Body memory

I had another strong, memorable experience recently that I've been thinking about lately, and haven't really been able to get my mind around it and what to do about it. Seems to be a theme, doesn't it? I recognize Something Big, but shelve it with the rest of the Big Stuff, not sure where it goes or what to do with it. Hmmm....now there's something I should think about someday...

Anyway, I was visiting my parents just after Thanksgiving. On our way out of town, True and the kids and I stopped at a local mall with some friends to hang out and have lunch. A bathroom stop on the way out found me just feet away from a real fanged ghost from my past: Spring, a woman I had been friends with from age three or so all the way through college, when our relationship ended in a very ugly way I wrote about briefly here. At first I really didn't recognize her, since she was very pregnant, and I wasn't expecting to see her. I was already past them and on my way to find True and my girls when I figured out who she must be.

It has been twelve years since Spring told me, sitting on the couch in our shared apartment, that she had to work hard to keep herself from coming into my bedroom at night and beating the crap out of me while I slept. I watched from the doorway while she talked, watched as the red crept up from her chest to her neck and face, until she was nearly purple with quiet rage. Then I ran. It has been twelve years since I came back to the apartment a few days later, after emptying almost everything I owned out of it and moving into a cramped dorm room for the last month of college, and found that she and her boyfriend had left a used and oozing condom on my stripped futon. It has been twelve years since she and I stopped speaking after more than fifteen years of friendship, and since Spring, as the more exciting of the two of us, took almost all of our mutual friends with her. Twelve years since I said goodbye abruptly to my entire social life, took what I could from the experience, and began building a life for myself without the benefit of all the friends with whom I'd grown up.

Apparently, twelve years, a wonderful husband who saw me through it, two gorgeous daughters, a good career, a lot of personal growth, and the building of far more meaningful friendships -- all of that is not enough to keep my armpits from sweating and my heart from pounding just from the sight of her.

Writing it here, it doesn't seem like much to be so worked up over -- college girls have arguments, sometimes ugly ones, and friendships end all the time. But she was violent -- she punched her fist through a wall once when she was mad at me. She was irrational -- she got mad when I asked her how her day was, because it was somehow smothering. She got mad when I tried to resolve our disagreements by coming to her first, even when she was wrong, because, I heard her tell someone on the phone, I was "walk-all-over-me nice."

And that, I think, is the heart of it, and especially how it relates to this blog, and what I am trying to navigate in my parenting. I secretly hoped to have boys, when I was pregnant, because girls can be so breathtakingly, unrelentingly mean to each other. I look at Doodlebug, whose social world grows more nuanced every day, and find myself thinking, "If that little girl Betty at school tells her 'You're not my friend' one more time, I will kick her teeth in." At the same time, I hear Doodlebug tell Little Shmoo, "You're doing it WRONG! Mommmmmyyy, I don't want to PLAY with her anymore!," and feel outrage on Little Shmoo's behalf.

How do we teach our daughters -- and our sons, too, to a degree -- how to be assertive and kind? How can I keep Doodlebug from ever feeling she has to put up with what I did from my friend Spring, but at the same time, not give her so much sense of self that she mistreats another child? I do realize, for those of you out there worrying about my worrying, that at the tender age of four-and-a-half, neither possibility is yet a danger, but I want to create the right expectations as early as I can. Spring started, fairly early in our friendship, calling me names that she disguised as nicknames, but were not, at heart, affectionate. I always felt somehow lucky to be invited into her world, somehow precariously balanced on the edge of her list of "approved" friends, and so I took her abuse as the price I had to pay to stay there. What made me feel that way? Why did I believe that this was the way friendship should go?

Of course, I know so much better now, and want to teach that to my children by example, but so much of adult friendship is invisible to children. Doodlebug only knows her little world, that Betty made her cry yesterday, but today they did a puzzle together at preschool, and they're "on the same team" again. I can't bear to teach Doodlebug about grudges, nor should I. All I can say when she tells me that Betty says they're not friends is that she doesn't need a friend who talks to her like that.

I didn't talk to Spring when I saw her at that mall a few weeks ago. Perhaps I should have. She wrote me an insincere-sounding letter from some sort of retreat she was on several years after our friendship dissolved...she said she was doing an exercise in asking forgiveness, and she wanted to ask mine. I never responded, because she had done that before, to other old "friends," even letting me listen to her have a phone call in college with someone she had hurt in middle school. It hadn't stopped her from hurting me, and I'm sure she's been as unkind to others since me. Here's my hope for her: that she has a son. I hope she never, ever has a daughter that she can raise to be so cruel and heartless as she was. I know boys can be mean, but I think on the whole it's a different kind of mean, and hopefully she has a partner in childrearing that can have a stronger influence.

I do wish I had more closure, because if body memory is any indication, there are places in me that are still deeply and sharply hurting from the experience. That's what gets put on the shelf for now: what to do about massaging those old bruises. What stays front and center is raising good women from my sweet little girls. Wish me luck.