When I was about 10 my best friend lived next door. Her name was Lisa.
My family thought that her family was weird. You see, they were Italian. Except in my family it was pronounced EYE-talian. This meant that they ate strange foreign foods like pasta and eggplant and drank wine not beer. They were also catholic. Shock. Horror.
Catholic girl that she was, Lisa went to the school around the corner - Immaculate Conception - or I-macs as it was called and not to Juliet like I did.
Lisa and I played outside every night after school, before dinner and after. We could play out until the street lights would come on at which point our respective mothers would come out on our respective front porches and, as my mother would say, "holler like a fishwife", for us to come in.
There were no other kids our particular age in the neighbourhood. They were either teenagers or little kids. I suspect that this, as much as actual interest or affection, was responsible for our friendship. Sometimes proximity breeds strange bedfellows.
In the case of Lisa and myself, we were stranger than oil and water - chalk and cheese and all those other euphemisms that exist for things that don't naturally go together. But that having been said we were friends for years.
We started out playing with our Barbies together. I must tell you that I played with my Barbie, bad body dismorphic role model that she was, until way too late in my life. Not 16 or anything inappropriate like that, but definitely until I was about 12 or so.
Barbie was my escape. Chubby girl with frizzy hair imagines herself a tall gorgeous super thin busy lovely - and I always imagined my Barbie was super smart and had not only a husband, conveniently named Ken, but also a power job as a doctor or lawyer and a kick ass convert able.
Barbie was never named Barbie though, she was always Leah or Jane or Trisha - something exciting and powerful not like Sandra which I considered quite bland and full of nothing.
I played Barbie alone for years - in my room - in my yard - in the back of the car - and then along came Lisa who liked her Barbie too. Her Barbie, of course was named Lisa.
We would set up our houses, complete with blow up furniture, a respectful distance from one another. I suspect we wanted LAND. I often ended up loaning Lisa my amazing blow up bed with cardboard headboard and matching plastic patterned quilt. You see, she liked it. Who was I to deny her something that was mine? SHE wanted to play with ME!! Tell me that there was anything better than that?
Our Barbie's did good fun things like go to work and make supper for our Ken dolls. Sometimes we would park our convertibles in front of the tv and pretend to go to the drive-in. Lisa and I would sit behind them eating popcorn and watching "Tammy and the Doctor".
All of this was fun but Lisa had a secret. Oh yes she did. Her secret was kept neatly hidden at her school but, as we got older, and technology (okay 1976 technology), the telephone, invaded our life, her secret got out! Lisa - was POPULAR. It seems like a little thing but it morphed our friendship to something HUGE.
Lisa stopped playing outside every single night. Sometimes, she'd be lured away by the intoxicating mysteries of the phone. Now, I can't say for sure what she and her new-found popular school friends talked about but, in my head, I imagine that it was all about how to rule the school, who to shun, who to mock and who to tease. That was the modus operandi for popular people right? To make everyone else feel inferior by their superiority? Right? Right?
It was hard for me to adjust to not being important in Lisa's life. But I sucked it up and kept on playing away with my Barbie. Barbie now got to sleep in her own deluxe blow up bed any time she wanted.
Sometimes, on weekends, I would get invited to be part of Lisa's entourage. You see, the popular girls, Becky, Maria and Julie, they all went to the catholic school and didn't know what kind of social pariah I was at Juliet. I was
IN for those few hours on a Saturday afternoon.
But what would we do?
We could listen to the radio? We could sit and talk about boys? We could try on Lisa's mom's clothes and shoes and makeup? We could play Barbies, I suggested...
*chirp*
**crickets**
*Stares with open mouths*
I remember that moment like a hard slap in the face.
Becky looked at Lisa, ignoring me entirely, and said "how OLD is she?"
I WANTED to say "but its what Lisa and I always do" - but, I knew - I just knew if I gave Lisa's Barbie love up that it would be a bad bad bad thing that our friendship would never recover from.
