Settling

I wish I felt better. There is still a cough every once in a while and I keep having to talk myself into doing anything. That is not normal for me! I feel so lazy.

This downtime has been interesting. I have been reading more than usual, maybe as an escape, and doing a lot of thinking. I have been struggling with a couple of issues and really have settled several things in my body. One issue had to do with the death of a friend who has been invading my dreams recently. After laying out the entire story to Michael, I no longer feel the guilt I have been carrying since her death.

I realized why I was chosen as her best friend for a few years. In the playgroup where we met, there were some very beautiful and very wealthy women whom she rejected as good friends. I was chosen, along with one other mom who was also at the funeral, because Lindsey was more beautiful and far wealthier. It has only been recently that I realized that description fit all of her friends. She liked being the queen. The Mary Tyler Moore to my Rhoda. Michael commented that she was an outrageous flirt. She liked the attention of men. Any man. She began hanging out at upscale bars with her new best friend. She liked telling stories about how men complimented her and wanted to be with her. She was still married at the time.

When she told me a story of male "friend" who died in a car accident after suffering huge health issues, I lost a lot of respect for her. It was the beginning of my leaving our friendship. During his funeral, she and her new best friend used her key to go into his apartment to remove all of her clothes (!) and personal items. I had never heard of him. I was really shocked. Again, she was still married to the lawyer she went to for her first divorce. They later divorced, she remarried her first husband who then left her after her diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis.

A couple of years ago, she had wanted to reconnect but I knew the relationship was not healthy for me and didn't want to be sucked back into her vortex. It was only after I was away from her that I realized that it had developed into a friendship that was very one sided and I was no longer "needed." I had been replaced. Actually, I had escaped. At her funeral, all the other friends who surrounded her twenty-five years ago were all still in her life, each jockeying into position in competition with each other to be deemed her best friend. No one had grown or changed. It was so odd. I was happy that I was ignored.

Having settled all this in my body, I now am so grateful for our relationship when our children were just babies, she taught me so much and she shared her lovely life with me. I no longer feel the guilt of not allowing her back into my life these past couple of years.