There comes a tipping point in all relationships where you decide if it’s worth carrying on. In “Four weddings and a little lady”, that schmaltzy family film of the early 90s, it was described as “time to fish or cut bait”. But I’m not talking about marriage. I’m talking about cutting off old friends who disappoint you too many times.
It won’t be one little thing, but a series. My old bridesmaid, Natasha, hadn’t spoken to me in months before I went to her wedding. She flirted with my husband and had failed to ask me to the bridal lunch with her best friend and parents, despite her playing a key role in my own wedding. In one of my wedding photos, she’s pinching my husband’s arse.
I’d had a breakdown after five years of being mainly in sole charge of two autistic children. She’d been fairly patient and available compared with others who’d dropped me at the first whiff of a tantrum. But there had been quiet judgment that exuded from every interaction. That, and I would often find her sitting on my husband’s lap in the middle of parties. She disappeared when she met her betrothed, and our invitation had felt like an afterthought. Time to cut loose, but not before I stormed the wedding with a PMDD meltdown so epic it threatened to end not just my marriage but also hers.
That evening (for I wasnt invited to the day) the weather reflected my mood. Natasha’s best friend, who I’d met but never warmed to, friend, had been asked to be a bridesmaid. She taunted me, with the details of the service and the lunch with Natasha’s mum, who’d once received me warmly at her home. Later, balancing a champagne flute on her disabled arm, she accused me of sitting on her civil servant husband’s lap (in truth, he was sloshed, professing his slurred ardor and had pulled me onto him and gripped me there). With nothing but pizza to sop up the booze, my husband got a bit too friendly with another woman on the dance floor, I turned on him- it wasn’t the first time – and in the process I brought the nuptials to a swift and dramatic end.
I never spoke to Natasha again, but she didn’t contact me either. Neither of us cared enough to find out how the other was, yet my Oyster card I had lost in the fracas continued to be used around her tube stop for several weeks.
This time it’s not handbags at a wedding that has upset me. This time the drama is a little more insidious. It’s the Reprobate mums, so named because they tolerated me, in their chaos and alcoholism, bad habits and challenging children, when all the judgey mums dropped me when my son began displaying ASD characteristics as a toddler. That and my own last diagnosed auDHD must have meant I was am intolerable to many, try as I might to fit in, I find that more often than not, I don’t. That doesn’t mean I am not without judgement. My own type A personality means I give 100% to everything I do, including parenting, and it can be hard to around those who habitually only give ten. Divesting myself of judgement was a hard won process of accepting my own and others’ flaws and I wouldn’t say I’ve entirely conquered my tendency to judge. But ten, surely there is right and wrong behaviour (perhaps this is my autism talking), but I confess I was should when Reprobate Linda first took a line of cocaine to get her through a kids party, when reprobate Kate used to regularly lose it with her clearly behaviourly-challenged daughter, and myriad other behaviours that I found to be rather beyond my own standards. Naturally, these dropped over the years, I learned not to sweat the small stuff as much as I had in the past, and throughout the years, these garrulous and and horizontal women generally provided companionship and bottom-of-the-barrel laughs through the trenches of neurodiverse parenting.
When Lana was born, I consciously tried to find a new bunch of mums who reflected slightly more of my own values and demographics, and these (which I found at a homebirth seminar) were more often to be found accompanying me to yoga than to a dirty club night. And though I tried to introduce the ‘news’ to the ‘reprobates’ they never quite gelled as much as I hoped, which probably says what you’d expect about the demograhics of these disparate group of women. Nonetheless, friends are friends, and the reprobates persisted against all odd. By and large, we supported each other.
But our friendship was not without its ups and downs, and there was a healthy dose of judgement on all sides. Like, when reprobate Kate turned up to my 40th with a black eye (walked into a cupboard), her on again, off again relationship with a local wannabe gangster the subject of perpetual on again off again drama. Linda’s battle against the booze and the fags began to look terminal after 50, and Claire, the quiet one, was more often sat on the fence of any conflict, preferring to stay on the side of rambunctious Linda whilst complaining endlessly to me about the difficulties she faced with her own wayward daughter; she never really listened to my own trials as Jonah and Ava hit their late teenagehood and beyond. It’s safe to say I succeeded better in my parenting. Jonah is on the GB squad and Ava is predicted straight 9s at GCSE. I don’t say this to boast. They both have a healthy dose of my drive, perfectionism, monotropism and ASD. They also have a side order of neurosis, gender confusion and wobbly mental health, so I’m not saying this is the path to a brighter future. But Linda’s son, Ronnie, now has a tattoo snaking like a backbone down his arm. And Kate’s daughter has adopted a moping loser of a coercive paramour of her own and is no longer talking to Kate, so that didn’t go exactly well.
Anyway, at a recent get-together, I asked if Ava, now fond of an occasional drink and one of the few times she deigns to be sociable, could come along. This was flatly refused with a fair amount of textual griping and drama from Kate and Linda. I was being ‘insensitive,’ apparently, and then I was being rude for asking when it was a ‘grown-ups’ thing – never mind that Claire has brought her own adult daughter along on a number of occasions and Kate frankly refuses to do anything these days without insisting that her gangsta accompanies her. But Ava was, for some elusive reason, persona non grata to this afternoon pub trip. Well, I’d already asked her by then and didn’t have the heart (having not seen her all half-term) to tell her she wasn’t wanted. She came anyway, and Linda and Kate acted like school girls, roundly ignoring her, plotting to go to another pub and behaving like the social louts they are by complaining not once but thrice about their roasts (which looked perfect to me) and then absconding to another pub down the road.
Having thus insulted Ava – who’d only really come for half a cider and wasn’t planning to hang around – I decided enough was enough. These people aren’t my cup of tea, probably never have been, and we only tolerated each other because of the kids. Now they weren’t tolerating mine anymore; I’ve had enough of their boorish antics and their casual callousness, their hypocrisy, snide bullying, and always, always stiffing me on the bill. I’m done. The reprobates are no more.
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