Friends and cunning

When I was in the sixth grade, I was best friends with a little girl named Susan. As often happens with kids that age, her mother met my mom and dad, and they hit it off. It was great! Her mom really liked my parents a lot, and Susan and her sister Lisa became good friends with me.

However, after a number of months, things became more difficult. You see, Susan's mother was in the middle of a painful divorce. The fact that my parents were happily married, and Nancy was being rejected by the man she had married (not sure who rejected who, I was only a child 10 years old), was one of the most damaging forces ever in the lives of my parents and myself. You see, the more painful Nancy's divorce became, the more tempting it was for her to compare herself to my mother.

Simultaneously, my little friend Susan, in her bitterness that she was losing her dad while I still had mine, became very very envious. So then, one night when Susan slept over my house, she began to say awful things to me. This girl, who I considered my very best friend, was very casually saying to me that "everybody hated me". Doesn't every child just dread hearing such words? She added too that the young boy who I thought was the cutest in the class actually liked her, and that they frequently found themselves staring at each other in class. Just imagine how much all of this hurt!

Now, let's go back to the topic of this blog. We are discussing cunning. Can you see how Susan's envy got the better of her? She was struggling with some hard issues for a girl of her age and was comparing her lifestyle to the security and worry-free childhood I was experiencing. Though we started out "bosom buddies", at this point our friendship had clearly changed. Susan may still have admired me, but she no longer sincerely enjoyed spending time with me. She looked at me, and I was an ugly reminder that she was losing her father.

When a close friend begins to behave in a way that does not line up with your standards for friendship, the warning flag should go up. Right then and there, when Susan was saying cruel things to me, I needed to be brave enough to recognize that she could no longer be trusted in the way that I wanted to trust her.