Isle of Remote

I’ve just heard from two friends I have not been in contact with for a while. One for over a year and the other I have been in touch with now and again, but I haven’t seen her in 15 years and she practically lives in my backyard.

One is recently married. Like two months ago.

The other just filed for divorce after 21 years of marriage.

They don’t know each other but they emailed me at almost the same exact time. Freaky, huh? So it feels weird to write one with congratulations, hit send then write the other with condolences. And I don’t know what to say to the divorcing one. A lot of her friends have been telling her they never liked her husband because he was just mean and cranky all the time, so now she wants to know if I felt the same way. Frankly, I always kind of liked him, but I never looked too deep. I mean they were married and you just get along, y’know?

He did treat her kind of bad though. Not yelling or name calling or anything like that. He just didn’t respect her. But I figured if she was tight with it who was I to butt in? Of course, she just filed and so it is all fresh to her and she is looking for confirmation that she is doing the right thing. I am nothing if not a sympathetic ear.

But it seems just as I get my own life sort of on track, everyone else’s is changing. I’m not sure I can keep up!

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.

Because I am SUCH a lemming, here’s the latest cliff I’ve jumped from:

43 Things

Check it out! It’s fun.

About my best friend situation - my other friend says that the dynamics of the relationship has changed and I just need to move on rather than wonder what it was that I did to break up the friendship. I guess I’m just startled because I didn’t see it coming.

I haven’t talked to my best friend since September because it dawned on my earlier in the year that I was the one doing all the calling. When we did talk it was all about things they bought or ate or places they visited or medical complaints. Nothing about feelings or anything personal like we used to talk about. No laughs or anything…. I just have to accept this and move on. Maybe one day she’ll realize that she misses having a friend (her husband gets upset when she does stuff without him) and maybe there will still be some of our old friendship left. But until then, I will move forward and be a better friend to the people who want to be in my life.

So, I get this call Friday and it’s the friend formerly known as best. She and her dullard husband are in town for the weekend and she wants us to get together. I have plans but we agree to meet for breakfast, but I have a class in the afternoon. We can get together on Sunday, I’m relatively free.

We go to breakfast and I’m charming. The eat rather quickly and spend the last 30 minutes watching me eat. I drop them off at the hotel and we make plans to get together either that evening or the next day.

I leave a message for them that night because my plans were looking to change and I wanted to make sure we still spent time together.

I get a call this morning that because they have decided to leave Monday morning rather than Monday afternoon, she doesn’t think we can get together at all today.

Should I mention they had no plans for how they were going to spend the day? Um weird.

Another thing is she called me out of the blue a couple of weeks ago (because she was bored at work) and made a joking reference to how she didn’t hear from me at work. It was on the tip of my tongue reply that I never heard from her when my grandmother died - the single most traumatic event I’ve endured to date - and she knows my whole family. It was grace alone that allowed me to apologize without being catty, but it still stung like the dickens.

My one friend says I can’t go investing more in the friendship than she wants to give. But I’ve already invested 24 years! It’s hard to just let it go. But she’s made her choice and it’s to put all her energy into her husband.

By the by, am I the only one who thinks it weird that he had NOTHING to say all through breakfast? My friend is all, “Mr Boring* has a collection of knives, don’t you Mr Boring?” “Mr Boring didn’t like the fish at that restaurant.” “Mr Boring thought that presentation was informative.” It was kinda creepy.

So I have to let go of this friendship. I think I’m ready to do that now. But I can’t help from wondering where it went wrong. It couldn’t have been solely because she married and he has no friends, could it? Seriously here, I’m not being facetious - he has no friends. And now, neither does she. She told me about a year ago that all the friends that were at her wedding 3 years ago are strangers to her now. Is that bizarre?

Let it go, Abbie. I can’t fix this. I just have to let it morph into what it will be. Sigh. Gotta go and search for a new best friend now!

(*the names have been changed to protect the boring)

I’ve been thinking a lot about friendship these past few days. It seems weird that random people in your life can come to be so close and so important. And then through crisis, you learn how deep that friendship goes. During this past month, I’ve seen many sides of friendships as I adjust to life without my grandmother.

I had a good, long talk with a new friend last night. We are both transplanted New Yorkers and we seemed to hit it off very well. She’s my mother’s age, but my friends all tend to be several years older and younger than myself, so I’m not surprised about how we connected. What I really appreciated is that she was able to verbalize my relationship with my grandmother. Other people have been great, but this sort of empathy isn’t everyone’s everyday, run-of-the-mill milieu.

Just after the funeral, one of my very distant cousins (I didn’t know who she was, I’m not very familiar with that branch of the family) and told me the coming months were going to very hard for me. That I would just cry for no reason and to just let it happen. I really appreciated her advice and it’s been true. Instances where I expect to break down – cleaning out my grandmother’s room, picking out the clothes she would wear – those are the times where I held together pretty well. Seeing her jewelry box sent me off in a torrent of tears. Grief is strange.

Anyway, I spent the evening talking with Ginger and she was so kind. I had mentioned that the last time I saw her over Thanksgiving my grandmother ended each night by telling me how much she loved me and how proud she was of me. I was a little puzzled by this and assumed she thought I was leaving to return home. She did it each of the four nights I saw her. It dawned on me that she was saying goodbye. But it still didn’t really register because she was doing so much better; I thought we’d be together again at Christmas. I was also really impressed with the things that she remembered: my new car, for one. And I said how strange that was and Ginger said that I was my grandmother’s whole world. Not like I was the special one, but that from the point of view of a grandmother, your grandchildren are the very best of everything. They have no faults. And I guess I always thought of how much she meant to me, and never how much I meant to her.

