I spuddle.

So I was recently Friend Dumped.   (I know!   WHAT THE H-E-DOUBLE-HOCKEY-STICKS?)  It was a subtle dumping and I did not see it coming.   I think I am working through the seven stages of grief about it, if the seven stages include obsessing about it, being mystified, and then worried and then — after finding out the Person in question wasn’t actually ill/dead/missing, as I’d feared — quite cross, a crossness that translates into lying in bed at night making mental lists of all the times this Person hurt my feelings or did something odd and frankly quite mean.    Making these lists satisfied me for about three days, they were pretty long lists and that is because (and this is one of the things that I actually liked about this Person), this Person always ALWAYS put herself first in a way that I never could quite bring myself to do.   I am very very bad at things like DEMANDING TIME FOR MYSELF and TREATING MYSELF and this Person had no compunction whatsoever about putting herself first.  Seriously.   You have no idea.   It was like a force of nature.   I could (and should) take a lesson. This Person was also fiercely determined that her kids have such a myriad of life experiences that every day they did something different and somehow I got pulled into this current and honestly, I think this Person made me a better mother, so it’s hard to be really really cross with her, in the long term.   Maybe the right word isn’t “cross”, maybe it’s “miffed”.   Also, “miffed” doesn’t get used often enough.

So.

You are busy and so am I, so I’ll just give you this bit of backstory, which is that I met this Person and she sort of leapt into my life with both feet and every day for over two years, we saw each other or spoke, and our kids were the same age and got along famously and it was really nice to have this Person in my life, and there was something about this Person, she just genuinely seemed to care so much about other people, and hell, I just liked her, even though she did do these sporadically hurtful things that I would stew about for a time and then forget, until I began mentally listing them a few nights ago so I could say to myself,  ”Actually my feelings are not hurt about being friend dumped by this Person because she was just a meany poopy head.”    But I don’t really think that.   I want to, because that would make it easier, but I don’t.  Mostly I think, “WHAT DID I DO?”

I feel bad, my peeps.   I do.   I hate feeling this way.   I feel sad.   And I feel used.   I feel, in short, like a chump.    A chump for worrying about this Person.    A chump for letting this Person hurt me.   A chump for ever thinking this Person was a real friend.

Now I am trying to just let it go and as you can tell, I am doing a crap job.   The part I should have mentioned earlier in this post is that this Person had to temporarily move away.   She left in August.  I began sending e-mails to see how it was going, the Big Move, and whatnot and I thought of her often and hoped she was OK and so I sent more e-mail and somewhere around October, I began to feel like a stalker so I wrote again and said, “I feel like a stalker!  But am worried!”  And heard not a peep and then I sent a few more saying, “Did I do something?  Is it me?”  and all the while my mental age was rewinding and eventually I was 12 again and feeling left out and sad and determined that no one liked me because of my crooked teeth and hairy arms.  (My teeth were straightened with braces.) (And my arms really are not that hairy.) (FYI).

The point of this story is that this Person wasn’t pinned under a piece of heavy furniture or lost at sea as I was beginning to fear, she just wasn’t writing.   Period.    Or calling.    Or, I surmise, caring.    And I am pretending it doesn’t bother me, even though it does.    More than it should.

I realize I should wind this up with a clever summary statement about how I’ve matured but really all that writing this has done is throw me back into stage THREE of Being Friend Dumped, and that stage is the General Annoyance one where I think, “I can’t believe I even took the time to post that rubbish.   Stuff it.”   Because in my head, I always think in a vaguely British accent with odd terms that I never use when I’m speaking out loud.

In other, unrelated news, I got my hair cut.   I have had long hair FOREVER and thought I should mix it up by having slightly shorter long hair but my hairdresser went the other way and gave me longish short hair instead of shortish long hair, which is fine, it will grow, and I’m really impressing myself with my maturity about not freaking out about my hair but rather TAKING IT IN STRIDE and avoiding the mirror and assuming when I look again, my hair will be shortish long hair instead of the reverse.   If you aren’t insane, this paragraph will have made no sense, but that can’t be helped.   The dumb thing is that my hair looked like absolute crap until I got it cut, it was WAY too long and I was in danger of looking like the mother of that Duggar family who obviously does not have time to ever attend to her hair because when you have 18 children or 46 children or whatever the tally is now, you just don’t have that kind of vanity.

So I’m being all mature and stuff and I am determined that I am going to both Recover Quickly from the Friend Dumping AND Like My New Hair.   I am.   And thankfully we had the electrician in this morning (for $96) to change the lightbulbs in the bathroom (I KNOW), so I’ll be able to see it (my hair, that is, not anything about the Friend Dumping) clearly when I go in there to obsess about it the very minute I conclude this post, which is right now.

Filed under: Me, Myself and I