Girl Friends Suck!

It's hard for me to have close friends. I don't trust easily. I can remember one of my first friends lying to my sister about me and my sister believing her. "Tina" said that I took money from her to get ice cream from the ice cream man. This was not true. That was from as early as, third or fourth grade. 

When my sister, brother and myself came to visit my grandparents, and then ended up living with them. There was a girl my age that her Mom made her invite me to her birthday party. It was fun, the girls seemed nice. Well until school started then they didn't know me. That was fifth grade. I got really close to another girl in sixth grade but that didn't last long. In seventh grade she had to move with her family due to her dad's job. We tried to keep in touch but this was before email, facebook and Skype. 

There was a long list of girls that when I think about them at the time we were bff's. "M", we will call her, just thought that she was better than everyone else. "S", was jealous of me and that caused problems. I don't mean to sound stuck up about that either. She really didn't like me at the end of our friendship due to a boy. "J", well I don't really know what happened with her. What sealed the deal with that one was her sending a picture of me to a boy. She wrote on the back my name and phone number and "call for a good time". I got a phone call from that boy the morning of my grandma's wake. Oh not asking me out! Just to tell me what he got in the mail and who had sent it to him. After that I don't think that I really had any close girl friends. 

"T", and I had been friends off and on for many years. In JR high she tried to have someone beat me up. In HS we were friends, then not, then friends again. Anyone that knew her knew that meant you were a thing to push around. She was never nice. If I was at her house she would be on the phone. If we went anywhere it would be her showing off how much she could buy. Once out of HS we lost touch, then I found her. We were friends for a while again, but it was during a very rough patch in my marriage that I stopped being friends with her. I told her it was to focus on my marriage, which was true. I didn't need anyone to be telling me that I should leave my husband. She was pissed about that. Years later we became friends again. Now for the life of me I can not remember how that happened. Maybe I am blocking it out? lol. It was in 2008 that my grandfather died, I had a miscarriage and then got pregnant again. She had been married for a few years by then and wanted very badly to get pregnant. She finally did and once she did, we again stopped being friends. 

Whitney had started school and I would tell her. OK go make Mommy some friends! I had her in Girl Scouts and that is where I met, "J". Married for a while, three kids, grew up in the town that we lived in and we were the youngest of the Mom's. Everyone else was in their mid-thirties or early forties. Now this seemed like a great fit. We started being friends when Whitney was in first grade. J was one of the reasons why I went back to school. That I learned how to make a budget with the money we had. She was one of the reasons why Whitney is at the school she is at now. I was able to still have a job, due to J watching Avery for me. Once I lost that job, was when the friendship started to end. She said to me that even if I did get another job right away she wouldn't watch Avery because she didn't have the room for her. You see she did in home daycare. In a home of three bedrooms and she already had kids that took naps in those rooms. I understood, it still sucked ass that she would do that to me though. Less than a month later, I lost my home to a fire. She was ok during that time. She watched Avery for me a couple of times just for an hour or two so Chris and I could talk to the insurance company. I would call her from the hotel that we stayed in for a month after the fire. She never called me back. Once we moved into a place that she could visit, (at my other place, I had three cats and she was allergic) we stopped being friends. Just in this last year our daughters reconnected through email. I messaged J just to make sure she was ok with it. Whitney missed being friends with her kids and I wasn't going to stop that friendship just because J was a bitch. She messaged me back that she was never mad and that she didn't tell her kids anything. Well what the hell, why would she be mad? She was the one that never called me back. Ok so what ever, she is so not worth my time. 

So here I am. Whitney is starting sixth grade and I have no friends at a school that we have been at since it opened. I have no one to talk to from work because no one wanted to have anything to do with me. I was having flashbacks from the fire. Within the first two weeks of living here, Whitney got her period. Chris had started a new job, not even a year before, and Avery was well one. My side of the family was my sister, her family, my Mom, that was it. Well that I had to talk to. Chris's side, well that's a very long story for another day, but no, no one to talk to there. I was lost, depressed, and wondering what I did wrong. Why did I have all these toxic people in my life? As lonely as I was I was not going to let anyone else in that would do what all of them did to me. No way was I going to have another close friend. I built this wall, Chris was for the most part on my side, but no one else. I had friends from HS that I would see every once in awhile. It wasn't like in HS though. I didn't call to talk to them on the phone everyday. It was just skimming the surface. There were sometimes five or six of us, we needed to catch up and we only had so much time away from the kids!! 

I started going to church in 2011. That was amazing. I had never been to a church like this one. I fell in love right away and wanted to do everything I could to help out. I wanted to help make coffee, I used to work at a place that did that. I could totally do that. Or I could usher. Show people where to sit, pass buckets. Oh yeah I could totally do that also. Growth Groups, what are those? I can join two, ok where do I sign? Membership class, hold the phone I could become a member? Oh lets see what else could I do?? WAIT A SECOND!!! I don't know these people. There are girls that go here that are my age. What if they want to be friends with me? Oh hell no I was not going to go down that road again. So I didn't do any of that. For months, it was go to church, listen to Pastor Dave, go home, and go on with life. It wasn't until August that the Growth Groups started up again. I really had started to hear what Pastor Dave was saying. I really wanted to bring God into my life on a everyday level. My way of honoring God would be to save money and be smart with it. So I signed up for two growth groups. A couponing group and Dave R. FPU. They even said that it wasn't a counseling group that everyone was there to learn. So let everyone talk. I took that to mean, I don't have to talk to any of these people to learn what I came to learn. SCORE!! No worries about making friends, because I didn't have to, or want to. Well the first group I had no worries about having to make friends. The girls that were in charge, well sucked at running the group. So I only ended up going to a few of those meetings. The second group, I kinda made a connection with the lady running it. She was very nice, but busy! She is married, has a full time job and she is a foster parent! OK no worries about her wanting to be my BFF. There were other girls, one not married yet, one that was married for many years with older kids. Another well she didn't show up after the first couple of meetings then the last one was newly married and pregnant. It was like I was checking them off in my head, nope, nope, nope and nope. OK this group is a keeper!! We got to the end and a couple of them wanted to be friends on Facebook. Cool I am totally ok with that. That's not really friendship, that's stalking with permission. 

Now we get back to the newly married and pregnant girl. She latched on to me like no ones business and would not take a hint. No I did not want to be friends. Wait, your husband is how much younger than you? After the baby is born I get to hold him? Awe, a squishy baby! DAMN IT, that wall is going to stay. in. place!! You have cats? You want me to come over? I get to hold your baby while you play with Avery? You are cutting coupons too? How is the cash only budget working for you? Oh we should totally go to the store together. There is a play date just down the street from me? Oh I can go to that. Crap, crap, crap!! OK so I guess having someone close to the same age, with a little one, doing the cash budget thing and has coupons, I can be friends with. BUT that's it. I do not need any other people. Crap the first one knows another that is royalty! WHAT? That's a girl I could learn a lot from! 

How in the hell did this happen? I talk to the second girl on Facebook a few times and now we talk multiple times a day. Hang out, drink coffee and like each other. I did not want this to happen, yet here it is. Yes the wall is still up but man it is not as tall as it once was. I still worry about if, and when something happens, will we stop being friends?