My So Called Summer – Part 1 – Riding the HOV Down Memory Lane

September is coming to a close. It’s been months since I have had meaningful contact with someone who used to be near and dear to me. I refer to the person I thought of as my BFF.

Adult friendships are hard

Making and keeping friends as an adult is hard business. So imagine my reluctance to move away from the friends I had cultivated and grown in my 30s. Since moving to Texas I had been feeling the pressure of being alone. I was a newbie in Dallas, a newbie at the job. A grown woman in a classroom full of adult-children at college.

So it was important to me to cultivate the existing friendships I had, even from far away. Knowing that even quality friendships have bumps along the way.

I appreciate the friends I have had over the years, but I believe this trip I have made to Virginia to visit with my friend S will be my last. I drove out there with my kids. Long hours on the road to reconnect with the friends and places I left behind.

However, when I arrived my BFF was in a bad mood. She and her daughter in the middle of some neighborhood Jerry Springer-level drama. I was shell-shocked to discover how much my friend had changed in the year I had been away. It was like I didn’t even know her.

See, the thing is, S had gone through some changes of her own a year ago after she suffered a surprise stroke at the ripe young age of 45. It was scary for everyone and I was as supportive as I could be at the time since going through some changes of my own: THE BIG D.

Solidarity in hard times

I remember getting the call in NJ notifying me that she was in the hospital. I remember not knowing what to do or how to act. But I was determined to be there for her, even from 5 1/2 hours away no matter what.

When she was well enough to have company, I went to visit her. I made that trip as a show of solidarity. I made no attempts to force the focus on me and my problems. It was a low-key visit. Since it was in February, we weren’t able to hit the beaches or spend time outside. But we did do a lot of vegging out in front of the TV, just talking, being with each other.

So making plans for this summer trip, I wanted more of the same. More together time, more hanging out. I figured now that she was no longer working it would give us more more days at the beach! More time to lay on the sofa doing nothing but talking.

More just me and my BFF. Well, I guess I romanticized it in my head because it was so much worse than I expected.

Now, months after the fact, I can only speculate to what may have caused the difference.

The events that transpired with her health and her job in the years after I moved away changed my friend’s financial stability. However, on arrival, it appeared their lifestyle had not changed much and they were struggling to make ends meet.

Adult friendships under strain

This struggle was at the root of the neighborhood drama that unfolded upon my arrival.

Though I felt bad for her and I suspected that this situation caused her embarrassment, it feels like it has sparked resentment on her part on the length of my visit, or perhaps on the spirit of my visit. Jealousy shows itself in many forms. Even she admitted that she felt that the stroke had changed her emotionally. It wouldn’t be surprised if there was now a green-eyed monster living where understanding used to live.

Why shouldn’t I sleep in or relax? My visit had no specific agenda or itinerary. That was never our thing, I mean, it could have been my thing totally, but she never lived by the scheduled minute before her stroke.

In retrospect, I realize that this is something that also changed about her personality possibly as a result of the stroke. I did not realize that the friendship rules we had before I moved away were null and void.

Passive-Aggressive is not a form of communication

If the stroke had altered her personality, it could explain the haterade she was pouring on me because I wasn’t waking up at the butt crack of dawn to go to the beach that was only 20 minutes away. We never did that when I lived there, why would I do it now? I am no mind reader, and I was not given a reason why we needed to get going SO early in the morning. Nor was I asked to get up early.

When we had lulls at her house, I could have suggested a whole score of things to do, most of which required money, like going to the movies or out to eat or sight-seeing. Although I don’t need to sight-see a town where I had lived for almost a decade.

Though I had budgeted for my trip, I budgeted to cover the expenses of me and my two children. Not the expenses for her, me, her daughter, and my sons. I’m not rolling in the dough like that. So mostly we did nothing, and planned nothing. She spent most of it in passive aggressive mode, venting her frustrations in equally unproductive ways.

Not that I was freeloading during my stay. I helped around the house. Bought groceries and cooked. I was happy just hanging out with people I cared about. But maybe that wasn’t enough anymore?

Too much drama

It didn’t take me long to remember the reasons why I was so eager to move on to other pastures in the first place. Those exact reasons (and a few more now) are why I don’t think it is wise for me to ever return.

I prefer to live a drama free life and all that I got when I went back to Virginia was drama in spades. There was drama at church. There was drama among the circle of friends that were estranged because of the church drama. There was her family drama, there was her medical drama, her daughter had drama, even her truck had drama (AC had gone out). Even the general seven cities of Hampton Roads had new drama in that they had finally installed all the controversial tolls on the highways.

What the hell did I get the three of us into?

We can never go back

I thought this trip was going to give us the chance to make wonderful summer memories and it would be like old times, but better because wasn’t absence supposed to make the heart grow fonder? I raise the bullshit flag, and salute it. It was not nostalgic. It sucked big time.

I had to cut my visit short. We left early and went to stay with another friend. But even there she had marital drama! I didn’t sign us up for this.

Last ditch salvage effort

Eventually, as we drove away to visit my mother in Connecticut for the last stretch of our vacation, every second I wished I was already back in Texas.

What kind of summer is it when the only good thing to come out of it was learning from our mistakes and vowing never to do that again? I wanted to give my kids something good to remember, something to talk about. Now all they have is the bad taste of going somewhere and having it suck balls. Fantastic!

In the two months since my visit I have exchanged one text with her, which she initiated. I forgave her bad behavior before I left because it was true that much of it was out of her actual control. Unanticipated emotional changes brought on by her medical issues. However, I have not wanted to reach out to her like I had before the trip.

I’d like to think that maybe we can still be friends, but I don’t believe this version of my old friend can be BFFs with this version me.