You’re not my friend anymore
Can you break up with a friend? You know, just finally say this isn’t going to work out afterall, we need to go our separate ways. Isn’t there a Friends episode with some such plot? Or a Seinfeld? If so, I need to find those reruns.
If you discover that you are not going to be compatible in a long term way with someone you date, you simply end the relationship. It may not be pretty. It may not be fun. But everyone knows that’s what’s to be done. But when it is a guy friend, or girl friend that you’ve been hanging with, or doing play group with, or in some book club, quilt circle, Saturday morning pick up basket ball game, or the monthly neighborhood cocktail association?
I just broke up with a friend. A friend we were in church with. 2 friends, actually. And their husbands and their children. So my husband and my children had to break up with all of them too. And it has been horrible. Just rotten. Because one of these women and her family will not let us go!
There were problems, naturally. I didn’t just arbitrarily get up one morning and say hey, I want to hurt someone’s feelings, and crush their children. This woman and her husband were very unhappy people. Something that took time to realize. And every time our children spent time with theirs, we had hours, if not days, of behavior problems that were not addressed in this family. Things including but not limited to 1. hugely disrespectful attitude toward parents, 2. anger, bitterness and hatefulness between siblings, 3. treating our 5 year old poorly, and 4. being quite sassy towards me when I had them. Things that, trust me, I waited and waited in hope that they would clear up, were just some sort of phase. Lord knows our children don’t walk in perfection. Over 9 months or so, no improvement.
The woman was what the article previously post describes as an energy vampire. I. just. could. not. keep up with her emotional demands. And constant negativity. I began to dread the phone ringing. S**t. I can’t take this right now. The Colonel would come home at the end of the day and I’d be stressed to the gills. She called 4 times again today, and the other one called 3. And she was hating her house. And she was hating her husband. And screaming at the children, and asking me what to do, and never listening to what I had to say, and then “do we want to get together”, and NO, I just don’t, but what can I say?. So we got caller ID. At least I could decide when or when not I would muster up the energy necessary. And then the invitations to get together and do stuff got to making us miserable. What do we say this time? Don’t you have a lot of work (wink wink) you have to do, hon? Crap. I think one of the children has a cold. And a fever. Yeah, definitely a fever. I have a migraine. We’re going to Atlanta (then we’d have to hide out in our house all weekend with the lights dimmed). And of course, to keep up pretenses and keep trying to see if we could maintain the relationship, we’d accept, or even initiate sometimes (which really bit, because we really really really didn’t want to). And then, after leaving town on a trip for 3 weeks, and realizing we were dreading our return, we knew what we had to do. But we were chicken.
We hemmed and hawed and mulled it over, and got together several more times with both families. And I just stopped calling them. And often didn’t answer the phone. They would call hey, just wondering if you’d fallen off the edge of the earth, it’s been 14.2 days since you called me (whine). And I knew all the time they didn’t understand. I hadn’t told them anything. To them, I’d just dropped out. So we tried one more time to muster up restoring the relationships. Had one family over one evening. And he and she went at each other all night. In front of the children, theirs and ours. And then she snapped at one of ours, in quite an ugly manner. And they started bad mouthing each other to each of us, seperately, after we tried to not so subtly diffuse the situation. They finally left, after I claimed a headache, which really wasn’t false. And this capped it off for us. That night was indicative of the struggles we’d been having. Every dealing with these people was like sucking the life out of our very veins. After long hours teaching the children at home, running a home, earning a living, raising the children, and all that involves, we just couldn’t afford any more negative out flow of energy. Call us selfish. I call it survival.
So we sent letters. Yeah. Maybe should have done it in person. But how do you just tell another family they aren’t compatible with yours? And when they beg tell us why (which they did later), do you actually go about pointing out all the points of struggle? We didn’t want to be judgemental, or hurtful. We just wanted to get out. Out. Out. Out! Is this crazy?
And now? If I were ever doubtful of this decision, one of these women just won’t let it go. I’m fairly certain now that she. is. just. not. stable. This occurred over 6 months ago, and until about 2 months ago, she called every day, 3 or 4 times a day. And had her children call ours. Left messages. And showed up at Valentine’s, and sent the children to the door to give ours things they’d made. And she has continued to send emails. Sharing news. Inquiring about whether or not we’ve reconsidered and could meet to talk. Sending letters from her children to ours, asking why they don’t play with them anymore. We have never responded. Not once. And I didn’t even let her children in the house when they brought Valentine’s (sounds heartless I know, but I thought it’d be harder on them and ours if they all saw each other, and couldn’t play…what’s heartless is their mother continuing to subject her children to hope that we’d all reconcile). Is this some sort of stalking, or what?
Have you ever had to break up with a friend? What happened? This is just bizarre to me! Wouldn’t you think that once you had to, they’d just accept it and move on?
