I Got Mean Girled… At Almost 40
About six years ago, I began feeling like my closest group of girlfriends of more than a decade (and one since high school) had seemingly been putting distance between themselves and me. I kept telling myself it was surely all in my head. But in early January 2020 when two of them pulled me aside one night to tell me they’d all planned a girls trip to New York without inviting me, I was speechless.
They were both tearing up as they talked to me and I can still remember wondering why they were so emotional when I was the one being left out. But when they went on to tell me that the other women had made “pact” of sorts to not post on social media while on the trip so that I wouldn’t know they’d even gone, it all made much more sense. These two friends — the ones I was the closest to at that time, the ones who felt it was so wrong of the others to leave me in the dark — knew that what they were saying to me was going to devastate me and may even end our friendship.
And they were right.
Save for a lengthy email I sent to one of them days later in response to her “Whenever you’re ready for a hug, I’m here!” text, I have had zero contact with any of them since.
More than five years later, not a single one has ever reached out.
And, more than five years later, it still hurts.
I think it will probably always hurt a bit. It was a tremendous loss, one I grieved for years. I loved those women, loved their families, like my own family. We celebrated loves and losses and birthdays and babies together. I’d celebrated so many of them becoming mothers over the years and now I was a mother myself — I needed them. I didn’t understand what I could’ve done or what was so terrible about me that could cause my favorite people to exclude and hurt me like that.
At nearly 40 years old, I was living through what was my first real “mean girl” experience. Believe me, it’s not lost on me how fortunate I was to have made it so long. But that certainly didn’t make it hurt any less at the time.
Over the years, I’ve come to take the advice I would give anyone else in my situation: People who treat you like that clearly don’t have the respect or care for you that you have for them and shouldn’t take up valuable space in your life.
In practice, however, that is easier said than done. (If you know, oooh boy… you know.)
When this friendship breakup happened to me, I had one child — now I have three. My middle child, my only daughter, is such a force. At 4 years old, she’s as spicy as she is sweet. The thought of someone hurting her or any of my children the way I was hurt makes me feel physically ill… and fighting mad. We talk about how being a good friend means making sure no one feels left out and everyone feels like they belong. We talk about how words can hurt but so can our actions. We’ve squeezed toothpaste out of the tube to understand that we can’t always make something go back to the way it was, even if we try our hardest.
Whenever I look back on that devastating friendship experience I always come back to this:
The people I chose didn’t choose me back.
That’s why it feels like such a betrayal. Perhaps I chose poorly, but I truly don’t think that was the case here. I can look back on the end of that chapter of my life and know that I loved them and included them whenever I could, but they cannot say the same. And that realization about women I loved and respected hurts.
But it also heals.
I am a good friend who is deserving of good friends. And while letting go of people who don’t choose me may hurt, it also makes room for the people who do.
And, in my case, so many of the people who’ve come into my life since then have been true blessings. They come to my kids’ birthday parties (and, in some cases, even make the cake!). They share delicious recipes and silly memes and TikToks at all hours of the day and night. They save seats at happy hour gatherings, baby showers, and funerals.
They make sure I know that, no matter how busy life gets or how long we go between contact, I am one of their people and they’ll always save a seat for me.
“Even,” as one of them jokingly said once, “if you have to sit on my lap!”
