Stress-Inducing Neighbor Mom has been a thorn in my side for a little over a year now, ever since we had the most terrible phone conversation of my life. It's hard because our daughters are best friends, but I have never been surer that I cannot be friends with another adult. There's a piece of her story I've never mentioned here, and it is that in...hm...2014 or 2015 she was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer. At the end of her treatment they told her the odds were 50-50 that it would come back. My understanding (though of course I did not press her for details, since even in the "friendly acquaintance" stage of our relationship we were only ever friendly acquaintances) was that a recurrence would almost certainly be a terminal diagnosis. Her daughters are both in grade school.
So. Even though I rolled my eyes when I learned that her daughter had never been permitted to walk from the library's front door to the children's section without an adult by her side, it makes sense to me that S-INM is very protective. In similar circumstances I might strive to buffer my children from all possible harms as well. It makes sense to me that she is very sensitive to the idea of kids in her orbit not getting enough mothering. It makes sense to me that she's thinking back on the legacy she will leave (she resigned from an academic post to stay home), and that she wants to encourage me to choose wisely and number my days aright.
(Though honestly, at the time of The Awful Conversation the thing that seemed most likely to me was that her cancer had metastasized to her brain and overridden all her filters.)
Another thing she does is talk about her life in capital letters. It's pretty common for Stella to pop over and ring the doorbell to see if the girls can play, only to hear that they are having Special Family Time (i.e., watching a movie together). Or that one of the girls and S-INM are having Special Mom And Daughter Time (i.e., going to the grocery store). I can appreciate that under the circumstances she wants to populate their memories with all the upper-case Special Moments she can. It also makes me wonder if what she calls A Party is something that might or might not deserve the label at somebody else's house. Was she planning to make box-mix cupcakes with her girls tomorrow afternoon to kick off Christmas break? And they said, "Oh, can we invite a couple of neighbor girls?" And she said, "Oh, yeah, and it's Stella's birthday on Saturday so we'll stick a candle in her cupcake and call it A Party!"?
I could see that happening. That would not be outrageous at all. But I still don't know what she has in mind. I saw her at school pick-up yesterday and we said hello, but she said nothing about Stella's birthday. I had no idea how to bring it up. It's possible that the younger daughter told Stella, "We're going to throw you a party!" in a moment of wishful thinking. How weird would it be for me to bring that up to the mom? Very weird. And I, my friends, am determined not to be the weird one in this relationship. I am also determined to keep our verbal exchanges to a minimum, because she makes me very unhappy. I will say a cordial hello when we cross paths, because I am a grownup. I will text her if her garage catches fire, because ditto. That's about as far as I'm willing to go.
Trying to figure out the Christian response in this situation has been really painful. I have this little fiery coal of resentment in my gut about the things she said to me last December. I keep coming before the Lord and asking him to hose it down. I keep handing it over in my mind's eye. I am willing to forgive her, I keep telling him, but you have to help me make it stick. In your comments here, I ask you to help me refrain from stoking those flames. I ask you, too, to be kind if you think I'm getting it wrong. This is a really tender spot for me, and I feel chronically uncertain about how to proceed.
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