After its over

Today I took the boys to the library.  They love it there, love playing with the trains and dollhouse, love the books and the stools that look like mushrooms.  Its always a relaxing way to spend an hour, they are so calm in that environment and I can actually sit down and even read a book myself while they play in a confined area.  But when I walked in, I saw someone I knew.  The youngest brother of my ex-best friend, and he was there with her kids, who I haven't seen in the five years since I ended our friendship.  I am such a coward and hate conflict, and I can never just be myself when I see her family because I think someone is going to say something rude or bring up our falling out, so I felt suffocated as soon as I realized who was there.  I let the kids go play and skulked down the dvd aisles so they wouldn't see me.  I was so relieved when I heard them checking out their books, hoping it meant they were leaving, but then the brother said, "Do you guys want to stay and keep playing?" and apparently they did, so they parked it on a couch across the room from where the boys like to play.  Still skulking, I sat down with my kids in a seat that I hoped the dollhouse would obscure enough to avoid detection.  And then her daughter, this little girl that I knew from birth and then suddenly stopped seeing, came over to where my son was playing with the trains and began to play with him.  I sat and watched them without saying a word.  She is quite big now, almost 8 years old if my memory is correct, and while she retains that same look that she had as a toddler, she has changed enough that she looks more like her mother.  I met my friend when she was just 11, a few years older than her daughter is today, and the similarity took me back to those first innocent years of friendship.  Back when we bonded over everything we had in common, when our mutual dark humor kept us laughing while the beautiful people at our school just flipped their hair and called us weird.  It was such a good friendship back then, and it lasted so long that I couldn't imagine my life without her. 
Then we got older.  We went to college and had different interests and different plans.  And sometimes she seemed a little snippy and critical of me.  Then we got married, and she became really obviously critical of my husband and sometimes my family.  Then she had a baby, a sweet little girl who seemed to soften and distract her for a while so that we could be friends again and have this point of mutual love that kept our friendship hanging on.  Then I got pregnant.  And she became someone different, someone who was always critical, giving me bad advice and making the increasingly brief time we spent together miserable.  It was harder to ignore the other people in my life who questioned why I was holding on to a relationship that had become toxic and wasn't making me happy, but I could still remember the wonderful times we had had together, and kept the hope that they would come back.  I made a last-ditch effort to save our friendship by telling her exactly how I was feeling and imploring her to stop being so mean.  Things were okay for a few months, although strained.  Finally, I had my baby.  She came to see me in the hospital and brought me her child's baby clothes.  I thought things might get better, until the day she called my 3 month old son fat.  My mama bear emerged from her cave and I vowed that the friendship was over.  I didn't answer the next time she called, and she seemed to understand why, because that was the last time.  I felt like I had a gangrenous limb amputated; I missed the functional times, but was glad to be rid of the diseased appendage that was threatening to take over the rest of me. 
My husband asked why I had ended things after she was critical of my child, since she'd been critical of my husband for years, and I could only say that picking on an adult who could defend himself (and he did) was completely different from her behavior towards my son, who didn't even know what she was saying, much less how to come back from it.  So its been over for five years, and I can honestly say I don't miss her.  I never backslid and called her trying to patch things up.  I don't feel like I owe her anything.  But watching our kids play together with no orchestration from either of us made me wistful.  I miss having a friend close by who knows me so well that I can just show up at her house when I'm stressed or bored, and we will have fun no matter what we end up doing.  I miss our shared history, because without her I don't remember things as well.  I miss having someone that has known me for most of my life and likes the cumulation of who I am.