Best Friends Forever - Irene S. Levine [79]
“I don’t wish her ill,” says Amber. “But I was enabling her to be the person she was, someone who was hurtful to me and my family.” Amber says she put up with Pia for so long because they had so much history, and she felt sorry for someone who had alienated virtually everyone else in her life. “I felt responsible for her,” she says. “At the end of the day, when someone meets love and caring with bitterness and selfishness, a decision has to be made. It freed me up to have the courage to draw new boundaries with other relationships and end those that were becoming unhealthy,” she adds.
Amber still wonders how Pia is doing. “I was about to call her last Christmas when I received a card,” says Amber. “It was her handwriting—no return address. I opened the card and it read like an itemized list of the bad things going on in her life.” That brought back memories of all those phone calls that never started with “Hello” but with something along the lines of “I hate my life. You’ll never believe what happened to me.” The card reminded Amber that she had made the right decision.
Sometimes the task of ending a friendship is so difficult that it takes more than one try. We romanticize the relationship, remember the good times, and tend to give our friends multiple chances. But personality endures, and rarely changes in the ways we would like it to. Annie, now 48 years old, told me such a story.
Annie met Liz while the two were traveling as singles in Europe. They bonded instantly. Liz wanted to visit the United States, so they kept in close touch after their trip. When Liz arrived in San Francisco about a year later, she was able to get a work permit and Annie found her some work through a friend.
“She lived in my place for months, but once she found a boyfriend, she moved out without giving me any notice,” says Annie. Annie was peeved at her ungracious visitor because getting a replacement roommate wouldn’t be easy or quick. “I stopped speaking to her until her mom visited and begged me to forgive her, explaining how insecure her daughter was and that she sometimes did stupid things,” she says. Annie forgave her and they grew closer.
But the apartment abandonment was far from Liz’s last infraction. “Over the years she did some awful things to me,” says Annie. But she always succumbed to Liz’s pleas for forgiveness out of compassion. She knew Liz was self-centered, unhappy, and had low self-esteem. Then Annie found out that Liz lied to her boyfriend, stopped using birth control, and got pregnant. “She was dying for a baby,” says Annie. “I despised her attitude about making the decision despite her guy not being ready for fatherhood. Again, it was all about her.”
Then Annie’s mom died suddenly in an accident. Liz said the right things that day, but her own mom arrived for a visit while Annie was sitting shiva. “She disappeared into self-absorption when her mom arrived. I’d just lost my mom and she didn’t call or pay a shiva call,” says Annie, who felt that she would have liked Liz and her mom to be there for her at that time. “She never liked to share her people with me because she was too greedy.”
A week later, Liz went into early labor. Her mom called Annie, who immediately called Liz. “She began to speak, but visitors arrived to see her and I could hear her delighting in the attention they gave her about possibly losing her son (he survived),” says Annie. Liz got off the phone as quickly as she could, telling Annie to call again at a more convenient time.
“She didn’t call when I lost my mother, but now was acting like a princess who expected to be courted,” says Annie. “We never spoke again, and I have no regrets.” It’s been several years since then. Annie was recently rushing to an appointment and heard her name being called. It was Liz. The two women exchanged pleasantries but Annie rushed off.
“We could have reconnected, but I chose not to. I always