Something big happened last summer that I haven't mentioned here, which surprises me. I thought maybe I had already gone over it, but I just went back through my last entries, and there was no mention of it, so here goes.
Last summer, my mom, sisters, and I took our yearly beach trip to our condo. My mom's bff, Cindy, joined us, and we all had a wonderful time doing all the usual summer things: swimming, sitting on the beach, going out for good meals, etc.
Well, things took an unfortunate turn at one of the dinners. We had just had a great dinner, and my mom and Cindy were paying their bills. My sister Amber had stepped outside with Max as he was getting fussy. Cindy is notoriously bad at math, like me, so she asked for help with how much to tip. I looked at her bill and helped her calculate a 20% tip, and while this was happening, my mom just started nit-picking at Cindy, saying she should make sure she left at least 20% because she had the waitress running around "all night" with her "demands." Okay, Cindy has historically not been a great tipper, but she was leaving 20% on this check. And Cindy had NOT been demanding with the waitress in any way on this occasion! But my mom kept going and was being very harsh and critical of Cindy for no reason. I thought it was very strange and even told my mom to stop. Cindy finally said, "You know, you really can be mean sometimes," and my mom got SO offended at that. She bristled and became all weird and later re-told it as Cindy "yelled that she was mean" and "embarrassed her in front of the whole restaurant and her daughters." Umm, Cindy had not yelled and no one in the restaurant heard what was going on except me and my sister Angel, who were at the table.
Basically, my mom started the situation and when Cindy finally said something, my mom twisted it and made it out that Cindy said she IS a mean person, when she actually said she was BEING mean, which she WAS.
That stupid little exchange at the end of dinner ruined the rest of the beach trip and seemingly permanently changed my mom and Cindy's friendship. My mom and Cindy have been best friends for over 40 years. Cindy had a shitty husband who was never around (whom she eventually divorced after 23 hellish years), and my mom was/is a widow, so the two of them raised their daughters (5 of us) together, and it was like they were the two parents. I've grown up with Cindy in my life as basically an aunt figure. We've always had a lot of fun and laughs with her, and she is truly like family. I'm closer to Cindy than either of my two living blood aunts.
To this day, my mom hasn't forgiven Cindy even though Cindy apologized at the beach. I think it's absurd Cindy even apologized as she hadn't done anything wrong, but Cindy wanted to keep the peace. My mom still holds that the whole situation is Cindy's fault, and she has not and will not take accountability for her role and the fact that she started the whole thing. I've always considered my mom reasonable and level-headed, but she will not budge on this situation even though she is so clearly wrong. It does not make sense or add up to me with what I know about my mom. My sisters and I started wondering if maybe her sugar levels were out of whack again because the only other time I've seen my mom act differently was when she had undiagnosed Type 2 Diabetes and her blood sugar was out of control. Her personality changed, and she became more harsh, so I wondered if something similar was happening. Her sugar actually has been very high for a little while now, despite trying various medications. She just had bloodwork done recently and her A1C number is slowly coming down, but it's still high (down to 8.1 from a high of 11). So, maybe there's still something to that.
On the other hand, I think my mom has been fed up with Cindy for many years now because I've noticed she's been very negative and critical about Cindy for a while, criticizing things she does and putting her down about various things. I even thought to myself then, like damn, does she even still like Cindy anymore because it seemed she never had anything good to say about her, and this was before this whole beach fiasco.
While Cindy is like family, and we love her, there are things we don't like about her. For example, she definitely can be racist and homophobic. She would never treat anyone negatively to their face, but she definitely believes certain things behind closed doors. Cindy was raised in the South in the 50s/60s by a black live-in maid as her mother was always gone working as a pharmacist. While she has told many stories about how much she loved the maid, it's very clear she holds certain beliefs that make it clear that she thinks black people are inferior in some way. She doesn't mind other races as she married and had children with a Latino man from El Salvador, and during her wild 20s she dated many Native American men, Asian men, etc. It's just black people she thinks this way about. She's also homophobic even though many of her friends in her youth were gay men. She especially despises lesbians, I think, because one tried to hit on her a million years ago, and that freaked her out.
