LC (the person - I hesitate now to call her a "friend" - who never wants to hear from me again) and I go way back, as do our mothers.
Here's the short version. Our mothers met at a job and became friends. About 20 years later, when LC was married and a mother, and I was a teenager, LC's mother decided to live in Greece. It was during the time that there was a Fascist government there. My mother (always politically conscious) considered it morally outrageous that LC's mother spoke about Greece never acknowledging the political situation there. My mother called LC's mother "ridiculous" (I don't know the specifics, but know that that word was used). LC's mother stopped speaking to my mother.
About 40 years later, after LC's having had friendships (they were quite separate) with me and my mother, which consisted of our seeing each other once a year in Maine (where LC lived) and talking a blue streak because we had so much in common (again, my seeing LC took place at a different time from my mother's seeing her), LC and I had a falling out over my talking to her on the phone endlessly (she has a degree in counseling so she is exactly the sort of person with whom one wants to talk endlessly about one's problems) about my crush on the Mentor, my general randiness, his abuse of me, and my feeling trapped. After the fifth (or the tenth) go around about this, she told me I would feel better if I went and did volunteer work. To me at the time, that sounded rather puritanical, sort of like telling someone to take a cold shower. So I said "F.U." to her, something I think I have said fewer than five times in my life, probably. I just was at my wits end. She wrote to me and said she couldn't "deal with me" any more, or some such thing. I suppose that was understandable. I had crossed some kind of line.
A few years later, she stopped speaking to my mother, for a totally different reason. She had adopted a dog with whom she claimed to be madly in love (sending endless postcards with photos), but when the dog peed on the floor once too often, she gave it back to the shelter, probably to certain euthanasia. My mother was horrified and told her that she needed to "do penance". She probably meant it as a joke, and in fact she isn't even a dog person, but nonetheless would have found it morally objectionable to value clean floors over a life, even a dog's. LC could have at least waited until she could find a home for the dog - someplace where people were less squeamish.
My mother never heard from her again, but I did. Shortly after my mother died she apparently had seen this on Google and sent me a handwritten condolence letter. Since she didn't have email, we were only in touch rarely by phone, but once she got email we began writing to each other daily. We were both housebound more or less (she for health reasons and I because my employment is from a laptop in my apartment).
Ever the counselor, she is, yes, the sort of person to whom one is prompted to pour out one's heart, and often what's there is not pretty. Or it's not grateful or it's not optimistic or it's selfish or it's petty.
But that she would shut me up (my mother in fact once told me that "hanging up" - or doing what LC did by enjoining me not to communicate with her - is, basically saying "F.U." to someone) is beyond comprehension. So I am kicking and screaming and yelling with rage, hurt, and confusion.
If she had even written to me and said "I simply can't continue our correspondence because the fact that you [_______________] is so objectionable to me that I have to say goodbye" I would have understood it. I still can't believe that my asking her advice about something personal when a tragedy had happened a half a continent away was so egregious that she never wants to hear from me again. Taking a timeout, yes, I could see that. Or saying "Let's back off some of these intense topics for a while". (Of course the irony is that she once said that she didn't like casual friendships where people "kept it light". I say "irony" because "keeping it light" is one of the best ways to avoid quarrels.) But to throw me away like a Kleenex? That's what it feels like.
Do I "miss" her? Sort of but not really. I desperately need friends, but to me that means people who are here who are available to do things, celebrate my birthday and I theirs, be available to help with something occasionally and vice versa. LC was simply a kind of epistolary therapist, although she asked me for my advice as often as I asked her for hers. It's more that I am hurt and angry that our friendship, whatever it was, meant so little to her. We were just in the middle of a nice "conversation" about a novel by Barbara Pym.
Everyone can be annoying, if you get to know them. People have opinions you disagree with, preoccupations you think are trivial, bad moods. Is it really worth throwing the baby out with the bath water? Was my perceived petty self-absorption on the wrong day so beyond the pale that it was worth shutting the door on our talks about books and politics, or our shared memories going back 65 years?
I think what bothers me the most is the hypocrisy of it all. This is someone who sees herself as saintly (despite being a militant atheist). She thinks you should never be angry at anyone unless they did or said something to be deliberately unkind. She also said her nickname is "LC let's talk about it" because she is willing to try to talk through any conflict. So what happened to that person? Or did she never exist to begin with?
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