And this is why I love the woods.  My foot is feeling better!  I'm not limping anymore!  I went for a walk at the dogpark yesterday and it was wonderful.  The trees were still there, waiting for me, looking like a cathedral, blessing me with their silent benediction.

I'm still working through the writing workbook my daughter gave me for Christmas.  Last night the prompt was to write about a time you were ignored.  

When I was fourteen years old I met a girl who was to be my best friend for thirty years, until she wasn't my best friend anymore.  We told each other everything and both went through a lot of shit together.  We had both married the wrong man and both had difficult children to deal with.  I loved her like a sister and thought she felt the same way.  She was my emotional support person, even when she moved to Vancouver Island. 

When I first left my husband in 2008 she was happy for me.  When I went back to try again, nine months later, and told her, she literally bit her tongue.  She had an infection in her tongue from biting it.  She was angry with me and thought it was a stupid thing to do.  I did what I needed to do at the time.   

I'm glad I tried again.  It convinced me that leaving my husband was the right thing to do and that I had tried.  So I had an alcoholic husband who was verbally abusive, a disabled daughter who became physically abusive when she hit puberty, a drug dealing son, and she told me that I was too angry.  That's all she ever told me, "You're too angry."  She ignored my emails and just didn't want to talk to me anymore.  Today it would be called ghosting but I had not heard that term at the time.

I needed her emotional support.  I had been there for her when she left her husband and had even loaned her money to leave him, which she paid back.  When she drank I was shocked at how deeply angry she was with her husband, but that anger only came out when she was drinking, otherwise she stuffed it all down, deep inside.  I listened to her, comforted her, supported her and she did the same for me, until she didn't agree with what I was doing.  It broke my heart for a long time and I cried a lot of tears over the loss of my best friend.

When I was writing about this last night I had to write and then distill my writing down into a four line poem.  What I realized and ended up with was a poem about two angry women, which I won't share here because it's a crappy poem but it speaks to me.  Both of us were such angry women and neither of us could cope with the anger in the other because it made us look at ourselves too deeply, I think.

I still miss the closeness we had; we grew up together and had history together.  I was her maid of honour and she was mine.  She was my son's godmother.  But none of that mattered in the end.  She didn't want to see my anger and all of the grief and sadness behind that anger, couldn't see it.  And I was the same.  I didn't realize how much anger and grief and sadness she carried either.  A part of me would like to tell her this but another part of me feels the need to protect my heart and not put it out there to be rejected and stomped on again.

It wasn't just her and it wasn't just me, it was the both of us, unable to give the other what we most needed.