Ellen Frank, a 64-year-old Jewish lesbian feminist activist, has been living with MS (multiple sclerosis) for more than twenty years. This plain-spoken, dark, funny, passionate memoir chronicles two pivotal years of her life, 1995–1997, when she takes up therapeutic riding, falls in love with various horses, travels from Vancouver to Tel Aviv to stay with her daughter and await the birth of her grandson, and writes it all down.
Ellen guides her beloved horse Geo in the dressage competition in the Summer Games for People with Disabilities, then leans on the reluctant Jewish Agency to get immigration status in Israel, repacks a 100-lb duffle bag in the Vancouver airport, dances at her daughter's wedding, hears about a terrorist bombing as she waits at a bus stop, gets a place of her own and a job as a secretary (thanks to her fluent English), defends an Arabic-speaking woman on the bus against a discriminatory driver, attends the birth of her grandson, and finally, with mixed feelings and a very new perspective, flies back to Vancouver.
In her parallel interior journey, Ellen works out her up-and-down agreement with chronic illness and middle age, remembers the Evil Eye so familiar to her female ancestors, breathes in the calming heat of the Negev Desert, works on her conversational Hebrew, wonders if she worries too much, and welcomes her newborn grandson to an Israel that is quite different from the one we know today.
Taking the Reins is an unforgettable, no-holds-barred story of living with disability rather than in spite of it. In Ellen's words:
It is not about triumph.
It is not about tragedy.
I never overcome and I never give up.
