Shoe Three.

I'm sitting here in my home office...ok to be honest I'm sitting at my desk in what is otherwise the room I keep my dogs in at night....and I'm looking at the piles of stuff I should be dealing with. Two weeks worth of coupons that need clipping, receipts that need filing, bills that need paid and other assorted papers which need other assorted shuffling.  But I don't wanna do any of that.  So I'll do this.  It is, after all, lunch time.

If you've been reading BlogOverLunch through the past month you know that my child support got cut almost in half, seriously impairing my ability to do things like, you know, buy food and make my house payment.  Shortly after that my boyfriend left me, further impairing the ability to survive finacially and delivering a paralyzing emotional blow.  In the wake of those two events I still felt like something else was coming.  I was waiting for another shoe to drop in spite of the fact that two resounding thuds had rocked my house to its core.

Well...turns out I was right.  My tormentor, be it the devil or anti-karma (I SWEAR I'm a good person..ask anybody...ok ALMOST anybody), whatever psychic, cosmic, plasmic entity has been tormenting me these last few weeks has three feet...and the third shoe dropped the morning of June 29th when my mom passed away.

My mom and I weren't close.  We saw each other on Mother's day, Christmas, Grandparents Day.  This past year, the first in probably ten years, she even called me on my brthday.  When we talked it was strained.  Always about what she ate the last night or about something one of the aides in the nursing home said.  She had no interest in what was going on the life of her only child or grandchild.

But all of that said, she was my mom.  I didn't want to see her suffer and even though I would prefer to die than to live how she's lived the last four years, it was hard to deal with her passing. 

The ordeals of this past month have all morphed into one, long, surreal drama which I am eager to leave behind me.

So yesterday I buried my Mom.  That's what people say anyway.  I laid a flower on her casket, the people at the cemetery did the actual burying.

Through all of this, since XBF left and especially since my Mom passed, I have found that I have four types of friends.  Yes, I'm a labeler.  Feel free to label me as such.

I have a couple of friends who I always believed would be there for me no matter what, and these two have not let me down.  I don't want to think about how horrible these past few weeks would have been without these two wonderful women. 

I have several friends who haven't been super active in my life over the past few years, we just stay on each other's radar through Facebook and email, but in this time of need they have emerged to be as strong and loving and supportive and wonderful as I remember them to be back when we saw each other all the time.

I have one friend who I had not seen but a handfull of times since High School.  I haven't cooked since my mom died thanks to her, and I hear there is more food on the way.  She has been a wonderful source of strength, musical advice and spiritual guidance, and I hope to count her as a friend for a long time to come.

So these ARE the times when you find out who your friends are.

Oh and the fourth group.  These are the people who I hoped would be there for me, but weren't.  I'm not talking about the friends who were out of town or recovering from surgery or dealing with their own grief over recent losses or couldn't get off work.  I'm talking about people who, were the tables turned, I would have been there for them even though it might have resulted in uncomfortable moments for me, but they weren't there for me, and have offered no explanation as to why, leaving me nothing to think except that I had misjudged their friendship.  Maybe this is just evidence that, if the tables WERE turned, my support wouldn't be appropriate and my friendship wouldn't be appreciated.  Maybe these people never really were my friends, and I'm just stupid in thinking they ever were.

But, if that's the case, then I haven't lost anything, have I? 

It's a realignment of sorts I suppose.  A by-product of hard times like this.  People you thought were just aquaintences prove themselves to be true friends, and people you thought were true friends prove to be just aquaintences.  And in the end, I guess it's a good thing to know.

I gotta go....one of my friends just brought me ice cream.