I went home that night, put my Barbies in a box and never touched them again. Many years later my cousin Amy was thrilled with Barbies' still in good condition blow up bed.
Many weeks later after listening to the radio and talking about boys who's names I knew but had never met I was instructed by Lisa that I would have to leave - now. You see, the others were staying over night - a sleepover with pizza and everything. I wasn't invited, explained Becky (I assume Becky explained because Lisa was a bad liar) because Lisa's mother wouldn't
allow her to have people who weren't catholic sleep in her house. A perfectly logical explanation really. Why would they want a heathen polluting their sleeping bags?
So, dutifully I thanked Lisa for inviting me over and headed out the door. On the porch I ran into Lisa's Mom.
'Aren't you going to stay over tonight with the girls?" she said.
Instantly I knew that I should cover my undesirability as a guest.
"I'm not allowed" I said. Instantly I was ready with a barrage of back up lies about my mother being old fashioned, needing to go to church, being on medication and having a bad back == just in case they were needed.
But they weren't. She went inside. And I went home and cried.
For right there that moment I realized that while I was part of the group for a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon, I wasn't really part of anything.
Just as I knew deep down that I was Lisa's friend when we played Barbies but only for my blow up bed and my proximity to her house.
I continued to hang out with Lisa when I could, when she wanted me and when I was allowed, until we hit high school.
Over that period of time I was her confidante when she liked a boy that the others disapproved of. I was her sounding board when she herself was excluded from the group. I was her dance partner when ice dancing was all the rage and she needed someone who could lift her. And on the day that Elvis died I was there with her to help comfort her Mom who was beside herself with grief.
We parted ways in high school, her popularity by thenb far exceeding what I was capable of achieving and creating a gap which neither of us were able to bridge.
My point here is not that I once had a popular friend and therefore should now be popular by association and therefore am way too cool to hang with any of you.
Nor is it to garner pity for my sad social ineptitude as a kid growing up.
I want to illustrate that how we allow ourselves to be treated in friendship as children sets the scene for how we carry forward throughout our lives.
I was a WILLING VICTIM of Lisa's disdain and to a certain extent her ridicule if my memory of feeling her bite is clear these 30 years later.
Life lets you lead yourself places and sometimes it takes you there by itself.
I still do all these things: I loan out my "things" to friends although I want them for myself. Not physical things anymore so much as my thoughts and feelings and time.
I hurt for various reasons and instead of running back up to that bed room and saying to Lisa and the evil Becky - "I know you lied you little bitch your Mom told me!" - and then running the hell out of that house head held high no regrets and never talking to that bitchy little madame again....I retreat and repress and keep all of my feelings in.
Mostly those feelings are ironically related to shame. I feel such SHAME when someone, worthy of my affection or not, does not want me around. My rational mind, my indoor voice knows that this is silly. But when you've done something, felt something forever, its hard to change.
Over the course of my life I have done many things in the name of friendship. I have lied to them, lied for them and lied about them. I have altered my life plans for them, given advice and told them how to live their lives. I have abused them and been abused by them. I have had them choose their boy friends over me. I've had them leave me behind and move on. I've moved on and never left them any place but in my heart. I've moved out in the middle of the night. I've fought with them and argued with them and sucked up to them but I've very rarely told them two things: what I really think and the truth.
I've loved them. I've also not.
And now, at 41, my son is being bullied - and upset by his FRIENDS. Again. The kid doing the bullying is himself bullied by his own older brother. While I feel for this kid I also want to punch him in the neck.
I see my son retreat inside himself to the place of shame that he and I share - shame at being excluded and for finding himself in a a place where he is in a position with no power.
I say to him - "stand up for yourself" and "you are worthy of respect". I say that as a mom quite convincingly I think - yet, I don't believe it of myself.
I see him crumble and I try to hold him up. I see him try to suck back the snot that is really just tears he isn't crying. I want to tell him not to be like me but I know he will.
Such a bad age. Its so hard to be ten years old.
