Happy Birthday To Grandpa: If our daughter’s maternal grandfather were alive today, he would be 101 years old. Wow. Our children never met either of my parents but their presence is felt by my children in my presence as their parent. Happy Birthday to you Dad.

A Wake Up Call With Horses: My iPhone showed a call made from our daughter’s apartment at 8:34 this morning, which I missed. Oops, I thought. Trouble still in the air, I felt a strong desire to ignore the call. But how could I? As I suspected, the apartment-mate did not want to accompany daughter and staff to Pegasus and watch our daughter ride. O.K. I jumped into jeans and other things and dashed to the apartment to take our gal to meet up with Sneakers, and Pegasus crew. Once at the apartment, instead of being greeted by grumps, my daughter and staff came out of the building smiling ear to ear. Apparently the girls had made up this morning. How? Staff explained that she sat our daughter down, reviewed the importance of friendship, the meaning of Thanksgiving (hey if the Indians and the Pilgrims can do this!) and Voila, the girls refriended. All forgiven but I still had to drive the lass to the horse.

Hairbrush: The day is beautiful and the riders jumped and posted for forty-five minutes. When we returned to the car, our daughter removed her helmet and began to brush her tresses. Stop! That brush again, weighed down by a collection of hair. Yes, I did. I asked if she had her other small brush in her purse, using it to pull that mat of hair out of that brush. I told her that I could throw the hair out the window (I didn’t) because birds use human hair in constructing their nests. “Oh good, they have a hairy nest.” Well, yes. We laughed, but I have to say the staff dropped the ball here. I guess they have other things to do, like meet as a security council and decide whether to intervene on warring nations. Priorities, Mom!

Natalie Wood: Pop culture and news being major attractions for our equestrian, naturally the re-opening of the case of Natalie Wood, a current hot topic, dominated the conversation on the ride back to her CRS. Natalie Wood, known to our daughter mostly as Maria in the film version of West Side Story. (You mean she wasn’t the one singing? Sadly no.) Now let’s see. Was Christopher Walken having an affair with Natalie and did hubby Robert Wagner find out, fight with his wife and then… (drum roll), either push her into the dark seas or not look to find his gorgeous wife? And, my daughter wondered, did they have children? I think so. And why did this come up now? All great questions. Our daughter concluded: “I don’t think they will ever find out what happened. Like with Jon Benet Ramsey, they never did find out who killed her.”

Pop Culture Commentator: Shouldn’t this girl have a gossip column? Or at least be a movie critic or pop culture commentator on cable? Love to get her career launched. The animal specialty has had so many blips, makes one wonder if another direction would be more reliable. When can I get this girl to write her blog, her book? I have invited her to contribute to my blog. She smiles but nothing happens. Oh well.

Setting Positive Patterns For Future Skirmishes: This round of interpersonal difficulties at the CRS with spill over to SPHERE, took up ten tedious days of my life (It’s not about you Mom) and the lives of the girls and their staff. My hope is that now that they have a paradigm for how to resolve conflict, they will get to the resolution sooner, with the likelihood that since their (“girl thing”) cycles are in sync, we can ward this conflagration off by a variety of measures not worthy of discussion at this time.

Fingers Crossed!

©Jill Edelman, M.S.W., L.C.S.W. 2011