Fun with traumatic memories #1

When I was 14 or 15, my best friend was someone I thought was preeminently cool. She knew how to skateboard, wore baggy flannel shirts, and wore long underwear under skate shorts instead of pants. Rock. She also knew what bands to listen to, like The Doors and The Grateful Dead.

Her family was much more comfortably middle class than mine, and they lived in a huge house out in the boonies of Jefferson County. It’d be what today we consider in the style of a McMansion, except they had a couple of acres of land.

Uncomfortably, her mom was a bitch. For some reason, my best friend’s older sister who had moved out on her own was worshipped in the household. Everything she did was better than what we did. At our age, the older sister was already awesome-er and liked better music like Black Flag and had a cat named Nixon.

Because we were 15 and she lived in BFE (Bum-Fuck Egypt), there was this constant tension between whose parents were responsible for transporting me back and forth. My friend never stayed at my house; I went over there. Sometimes, when her mom bitchily begrudgingly drove, she would let us listen to our music. My friend put in The Grateful Dead one day, and her mom laid into it. “This is horrible music. You have no taste. This music only sounds good if you’re on drugs,” she said in a cruel tone. Yeah, it’s true, we had no taste, but we were barely teenagers. Have you ever met a teenager with good taste?

One day, at my friend’s house, her mother sat us down at the kitchen table. We were in for a lecture. “You don’t add anything to your friendship. You don’t help each other grow. When your older sister was your age, she had wonderful friends, and they enhanced each others’ lives. You don’t do that. You’re just stagnant together. You don’t have a healthy friendship. You don’t offer any growth.”

I felt so betrayed by her mother. Maybe her mom thought my friend didn’t measure up to the older sister they worshipped, but did she really have any maternal right to unfavorably compare her children to one another? Out loud? To her impressionable teen daughter? In front of me?

And what about me? Not good enough? Not bringing enough to the relationship? Why on earth would anyone say that to their daughter’s best friend? I hurt. A lot. Her mother was always critical, but sitting us down to lecture us on what bad friends we were was profoundly judgmental, and I felt humiliated by her exposé on our deep and apparently developmentally threatening relationship.

In addition, I thought my friend enhanced me. She taught me about cool, and even though really I was walking her path, she taught me about individuality. Another barb. Even if her mother’s opinion was that I brought nothing to the relationship—unlike goddess sister’s amazing friends of wonderment—I got a lot out of my relationship with my friend. Why wouldn’t my friend’s mom respect her enough to believe that she could add to our friendship?

I got enough shit that I was doing the wrong things and not living up to standards from other people, but I had never had a friend’s parent sit me down and earnestly tell me I wasn’t good enough for her daughter. What a bitch.