Thursday, December 2, 2010

We Split the Sheets

Today I'm linking up with Mama Kat's Writers Workshop. My inspiration for this post came from Prompt #1 - Have you ever had a fight with a long time best friend and never made up?



Mama's Losin' It


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You may be thinking, "Hey, this post supposed to be about a friendship gone wrong, but "splitting the sheets" is a reference to divorcing, splitting up, or separating". WHATEVER! It got ugly. She was a bitch. And there's not enough thread on the spool to mend the mess that our friendship became...so we split the sheets.

**The curtain raises**

This story begins with me starting a new job, in a new field that I was going to learn from the bottom up. I also didn't happen to know a single soul at the company, so it was exciting to be befriended by someone fairly quickly after arriving on the scene. Ashley and I were similar in age, and were both married with no kids.  We seemed to have a lot in common - similar interests, lived on the same side of town, and she had only been with the company less than a year herself.  We would eat lunch together, seemed to work well together, and even became friends outside of the office as well.

After we had been working together for about six months the drama started. If I wasn't doing my work exactly like she thought I should, she would run to MY BOSS's office and make it sound like I was completely incompetent.  For crying out loud - I WAS LEARNING!!  I also began to hear, through the grapevine, that she was talking smack to other coworkers about me.  She rarely ever addressed her gripes with me directly - she would just gripe to everyone else.  Nice, huh?

In addition to the childish antics of tattle-tailing and her playground politics, began to get even WEIRDER!  When I started trying to get pregnant...low and behold, Ashley decided to go off the pill, too. Fred bought me a really nice dress for my birthday...and amazingly, Ashley found almost an exact match to my dress, that she absolutely HAD to have for the company Christmas party. I got pregnant right away...and wouldn't you know it, she started taking the ovulation tests and ended up getting pregnant three months after I did. It was WEIRD!! There were countless other creepy instances, but you get the idea. She was a nut.

The movie Single White Female came out around this time, which was unnerving, because it felt like Ashley was becoming a complete copycat like the psycho in the movie.  All of this "let's do this together" bullshit was way more than I could handle!  Anyone who really knows me, knows that I am totally a "my space....your space" person. We can hang out, and it's cool that we have similar interests, but we ARE NOT going to plan on wearing our yellow shirts and pink Converse to yoga class tomorrow. Got it? Ain't gonna happen. You do your own shit, and I'll do mine. Too much togetherness makes me uncomfortable and feel suffocated.

As time passed, her copycat routine one minute, and naggy co-worker the next, began to wear on me.  We would argue, distance ourselves from each other, eventually "make up", and then attempt to be friends again. This cycle of behavior continued for a couple of years, until she took a job offer from another company and put in her resignation. OH HAPPY DAY!! My problems were solved! She was finally gone.  I could breathe again.  My life felt joyfully absent of a needy shadow....and it was GREAT.

Unfortunately, existing peacefully didn't last forever, because it wasn't long before she realized that the grass wasn't greener on the other side.  Much to my dismay, and the dismay of some others, upper management let the psycho back in the front doors, gave her a desk, and put her crazy ass back to work. Ugh.

It didn't take long for the final installment of our friendship to blow a PERMANENT fuse. It got ugly, obnoxious, unsavory, and spiteful. I pulled out all the stops to sever every last shred of friendship and harmony that we had ever built. I didn't want there to be any question in her little pea sized brain at the end of the day that there might be hope for continued friendship. I wasn't just DONE, I was FINISHED and out for blood.  I wanted my space back, respect for the work that I did, and to live a life that was absent of her presence.

We kept the battle generally under wraps and relatively civil while we were at work. She moved to another department which helped, but the real "cut" came when I quit after having one of my kids.  I quit answering her phone calls and didn't respond to emails.

Do I think about her? Yeah, I'd be lying if I said that I didn't.  We had become, in my opinion, really good friends in the beginning.  And I liked Ashley a lot, but as time passed it became more of a codependent, needy relationship.  And Homey don't play that!

Do I wish that we would reconnect and ice things over? ABSOLUTELY NOT.


~Ethel~

9 comments:

  1. Woah, what a psycho! Breaking that off was a very good idea.

    visiting from MamaKat's! :)
    -Julie from 3MomsIn1.com

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  2. Whoa! She sounds CRAAAZY! Cuckoo for cocoa puffs crazy!

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  3. I don't get these insanely crazy people like this. Like they can't have their own life and must glom onto everyone around them.

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  4. Good grief! It does sounds like the Single White Female movie! Glad you were able to get free.

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  5. I have an Ashley too.. but fuck if she's related to me and I can't sever the ties. I got married, she got married, I had a baby- 17 months later, she had a baby. Three years after that, I had another baby and 19 months later, she had another baby. There are so many other things she's done and it really does get annoying to the point of almost making ME lose my mind!

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  6. They say imitation is the best form of flattery or some bullshit like that... yeah she was a nut job. Glad you were able to "Split the sheets" with her!

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  7. I had a crazy friend like that as well. What a WACK JOB! Visiting from Momma Kats!

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  8. Sometimes you are just much better off without some people in your life! And, it takes strength to recognize that! Here from Mama Kat!

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  9. That is all Single White Female! Wowza!

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