Mrs SSS

Ah...good times.

A friend is a wonderful thing. Especially when friends seem to have been pretty thin on the ground for quite a while.

Being a stay-at-home mom to a four-year-old and an infant was stressful. Add in a husband who drank a 12-pack of beer every day and spent his spare time being insulting and denigrating and generally obnoxious, and it's no wonder I was not moved to mop all that often. Did I mention that we were chronically and perennially broke?

Oh, and the reason friends were as scarce as hen's teeth? SSS made passes at each and every one of them. The ones he scored with, I usually knew about (and sometimes even remained friends with, for a while), but the ones he didn't just stopped coming over.

Mrs SSS was, at that time, Mrs Best Friend. She was sympathetic, she was empathetic, and she listened. It was so very nice to have somebody who listened. I poured out my heart and soul. She listened to all my complaints about my life, and then...then...she told SSS all about it. With suitable embellishments.

She encouraged me to take baby steps into community theater. Yes, she said. You have a right to have a hobby, she said, and to express yourself. He will come around, she said.

In the beginning, she and I were both involved with the theater. After two or three shows, she quit. She hung out at my house with my husband while I was at rehearsal. God knows what she said to him, but I'm sure she was very sympathetic, very empathetic, and she listened. She did other things, too, but mainly, she listened and encouraged him to stand on his own two feet and not put up with my shenanigans. I should thank her for that. I got 24 years of fun out of Sam Bass Theater, and a lot more positive energy than I got from SSS in a 15 year marriage.

I didn't really realize how bad it had got, until the weekend when I was babysitting her kids while she and SSS went off for a well-organized escape together to a hotel. Of course, her husband didn't know about this, and he and his brother came to my house, his brother drunk as SSS usually was, and tried to force his way in because he thought SSS was hiding in a closet somewhere, too afraid to face him.

I loathed the two of them, then, but it still took me a year or more to get myself to the point where I could see that there was no hope for my marriage, and that, with a lot of help from some real friends (you know--the kind with my best interests at heart--not the kind wanting to acquire my husband), I could get out on my own.

After SSS and I had been separated for a year or so, she congratulated me on having managed to survive.

You know, she said, we never thought you'd make it. We. She and SSS had sat around discussing the possibility of my ending up in the gutter, at which point, they would swoop in to rescue the girls. Did I mention that SSS paid no child support for five years after we separated?

Even after all that, the habit of friendship is so ingrained that I find myself responding to her sympathetic charm whenever I'm around her. I know it's fake, I know she has no respect for me (how could she?), and yet...and yet...I mourn for the friendship I thought (for a while) that I had with her.

Now this, from an email I just got from her:

"Thank you for removing the blog part....yes - there are some others that I wish you would remove but I guess that's another story all together!!!! There are definitely things that none of us need and we do need to move on."

(I just removed a short blog entry in which I mentioned that she was having a birthday party for SSS. She told me that the party was for another person, and so the entry was incorrect.)

Mrs SSS, one of the reasons I write this blog is to work through some of the things that "none of us need." The thing about my blog is that it is mine. If you don't like it, don't read it.

As SSS has said, "You can wish in one hand and (deposit compost) in the other, and see which one fills up first."

And, "People in Hell want ice water."

That's what the red X is for.