Off the Reservation

Things have come to a head and then exploded. I could no longer tolerate the spewage coming from User-Bitch's blog and sent her the following email:

I tried to leave this as a comment but it was too long...

I have been trying VERY VERY VERY hard not to go on the defensive here and spend all my time arguing about your interesting perspective on things. I understand that your background forces you to see things a certain way and long ago gave up thinking you would see the world around you in the same way that I or anyone else I know does. That's who you are and that's fine.

But I am going to say this one time and let you do with it what you will. I was ALWAYS your friend. For the past decade-plus I have ALWAYS had your back. I have fought for you, I have sacrificed for you, I have supported you unconditionally no matter where your life took you. I gave you EVERYTHING I have emotionally, logistically, financially. I thought I was being a good friend, a good sister. I have tried with everything in me to give you a family that you could be part of.

You have thrown this back at me. For all practical purposes, you have spit in my face, insulted everything that I am, everything that I do, everything that I tried to share with you. You never tried to hide your utter contempt for me and my life and I tried for years and years to find excuses for you. I was your friend, your sister, your rock, right up until your post "Friends and Priorities" when you stated point blank that you were done with our relationship. I was willing to move past you calling my son a manipulative bastard because I know you were angry and that you hate him (regardless of how you protest, your behavior speaks to the contrary).

You have done nothing but vent hateful feelings and inaccurate assumptions since I tried to tell you that I need you to work on finding another place. Up until the doctor told me point blank that I am in a co-dependent relationship with you that is adversely affecting [Kid-1's] mental well-being and that I should get you out sooner than immediately, I was perfectly content to have you and [her daughter] stay until you were ready to go. I thought things could be handled by simply keeping you and [Kid-1] apart. But when I tried to tell you that, you went immediately on the defensive, wouldn't listen to what I was saying, and shifted all blame for all things onto [Kid-1]. You quickly shifted that to include me and anyone else that wasn't you.

You can accuse me of all the BULLSHIT that you want to: being two-faced, never being your friend, "replacing" you, betraying you, doing this deliberately to stress you out. And you can choose to never trust me again and choose to not invest any more in our friendship. That is your choice and ultimately your problem. But I held onto our friendship until you declared that I wasn't worth being friends with. I REFUSE to continue to give you my entire heart and soul now that you have made your contempt so blatantly clear.

You said that I am going to wake up and realize you are gone and I will be alone... I think you need to take a long hard look at that, [User-Bitch's pen name]. Look at my life then look at your life and tell me again who is going to wake up and realize she's destroyed her relationship with the only person who would take her in and love her unconditionally despite all of the shit in each of our lives. You wished you could be the kind of person who uses others? You got your wish. It just took me this long to realize that I was enabling your destructive behavior instead of helping you.

I am willing to be friends with you. And I am willing to give you what help I can but no longer will I bend over backwards to accommodate you when you hold nothing but contempt for me and mine. As for what I am doing to my god-daughter whom I "supposedly love", I love [her daughter] like one of my own. I always have. I nearly had my own children taken away from me to keep from letting her and you down. Knowing that you will take her away, poison her against me, and I will never see her again breaks my heart. But you did get one thing right - I chose [Kid-1] over you when YOU forced me to make a choice. Were you my own biological flesh and blood, I would ALWAYS choose my children over you or anyone else in existence.

YOU did this. Go ahead and blame me. Blame everyone but yourself - you always do. Blame whoever you need to blame in order to get yourself through the night. Tell yourself you did more than enough here. Tell yourself we expected too much. Tell yourself how you work yourself to the bone and have a golden work ethic. Go ahead if that's what you need to make it through another day. But don't think for one moment I will be the only one losing out because you have shattered our friendship.

Knew upon sending it that our friendship was irreparable. But I had known long before this email that our friendship was over. The horrible things she has been saying in her blog... We could never completely recover from something like that. Had I sat back and taken it and gone crawling to her begging her forgiveness and telling her how right she was and how awful I am... then we might have kept our friendship going, albeit not the same way. But I was not about to do that because it isn't true. The vomit she is writing on her blog is completely distorted and in some cases factually inaccurate. It had reached a point where I had to stand up for myself and my family.

It came as no surprise that the next morning (Sunday - Father's Day) she packed up a few things and left for good. What did come as a surprise is that she didn't give the kids a chance to say goodbye to Libby. I broke it to them as gently as I could and I did not cast blame anywhere although I did make sure they knew that I didn't, nor would I ever, "kick them out" as she told someone over the phone. She always plays the victim...

After she left, when I had a chance to check my email, this was her reply:

You are so far off the reservation that it would be funny if it weren't so disastrous. You have completely lost your mind and I'm not even going to bother trying to debate anything with you. I NEVER want to see or speak to you again. Libby and I are leaving today as soon as I can make arrangements. I will collect my stuff and move it into storage hopefully next weekend if I can find enough people to help me move it.

I would love to link to her blog here so that anyone who wants to can read it. But a direct link from here would allow her to trackback to this blog, which she does not have the URL at this point. I would hate for her to try to use the things I post here as ammunition against me and she is just angry enough to do exactly that. So I will simply cut and paste the parts that I need to refer to. If someone wants the URL to read her blog, leave me a comment.

A few things that I find notable... she has decided that I have become mentally unstable and that is why all of this has happened. In her writing.com blog she says,

Please note, as of today, I am moving into a homeless shelter. My former best friend has become mentally unstable (or at least that's the only thing I can assume because anything else is simply too awful) and I'm being forced to leave. I have no financial resources at this time to do anything else but hope to have an apartment in August.

She is putting her two year old daughter through the hell of living in a homeless shelter for two months because she is so angry with me. This is yet another example of how she always always ALWAYS puts her own needs and feelings ahead of other people, even her own daughter. She will sometimes think about others' opinions and needs but ultimately she doesn't care and what she wants is what she does. And yet I'm the one who is mentally unstable.

Another interesting thing to note is that she has moved into a homeless shelter. She isn't staying with friends till she can get an apartment. I have to wonder if that is because no one would take her in if she refused to ask anyone. If I had to guess, I would say she let everyone know about her situation, playing up the "poor victim me" side of it, and no one offered her a place to stay, even knowing where they have now ended up. It's possible that someone offered and she said no, after all I caused her to lose faith in humanity and never make another friend. Still, for her daughter's sake, I would have thought she would suck up her pride and accept a roof over their heads. Then again, everything she does "for her daughter's sake" is actually for her own sake so why should this be different?