The World According To Anne Arky

A few years ago, six months before my father died, my friend’s mother died. From the time I found out about her death, I was constantly on the phone with my friend (who lived and still lives several states away), trying to keep up her spirits and help her get used to life without her mother. She had lived with her mother, whereas my folks lived a couple of states away from me and I didn’t see them but a few times a year. Meanwhile, I went to my friend’s mother’s funeral (which was a few months later for the convenience of one of her family members), using the last of my tax refund to get there. A little over a month after her mother’s funeral, my father died. My friend sent me a card.
I continued for the next three years constantly on the phone with this friend, trying to make sure she didn’t feel alone and lonely (she moved to a new area where she didn’t know many people, and had not kept up with many friends back home for some years). I tried to help her deal with moving forward and situations involving other family members, among many other things. Some of our conversations were spent covering the same ground over and over and over for hours on end, and led me to so much frustration that I almost got a new ulcer for it, but I persisted. Because of my venting to another friend about feeling like I was talking to a brick wall, I was led to the book, “When Helping You Is Hurting Me”, and while I never actually got hold of the book, the very title of it got my attention enough so that I stopped letting her lead me down the same alleyways of conversation that caused me to gnash my teeth to little nublets.
If you have read any of my previous entries, you already know that my mother died two days before this past Christmas. I can only assume I have clearly conveyed what a devastating loss this has been to me, without dwelling on it too heavily except at the time of her death. Well, in case I failed to do so, trust me – I have lived through sexual abuse, a childhood that played itself out like the movie “Carrie” (minus the telekinesis), the marriage from hell followed by the divorce that seems ever on-going, and medical issues abounding, and I have never, ever had anything harder to deal with than the loss of my mother. My friend sent me another card. I miss my mother so much, sometimes I can hardly stand it. I’m past the point where the first thought in my head when I wake up is “Mom’s dead. Mom’s dead. Mom’s dead.” But the worst times are the weekends, when my phone seldom rings. It may ring off the hook during the week (sometimes yes, sometimes no), but just about the only time it rings on the weekend is when my friend Fran calls on a Sunday morning, and my friend David might call. I used to spend a lot of my weekends on the phone with Mother, and that is when it hits me the worst. (That’s also the time when I am least busy and have the most time to think about things I can usually run from when I’m busy.) By an hour after I’m out of bed on Saturday, I start getting depressed because I know I can’t call Mother, and by Sunday night, I’m so depressed, I haven’t been out of the house or out of my pajamas all weekend. Getting out of bed on Monday morning has always been hard, but it’s getting harder and harder after weekends spent like that. Mind you, once in a great while, this friend might call me, and she sent me a birthday card with a generous check as a gift, but besides the occasional pass-it-on email, we don’t seem to talk too much, and if we do, it’s usually at my initiation. (Lest anyone think my friend’s not calling or absence of action might be financially motivated, let me assure you that her mother left her in very sound financial condition – a hell of a lot better than my financial condition is, believe me – so that is not a driving force here.)
I don’t do things for my friends and keep score with the expectation of everything I do being met with an equal action in return, but when you reexamine something and things are so blatantly lopsided, sometimes it’s hard not to notice. I really wish this whole thought had not occurred to me, but it did last weekend, and now I’m really bummed that this friendship is obviously so one-sided. That doesn’t mean I intend to discontinue the friendship – it takes a lot more than this for that to happen – but it does mean that I won’t be putting nearly as much effort into it as I have in the past. I’m not really mad, just disappointed – and really, really hurt.