower
My personal experience of growing into & wearing the hat (title) of cowgirl has always been standing by my cowboy through thick & thin. I wanted to marry a cowboy, which I thought was a hat & boots. I laugh that God gave me the real deal! A 3rd generation horse trader, auctioneer & rodeo cowboy. What I didn't learn from my entrepreneur & dairy farmer parents, I have learned from my husband, Kelly, or we've learned together. We spent 20 years contracting rough stock & producing rodeos at the amateur, PBR & PRCA levels. I wore that hat of rodeo secretary, cook, pickup man's wife, contractor, trucker, bull flanker, promoter & opened my home to many cowboys over the years. We qualified a couple of bulls to the PBR World Finals & a couple to the NFR. The bright lights came at a cost. We missed many family events & sacrificed building a family of our own. It seemed as if the years just got away from us. When the world shut down in 2020 everything changed. We found out there was life beyond rodeo, taking a life-changing pack trip to the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana. I will forever be grateful for that trip as it opened my eyes to what was possible & what was important. The next few years, I had to pull my hat down & literally cowgirl up when my husband experienced a bad horse wreck in 2021. I became the caregiver, wage earner & ranch foreman in the blink of an eye. I set all of my own personal & business goals aside. It was a tough year that closed with my FIL being diagnosed with terminal cancer. To wrap up this long ramble (that still fills my eyes with tears), we had some really tough years. We left a toxic rodeo partnership, completely exited the rodeo world & found our true selves again! I've always felt that I could do anything, & I am laying the groundwork to keep raising that bar. I have put my business & personal goals back in the front seat! We're currently in the early stages of selling our ranch & the 10 yr old home I designed to build a small cabin on a dead-end road overlooking the valley where I grew up. Being a cowgirl is being tough as nails, but being able to bend & shift through life's ups & downs. Stand by your man, work like a man, act like a lady, laugh loudly & love hard pretty much sums up this wildflower.