I hold onto my friends forever. If you make me your friend, you've made a wise choice. I am a good, fierce friend. I treat them well and bend over backwards to do anything for my friends that are within my control. However, finding even one friend to do that in return for me is seeming to be a challenge.
I have stories upon stories of friends disappointing me:
After Rowen was born, I cried out for help because Joe was repairing our water line. I came home from the hospital less than 12 hours of giving birth. I needed help inside the house caring for my other children while I had no running water. However, nobody come to help. Nobody. I begged. I cried out for help. Nobody came.
I went across the country to visit a friend, putting my family on hold for a week and putting up with a cost we really couldn't afford. This was last year that I went. I took Rowen with me when he was 6 months old. Then this year, she's 4 hours from me and I told her I would do anything to make sure we could connect. Drive the 4 hours to see her, even if it was for one hour, I would do it. I guess I'm not a good enough friend to make that happen on her end. It was a huge disappointment because I thought this was the one friend where we would always do anything for each other. It's frustrating because she is single. Lives a single life so if she even came up to visit me for a weekend I would take it and she was just 4 hours away and didn't want to see me. It hurt.
For my birthday this year, all I wanted was friends to come over, have a potluck and just play games. I had about 17 people that chose to come over. Only 3 people ended up coming. 3 people! The rest of the people texted me or sent me Facebook messages saying that something came up or they were too tired, etc, so they couldn't come. I was really hurt that people chose to come over on my birthday to honor me and chose to back out.
So as you can see, I have lots of disappointments. The question is is when do you finally let "friends" go that no longer are worthy to be in your life? How do you let people go? I'm still "friends" with people from elementary school, my first job, my second job, my third and last job, high school, mothering groups. It's exhausting being "friends" with everybody that wants to just be acquaintances.
What's more difficult is dealing with family that say your family and furthermore, friends, but their actions contradict that statement. Hell, if they weren't family, they would've been long gone with the way they treat me.
I find people that are habitually late or change their plans last minute to be very disrespectful for me. I do not like it and will not have those people in my lives. Saying that you will be at the park to meet me at 10 and then showing up at 10:20 is not respectful or courteous. When did texting people "I'm not going to be there" and flaking become normal? How, as a society, do we combat this?
I understand emergencies come up. Life happens. I get that. I'm the first person to forgive somebody for saying that they will meet me at the mall at 10am. I show up at 10am and then at 10:15 they text and say an emergency came up. I forgive that, but not being able to get their crap together and bagging it is not forgivable.
Does anybody else deal with these problems? What do you do? How do you give somebody the boot out of your life? How do you deal with the boot that they should receive but don't just because they're family?
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