Fake Friends at Fairway

The other day I was hungry for guacamole and stopped in at Fairway at 74th Street to get some avocados and lemons.  I was in a hurry and didn't bother with a basket and was holding four small avocados and three large lemons when I ran into a woman I had been “best friends” with some years ago.  I’m pretty sure I never really liked her.  For years, most everyone I hung out with regularly knew her as Mrs. Finkelstein, The Friend that I Hate.  I suppose I never really hated her either – it was just that talking with her always left me feeling bad about myself as a person and as a mother.

She and I became friends at Breastfeeding Support Group a few weeks after our babies were born.  When the Lactation Consultant formed a New Mommies’ Group, Mrs. Finkelstein and I both joined.  So did a few other women, and we all ignored our differences so we would have a large group of comrades during the transition to Motherhood which is so scary you can’t even admit you’re scared to each other.   If one of us started to crack, we would all fall apart.  We stood together in solidarity, or rather we pushed strollers around the park and arranged lovely picnics with lovely cloths spread out in Strawberry Fields for our lovely food and lovely babies.   If we complained at all, it was about the long hours our husbands worked which enabled all of us to stay home with our babies for as long as we wanted.  Nevertheless, we still complained about it because it was safe to complain about husbands.  Complaining about babies made you a Bad Mother.

In many ways, Mrs. Finkelstein was a caring friend, but after a year or two of therapy, I concluded that her judgmental perspective reminded me of my own mother.  I figured if Mrs. Finkelstein would hang out with me, I must be okay.

Mrs. Finkelstein never missed an opportunity to tell me that I made wrong-headed parenting choices despite the fact that her own parenting led to a visit from school social workers once her twins entered public Pre-K.  For example, when the kids were four or five months old, Mrs. Finkelstein Ferberized her twins which meant that she followed the recommendations of one  Dr. Richard Ferber which had been oversimplified by the popular press into something like a celebration of letting your baby scream himself to sleep, or Cry It Out.  For the record, I understand that all babies need to cry sometimes - but I never let Velvet cry anything out.  Maybe I did have my own issues with abandonment, but given that Dr. Ferber himself went on TV multiple times to say he never once advocated leaving babies alone in the dark to cry until they vomited, I maintain that Ferberizing is Bull Shit.  Meanwhile, Mrs. Finkelstein took absolute credit for her children drifting peacefully off to sleep as a result of her wise commitment to Dr. Ferber's methods and determination to maintaining control over her children's habits.

Mrs. Finklestein is a well intentioned woman.  It's just that her own anxieties spilled onto her children, and she's one of those controlling people who believe that very young children are manipulative.  It's true that very young children are always exploring new and improved methods at getting their own way - but this behavioral experimentation is rarely premeditated,calculated and sinister even when they are as old as four.  By the time they are four years old, some kids are truly manipulative but when that's the case, you will generally find that one of the parents is Masterfully Manipulative and sometimes an Emotional Blackmailer.  

I'm not going to lay that on Mrs. Finkelstein, but in my view, her kids went to sleep easily because they slept in a room together and therefore had automatic companionship and because they were worn out from the way she shoved food at them all day, saying, "Eat! Eat!  When they were a couple of weeks old, the pediatrician gave the twins the label Failure To Thrive, and Mrs. Finkelstein felt so guilty about that failure that she continued chasing the kids around with bagles or roasted chicken when they were two and able to run away from her.  Or she strapped them into high chairs and wouldn't let them out until they finished the food she had lovingly prepared.  Needless to say, I avoided meal times at their beautiful prewar apartment on West End Avenue, especially once she started complaining about their lack of money as the maid busied herself around the kitchen.  

She continued bitching about money even as she used part of her inheritance from her mother for liposuction on her Size Two ass.  The kids may have been in middle school by then.  She had never been happy with her ass because it was kind of square, and when one of her friends from exercise class was diagnosed with breast cancer, Mrs. Finkelstein decided that life was too short to live without the ass you wanted and made an appointment with the plastic surgeon.  Maybe so.  If I could afford it, I'd have the fat off my arms sucked off and a tummy tuck - so I'm not condemning the procedure.  It was the way she moaned about having no money that bothered me.  She lamented loud and long about not being able to go on ski vacations as she and her family of five were boarding a plane for Israel.  I never knew how to respond to that kind of complaint - especially since my own mother said, "Well, Patricia, at least you're not in Bosnia," if I complained about anything.

When the boys were all in high school, Mrs. Finkelstein was compelled to call me up one day and say she did not approve of the way I allowed Velvet to smoke weed.  I explained that Velvet was not ALLOWED to smoke weed.  Velvet would not get in trouble for smoking weed as long as we maintained an atmosphere of Plausible Deniability and he got straight As at school. I also explained that it's hypocritical to punish your child for something you yourself do - and since Velvet knew I smoked weed occasionally, there was no way I was going to tell him that smoking weed is BAD.  That's when she told me that I knew I shouldn't be smoking weed either.

About the same time, Mrs. Finkelstein and I were on a different phone call when she felt compelled to tell me that The Narcissist would never marry me because I'm not Jewish.  Never mind that I didn't want to marry the Narcissist, or anyone else for that matter having been recently divorced.  Never mind that the reason the relationship never went anywhere because it took me over a year to understand that ordinary people could display levels of assholery I though were only possible among luminaries like Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and Dick Cheney.  The point is that Mrs. Finkelstein intimated that to The Tribe, I was nothing more than a shiksa whore.  She never used the term Shiksa Whore.  She didn't have to.  

I will always be grateful that Mrs. Finkelstein steered me to a great therapist when Velvet was little and I was in despair at being such an awful mother.  Mrs. Finkelstein visited me when I was in Four Winds, too, and I'm sure it was a sincerely supportive gesture.  For several years, I maintained the relationship with her simply because of that gratitude, but after those phone calls, I fully shut her out of my life.

Last year at Rosh Hashana, Mrs. Finkelstein contacted me, using phrases recommended for generations by Rabbis asking me to please tell her if she'd done something to offend me so that she could atone.  She wanted to be my friend.  She mentioned that a dear friend of hers had been diagnosed with cancer and she needed someone to talk to - so I knew why she wanted to be friends with a degenerate like me.  Nobody else would talk to her.  I agreed to have lunch with her because she was so insistent and because I didn't want to hurt her feelings.

I never told her what she had done to offend me, however, so she never had an opportunity to make it up to me.  In my mind, that would be another game of charades with a woman who can't allow others the freedom to be themselves.  Maybe one day, we'll have to have that confrontation - but I can't see any reason to go through all that with someone you don't want to be friends with.  Although now that I'm thinking about it, that kind of confrontation and honesty may be the only way to free yourself from pretense.  We'll see if it comes up again this year at Rosh Hashana.