Best Friends Forever - Irene S. Levine [26]
BREAKING A CONFIDENCE
When they both turned 30, Linda and Susan were following parallel paths. The guys that they each were dating, and later married, happened to be close friends. Soon after marriage, each woman gave birth. Two years later, both women gave birth again. Each couple had a boy and a girl, with the same-sex children being roughly the same age. To further cement their already close friendship, the young families moved within a couple of blocks of one another and the women spent most days together with their children in tow at the playground or in each other’s homes.
Linda and her husband divorced about five years later and she and her children went through a rough patch. The children felt like their lives had been turned upside down. By that time, Susan’s first husband had died of leukemia and she had remarried. Her children, like Linda’s, were having difficulty dealing with their changed lives.
“My daughter was especially rebellious, blowing off her school-work,” says Linda. “She was deeply depressed as a result of having to deal with the dissolution of our family as she knew it.” As a single mother, Linda was never sure whether her teenager’s erratic moods were a result of the divorce or something more.
When Susan offered to help—to talk to Linda’s daughter—Linda breathed a sigh of relief. Susan recounted her success as a youth minister, in addition to her long relationship with Linda’s kids, and assured her that her intervention could help Linda reconnect with her daughter in a positive way. Nothing could have prepared Linda for what was to come.
“Her way of helping: she told my daughter that my son was conceived out of wedlock, something we had hidden from them and intended to tell them one day in our own time,” says Linda. “She also told her that her Dad and I never loved each other (not true) but that we married because we ‘had to’ (again, not true). It threw my daughter into an emotional tailspin and made her despise me even more. It added to her depression instead of helping it.”
After her daughter recounted the details of the “counseling session,” those transgressions were the only things Linda remembered about her former friendship with Susan. She considered her friend’s actions a betrayal of the worst kind and never spoke to her again. “She harmed my daughter emotionally by divulging what I had told her in confidence, telling her something she had no business telling her. When it happened seven years ago, it made for a very rough patch in my relationship with my daughter,” says Linda. “Fortunately, my daughter and I weathered it and are extremely close now.”
“I never could decide if she was being spiteful or just stupid,” she says. “I tend to believe she was being spiteful, although she explained it away as plain stupidity. She hurt my daughter, and I erased her from my life. It wasn’t that hard.”
Susan may have been harboring unexpressed anger at Linda that led her to “act out” by saying these terrible things to her daughter. Had she been able to express her feelings to Linda more directly, this fallout might never have happened. Whatever Susan’s motives might have been in sharing what she did with Linda’s daughter, it created a fatal breach in Linda and Susan’s friendship. Linda couldn’t find any way to condone or explain the way Susan had hurt her child. As far as she was concerned, any semblance of trust between the two friends was gone and could never be rectified. In this friendship, as in many, there may have been a host of unexpressed grievances.
Other betrayals are relatively minor when looked at it retrospect, but while they are happening, or soon after, they make a woman feel like her friend has turned a blind eye to her feelings. I remember how hurt I felt when my best friend Lenore had chosen the same June wedding day as mine. With the limited availability of caterers and the brief window between graduation and summer, she said she had no choice. But I had wanted her to be my maid of honor! Didn’t she know that? How could she betray