Sigh. I was supposed to be talking about friends here. Right. So this past month has been amazing in terms of my friends reaching out to me. I’ve gotten cards, phone calls, letters, emails – it’s made me feel really cared for. Even here, where you guys have never seen me before, and wouldn’t know if I crashed though your roof, the support has been so great (*waves* to Meadow). So you would think my very best friend in the whole world, whom I’ve known since 1982, would call me. Send me a card. Call my mom, maybe. I get a rather tersely worded email: Sorry to hear that your grandmother passed away. Call me if you want to get together while you’re in town. What the????

Who skipped the friendship train? Was it me? Should I have called her first and told her? Is that why she pulled away? Or is it something else? Perhaps I am expecting too much?

My friend married a man I was not particularly happy about. He had some serious issues and an overabundance of heavy baggage. Not that it was insurmountable, but something that really should have been dealt with before they said ‘I do.’ Basically I kept my mouth shut after she informed me that she knew what she was doing and this was what she wanted. What can you say after that? I knew how their relationship would run. He would uproot her from the familiar, from her support system, and leave her wholly reliant on himself. He is a very insecure man.

They have changed churches several times and she has a hard time fitting in. She said one time that she just doesn’t have time for her personal friendships anymore (not just me, her other close friends have dropped off the radar) and whenever I talk to her now it‘s just a series of what they’re going to buy, what they’re going to do, where they’re going to vacation – pretty much either look how much money we’ve spent or I’m married now and you’re not. And all they do for entertainment is eat. Never about what she’s feeling or good stuff. And I can’t be the sole caretaker of the friendship anymore. Especially when I am currently at the point where I need to take more than give.

So now I know I have to sit back and wait for her to come to me. My going to her obviously didn’t work, so I have to be patient. But I can’t say as that didn’t hurt me right to the core that she didn’t call me.

So I got the chance to talk to my friend today. She sounds okay. We didn’t really talk about anything personal like in the old days, but it wasn’t too bad. I am thinking that she’s depressed, though. She did mention that she’s not able to even reduce her schedule by one day. I know that was one of the things she was looking forward to when they got married.

I mean she already had a house and it was just her income making the mortgage payment so with his added income she figured she would be able to work part-time if she had to work at all. But unfortunately, he’s a bit of a spender and she is a bit compulsive about things. I feel sad that her dreams of marriage aren’t what she thought they would be. And I hate not knowing if she’s happy or not.

On another note, I had a real nice “conversation” with D via email today. I like him a lot - he can spell and punctuate. Sigh. I used to hang around a lot of high drama, high energy, gregarious men, but I’m finding now that I have a soft spot for the gentle spirits. I mean, I’m high drama and energy enough for three people! Do I want to add more to the mix?

I know I’ve said it a thousand times before, but this time I really sense change in my life. I don’t know if that means relationship or not, but I really feel God pulling me toward something. I can’t wait to find out what!

I am such a wuss. I didn’t tell the folks that be I didn’t want to be involved in group anymore. I don’t know why I do that. Well, actually I do - I don’t like to say no apparently. I want to be able to do everything all the time because I’m afraid I might miss out on something. My own wishy-washiness repulses me.

On the other hand I think I may see a couple. I like to matchmake….but only for my own enjoyment. If someone asks me I may say something, but mostly it’s just my own little people chess game. Anyway, they were sitting next to each other and I was struck by the similarities between the two. Also that their differences pair well.

I’ve not heard from my friend J. She’s been very elusive the last couple of months. Odd when you consider that the last time I spoke to her - February, I think - she mentioned that she doesn’t really have friends anymore. I can’t believe she’s been married over two years already. Her husband is a little, what I call, socially retarded. He doesn’t really play well in social situations and I predicted that the first thing he would do was isolate her from her friends.

Well, now they’re going to a totally new church. She doesn’t socialize without him hardly ever. He tries to make her feel bad if she does. All they do is go out an eat. She doesn’t take much care with her appearance anymore. When she talks to me it’s almost in a putting-down kind of way - like now that she’s married she doesn’t have the desire to do any of the things we once thought were fun (”oh I don’t think I want to do that, WE don’t do those types of things…”) She’s stop sending me emails and every time she plans a trip to visit, the next thing you know he’s planned a vacation to…wherever.

I know those are the signs of a controlling, unhealthy relationship, but K pointed out that it’s also a sign of depression. Is this all in my head? Because I expected trouble in this relationship, am I reading things into it? I dunno.

I excused it at the wedding because I thought I was projecting my own needs and wants on her - that she was happy with him and that was all that mattered. She didn’t need the romance or the kind words or the respect. My list is not her list, you know?

But now I see in clarity that she was so excited about the things he did right, because she wanted him to love her, that she never really looked at the things he did wrong. To a certain extent, that is good - no one wants to be with someone who is constantly criticizing. But in this case, it was so weird how he didn’t seem to think he was part of a couple. He wouldn’t sit next to her unless prompted (usually by her), he didn’t want to hold her hand hardly ever. No open mouth kisses, let alone tongue action, because he thought it was “gross” (yeah, I know BIG sign, that one) and he didn’t think that “normal” people actually did that. He didn’t really stick around a church long enough to put down roots. And more very weird stuff.

So, I can understand her distance from me, because I think she senses how much I dislike him, but I don’t understand how you could not maintain any friendships at all.

So, I’m worried. Do I keep trying to call her even though she returns my calls when she knows I am not going to pick up? It’s so weird not being in your best friend’s life.