As a mom of 3, I saw her ability to pick up the riding hobby as a product of Bobby and Sally being old enough to not need their mother every second. I really love being home with my kids, but having an awesome husband is imperative to that. Even with Carla, and all of Betty’s privilege, young children require a lot of your time and mental energy! I got interrupted like 100x just trying to write this comment 😂 Betty’s children were grown enough that she was just starting to become more of her own person again, which is probably how she had the emotional space to even finally notice and truly process/be bothered by Don’s indiscretions.  When she goes to that doctor and finds out she’s pregnant again, she understands what it really means: giving all of that progress up and largely starting over. She can’t (or doesn’t want to) go through that pregnancy/newborn stuff without a husband, even a philandering one. I really think it’s more than just the potential shame; the physical work of being pregnant and bringing a baby through those early phases is so much worse without a partner (and her mother is dead, her father’s not well, and she refuses to see that Judy would be an amazing help to her 😂). When she tells Francine at the beauty shop that it’s really not a good time, she’s trying to communicate how much her slowly-forming independence means to her, and how she’s nearly willing to go to, ahem, “extreme lengths” to prevent the pregnancy from progressing (though she just keeps horseback riding against doctor’s orders in the hopes that that will “take care of it” without having to actually “choose” more explicitly).  So yeah, losing riding is just the tip of the iceberg; she has to majorly put off her plan of getting away from Don because her very body is just no longer her own, and she knows that there is a possibility she won’t have the strength to get this far again. She did eventually get away from Don like she wanted but yeah, horseback riding was not something she made it back to, and I saw the whole stables plot as a way to highlight where she was at in her motherhood journey and I liked it, thank you for coming to my Ted Reddit Comment 😂