The mid-90s were hell on wheels in terms of intensity.
Ed and I were doing the marital classes and working to build a new relationship between us. Our son was having trouble at school. There were stresses with bills and jobs. Ed’s parents were getting sicker, which required periodic trips home, and we were also doing regular therapy to focus on our specific issues and my healing from abuse. Oh, and yes, we were waging battles again with my dad about his interactions with the kids in the family. Then, my friend called.
That phone call
I was about to step into the shower.
My husband stood in the bathroom doorway. “She’s on the phone.”
Every fiber in my body cringed. She’d been my friend. She helped nurture me when I was suicidal. She helped me over the hurdle of sex. But things had not been right for a long time.
For one, she seemed to change and view me as competition after I had my son. It was as if becoming a mom put me in a different category. To me, it was like I ceased being the person she defended and protected, and my son was now her goal. She seemed to think he needed protecting from me as I was now a “mother.” Had I become all those other mothers out there that her daughter’s friends complained to her about? Or her own mom, with whom she had so many unresolved issues?
All I knew was that she would act like she was the better mother, and I wasn’t doing it well enough. And instead of helping me find my footing and confidence as a new mom, there was a demeaning attitude.
Then, with the ferocity of her reaction because I changed her from being his guardian during her divorce, that pretty much severed things. For the last year we lived in Connecticut, we barely saw each other…until the night before I left, when she sobbed.
Despite all that, she had been down to visit once or twice since we’d moved to North Carolina. From the first visit, I just didn’t feel safe with her. It wasn’t a sexual thing – that was long since over. But emotionally, I felt unsafe. And throughout the visit, she was criticizing everything about North Carolina.
The next time she came to visit, it seemed to cause problems between Ed and me. After she left, he shared how, during one conversation between him and me, after I left the room, she shot him a look best described as a demeaning sneer. He didn’t make a big deal of it, just noted the observation.
But I knew that look, and that side of her. When he told me that she had acted that way toward him, I was angry. I was starting to see that the relationship was unhealthy, co-dependent even. So when she had called a couple more times recently about coming to visit, I begged off. I just couldn’t deal with it. Even without our growing differences, it was just an intense time with all we were dealing with. I expect I didn’t get that across well, or maybe I did and it didn’t matter. Her tart response was, “Don’t put yourself out.”
It was such a struggle. I was a loyal person, and I deeply appreciated what my friend had done for me in life. And I had tried to be there for her, too, over the years. I had done my best to support her through bad times in her marriage, helped out with chores when she was overloaded, and I had been there for her through her illness. And I tried to stay friends for a long time in spite of our growing differences. But things were never right after I’d become a mother, and that whole guardianship issue. More and more, I noticed attitudes from her that I didn’t like or agree with. And at this point, there was just too much going on.
So when my husband stood there in the doorway and said, “She’s on the phone,” all I could do was look at him with total exhaustion and say, “I can’t do this anymore. Please tell her I can’t come to the phone.”
I think I expected that at some point I would call her back. But it just kept getting put off. Things had been too much. The relationship felt wrong. And I had been stretched too thin. There was nothing left. The thread binding us just…let go.
I regret I didn’t have the courage or energy to just say that outright to her. But at that point, I was doing the best I could to hold things together.
Full disclosure
Sometime after that, I decided to share with Ed the full nature of that relationship and the sexual encounter. I didn’t have to. That had long since been left behind, and it was before he and I ever met.
But the more we did our therapy, the more we were learning just how much our pasts caused problems in our current life. And the more we opened up to each other about so many things from our backgrounds.
It suddenly occurred to me that my relationship over the years with my friend also needed to be opened up between us. I didn’t have to. What happened between her, me, and her husband was long since in the past. And had happened before I ever met Ed. But I just felt like the whole nature of how that affected me — my life, my friendships with women in general, something Ed had noticed too — needed to be aired. I wanted all of my life to be a known quantity and was willing to risk total honesty.
To this day, I prefer full disclosures between him and me. If there’s an issue, let’s put it on the table and hash it out. No avoiding things, and definitely NO SECRETS between us. I’d lived a lifetime of secrets in that house. I was not interested in keeping anything from him that could cause a future problem. So I put the story of that relationship on the table. And I made it clear I owned my part in it. I may have been vulnerable and not very “sophisticated,” but I wasn’t a child.
He reacted well and didn’t hold that against me. I think it surprised him, but he didn’t judge me. His comment was simply, “She saw you coming. She was older. You were vulnerable.”
In the many years since then, I have had time to work on the nature of my issues with that relationship and with my friendships with women in general. Later, I will write about what I have finally grown to understand. But for now, I will just speak about the friendship issues as they stood at that moment, and the complexity of the therapy work Ed and I were doing.
Tags: family, life, love, relationships, writing
Soul Mosaic 
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