Friendship

Maintaining friendships gets harder as friends get older, families get started and the day to day routines seep in to your life.  As cliche as it sounds, when your kid is the “different” kid, you learn really fast who your friends are.  I can’t speak for my husband because things don’t affect him like they do me.  But, for myself, I’ve definitely seen the tides turn.  Like anything else, a lot of it has to do with how I deal with the pressures and the challenges of raising our “spirited” child, not to mention our older “spirited” child (aka The Wyatt Show).  I shut down on people when things are hard for me.  I can let them in a bit, but not the whole way.  I don’t really know why, I just tend to keep everyone a bit at arm’s length.  I don’t have a person anymore to call and lean on; nor am I anyone else’s person when things get tough.

I have several stages of friends.  And to anyone that is reading this, please don’t take offense to any of this.  In no particular order:

• My lifelong friends – the ones I have known since birth, or pretty close.  The ones that I could go without seeing for ages, but it’s always comfortable when we get together.  They are the ones that say they have no idea how difficult things have been until I just verbally vomit on them one day when they make the mistake of asking how’s it going?
• The neighborhood friends – We’ve lived in our ‘hood for 3 years now and these are the girls that I’ve gotten to know a little bit at a time.  There are probably 8 or so that I see on a regular basis and out of that there are ones that I’m closer to than others.  I make jokes about my kids and their behavior to try to mask how embarrassed or down I am.  That’s my coping mechanism.  When we all get together with our families, I try to make excuses to not bring O.  There’s part of me that is ashamed of that and part of me that needs a break.  Yes, I’ve broken down in front of them, but I try to not be the downer of the group.
• The friends that I miss terribly.  My exBFF, who I didn’t have a friend break up with, we just went in different directions,  my work bestie, who moved on to a different company and I only get to see her on occasion, my one friend who is my true friend soulmate who lives an hour and a half away and probably gets me better than anyone, but I hardly ever get to see her.

The worst though, is the friend that showed their true colors when times got tough.  This friend still doesn’t seem to know why we are not as close, her husband even asked mine what happened, but nothing worthwhile was shared.  This is the friend who suggested we move O from his preschool to a program for kids with disabilities.  Full disclosure, he’s in that program now, but he didn’t qualify for the program at the time it came up and when she said it, it hit me like a ton of bricks.  And it’s not the fact that she suggested it, it’s the real reasoning behind it.  Our children were in the same preschool, separated by only a few months in age.  And her son was a target for O’s hitting, which embarrassed me terribly.  But the slap in the face was the day that the Director of the school mentioned to me that someone I considered one of my best friends, someone who knew that we were seeking answers from every where possible, asked “what they were going to do about him” and “at what point would he be kicked out.”  It was then that I realized when she asked (repeatedly) if he was moving up to a new class with her son, that it wasn’t because she was curious, it was that she didn’t want them together.  She would still be nice to me, but every time she asked about him, it felt like she was digging for info, not that she genuinely cared.  When we were at baseball games for our older children, she would no longer make eye contact with my child or speak directly to him.

I don’t share that story for sympathy or for a poor me tale.  It was one of those times that I had to chose to distance myself from a friend because of my child and it tore me up.  And I couldn’t tell her why because I couldn’t get the person who told me in trouble.  I just had to let it go.  I miss that friendship and maybe one day I’ll tell her, but by then, it won’t even matter.  I’ve tried to move forward with this friendship, but there is no longer trust and that’s not really even friendship anymore.