I’ve mentioned before that I’m having issues with the person formerly known as my best friend. I’m still not sure where our friendship is headed, but I realized I’ve now grown accustomed to her absence in my life. It doesn’t hurt anymore, but it does still manage to befuddle me.
About a month or so ago I get this email that her email account has been letting her send but not receive messages. Says that apparently she has not received any messages in a couple of months before she noticed the problem.
I happen to know these are not the busiest folks on the planet. Asleep by nine, up by five. Work, work, home, eat, pets, tv and early to bed again. So it’s not like she’s been so busy that she hasn’t had time to check her email. And she did notice that she was able to send, but not receive messages.
They have DSL like I do. Her lovely husband has not had a problem with his email. And all his IT knowledge (a field in which he earns his pay) was unable to fix this glitch. Is it wrong that I think he did something to sabotage her email account? And two months is an awfully long time for her to realize she hadn’t heard from her family once, isn’t it?
I called her a few weeks back out of the blue. (I believe when you get the urge to call someone you really should - there’s something that person needs to hear from you.) So I call and we had a brief, impersonal conversation in which she told me she has to be better at being a good friend. Of course that’s the last I’ve heard from her.
Cut to conversation with my mother. Seems my father complained to her that I haven’t been returning his phone calls. How does he manage to piss me off without even talking to me? This is a grown damn man! You got a problem? Talk to the person you got the problem with! And then don’t freakin’ lie! I have returned all phone calls except one which I forgot about, but did ring back a week or so later, but didn’t leave a message. It was his cell phone so I know he knew I called.
So I’m thinking - is this one more way for my relationship with my father to shape my relationships with others? My best friend marries and doesn’t call me anymore and so I’ve pretty much cut her out of my life like a trans fat. Because I don’t want to keep pushing myself on people who don’t want to be pushed upon. Have I done this before? Yes, several times.
I told my mother last year that I’m tired of putting myself on the line for my father to disappoint me. Yes, I accept the man that he is, that he’s never going to be able to live up to my (low) expectations, but I can’t do all the work. It’s time for him to be the grown up. And because he removed himself from my life without caring how much it hurt me, he’s going to have to work a little to get back in. I’m not cutting him out - I wasn’t raised like that - but I’m just not inspired to work that hard at something that’s always left me grieving. Once you’ve burnt your hand on the stove, you’re smart enough to avoid doing it again.
So I’m re-evaluating how I need to proceed in the course of my relationships. Do I deliberately hold things back because I don’t want to get hurt? Yes. I mean, if your own father, whom you adored as a little girl, can drop you off his radar in a split second, how is anyone else supposed to love the real you?
Do I carry self-hatred around with me? No. With everything that is in me, I know that my absence from these two people’s lives is a loss to them. But it’s also a loss to me - relationships are an investment of time and emotion and it does something to you when someone shows you that investment was not worth as much to them as it was to you. That rejection is something you carry inside you like a festering tumor - you don’t know it’s there until something doesn’t feel quite right.
How will I move beyond this? I have to let myself be vulnerable. People are always going to hurt me, disappoint me, leave me. That doesn’t mean it was anything I did - IF I’m being true to myself.
We were never meant to find that sense of completion through another person - people are fallible. They make errors in judgment. They are broken. They have many, many flaws, some of which can strike you right out of the blue and leave you so breathless and wounded. But I have to hold in my heart and my head that there is someone who already loves me so perfectly and completely and passionately that His perfect love can even allow me to accept the imperfectness of those in my life who have hurt me. I’m having a hard time grasping on to that lately. I’m so overloaded with so many feelings that sometimes I feel as though I’m just waiting for everything to spill forth and pollute the earth - I am a living, breathing Pandora’s box ready to spew the ills of my life on to an unsuspecting world.
My mantra this week: Perfect love casts out fear. Perfect love casts out fear. Perfect love casts out fear. I’m so afraid that if I let myself crack, there will be too many pieces scattered about and nothing to put back into a semblance of me.
I guess that is why I’ve been so angry lately. A simmering pot of anger on a slow boil. All that emotion has to come out somehow, and isn’t it amazing how anger is …. more acceptable than breaking down. I’m not a good manager of my anger. I am, however, extremely good at stifling it….to a point. And then I’m out of control. I can stifle a good 5-10 years - so if this were an Olympic sport, I would so be bringing home the gold.
I guess it is a step forward that I’m realizing this. Maybe now I take another step forward, and then another. Maybe it’s time I learn how to take refuge in the arms of the one who created me. Somewhere along the line, I lost the assurance that He could heal what was broken inside me. I mean heal 100%. I recognize that I’ve come this far, but somewhere inside my head I’m saying, “this is best He can do with what He’s got.”
Hmm. Seems there was a lot brewing inside these past few weeks. Honestly, I didn’t know all this was going to come out until I saw what I was typing. It’s given me a lot to think on this night.