In the last however many years, we've all heard Cindy go on racist or homophobic "rants," which I do not tolerate. She tried to start one such rant in the car at the beach last summer, and I shut her down. I told her that I loved her but that I simply would never agree with her and that I didn't want to hear what she had to say about those topics. She knows I mean business and shut it. With both my mom and Cindy being retired, they used to talk on the phone daily, and my mom would just let Cindy go on these rants at length, sometimes for hours. WHY my mom never just hung up or told her to shut up, I don't know. My mom is a people pleaser and not assertive in that way. My sister Amber is like that. I am not like that as I'll speak my mind real quick. So, I think hearing all of Cindy's terrible rants over the years had just gotten on my mom's nerves to the point that she wanted any reason to cut Cindy out of her life, and she got it with the tipping argument at the beach.
Now, I know what you're thinking. You're probably thinking that you side with my mom because who would want someone like Cindy in their lives anyway? Trust me, I get how it sounds. But, I truly know Cindy, and when she's not going on about that crazy stuff, she's one of the most fun people to be around. Even though she's 74 years old, she's mentally still a hormone-fueled teenager. She loves k-pop music and has the hots for all the Korean singers. She's constantly sending me vids of these ripped dudes dancing and singing. She's just a lot of fun to be around. She has a great sense of humor that has had us laughing our whole lives. And again, I was raised with her in my life as if she were family, so I can't just cut her off so easily. While I do not deny that we have fundamentally different views on certain things, I can put that aside and still love her as a person.
I have tried a couple of times since the beach incident to talk to my mom and to get her to see her role in the whole thing and she ends up getting mad and will not budge. I think she is also disappointed in me because she sees me as "siding with Cindy" over her, when I'm not, I'm just siding with what was right in the situation, and it wasn't her. She was wrong, flat out, period.
My mom has even said crazy things like she never wanted to be friends with Cindy in the first place (back in 1984), but Cindy "forced" a friendship on her. Come on. That's extremely dramatic because they both changed jobs and moved states and maintained their friendship. That doesn't happen unless you WANT it to. And like I said, we grew up having a great time with Cindy around, so I absolutely refuse to believe that my mom has been a "victim" of Cindy's friendship all these years and now she's finally free.
As I said, my mom still hasn't forgiven Cindy for the incident (despite Cindy apologizing and Cindy not actually being in the wrong), so much so that she even said that she will not go to Cindy's funeral when the day comes. I couldn't believe that! This is someone we have known and loved our whole lives and she wouldn't go to her FUNERAL over a stupid argument about tipping? Like what the actual fuck??
So, to this day, my mom and Cindy are not really talking. I think they both still communicate on a group thread with me and my sisters, but they aren't talking on the phone like they used to. We also don't see Cindy anymore because my mom simply doesn't want her around. That's so sad to me because Cindy has been in bad health for many years and literally could die at any moment. It's a miracle she's made it to 74 (though my mom has bitterly said that Cindy will outlive us all). I just hate that our last years with Cindy are going to be spent dealing with this awkward fallout of their friendship. My mom gets offended even when we see Cindy. A month or so ago, Amber was on the phone with my mom while she was driving to Cindy's house to drop off her Christmas present (she hadn't seen Cindy in so long that she just wanted to get Cindy's Christmas present out of her car), and my mom got all weird and offended and demanded to know why she was going to see her. So now, if we happen to see Cindy or talk to her, we have to keep it secret.
This whole situation is so bizarre, y'all, it's like damn, y'all are in your 70s and have been friends for almost 45 years, like get over this and get back to being friends so we can all have a good time together again, damn!
10:13 a.m. - Friday, Apr. 12, 2024