It's times like this when you find out who your real friends are...

...and the findings can be a bit surprising. 

On top of all the legal stuff, I'm sick now.  And of all things, one of my "friends" who has tried to "help" me by attempting to suck me into his multi-level marketing cult, decided this is the appropriate time to blame me for being sick because I didn't buy his snake oil. How disgusting! 

Then after another sleepless night of coughing: a knock at the door, official papers for a lawsuit. Apparently I'm liable for my darling hubby's medical bills even though he took all the disability money and ran. Lovely. If I'm liable, shouldn't I have also had the right to refuse medical treatment? There should be some sort of medical Miranda rights thingy that they are required to read you at the ER. "You have the right to refuse treatment. Anything that will be billed to you later must be quoted to you in detail before administration..." Furthermore, if a hospital is treating a low income person on MediCal and they are dealing with vendors who do not accept MediCal, they should skip non-covered treatments unless the person "responsible" for the bill is given a quote and approves the expenditure.

I'm too sick to be profound, but I just had to vent. Snake Oil Dude thinks it's my fault that I'm sick--that's not such a big deal because he never was a close friend. There's another person who I thought I was close with who I learned simply cannot handle the drama of where I am right now. I can't move fast enough for her liking (and I'm sure if I did, others would find fault in that.) 

If I have to second guess everyone I consider sharing honestly with about where I am right now, I'd rather just go it alone. It hurts too much to have people heaping on blame when I already feel like a total failure. Throw in these uncontrollable coughing spasms to the mix, and I feel like just crawling under a porch, curling up, and dying. 

After being served the papers for this lawsuit this morning, I thought how my critical friends would likely blame me for that, too. I'm not on top of things like I should be. How could I let it come to this? Yes. I know it's my fault, so go pat yourselves on your smug little backs! I should have dealt with the creditors. Or maybe I should have driven off that overpass the day before my hubby's accident... if I had died then, he wouldn't have gone to work the next day and everything would have been dandy. Now I'm being irrational, right? Why don't you just blame me for that, too? After all, apparently, that's what friends are for.

Transitions

I do feel for Maria as she goes through her "transition." I heard some radio commentators mocking her today for this video:

They were calling her whiny. True, it would probably be a whole lot easier going through a "transition," with a couple million dollars to navigate it, but I still think it's pretty low to laugh at another person's pain.

I did find it interesting that the same sort of extended family health and grief issues compelled Maria to put off leaving Arnold, even though she wanted to do it long ago. She definitely could have afforded good lawyers, but still she waited. As a mother myself, I'm sure the thought of pairing the loss of her children's grandparents with the split up of their parents' marriage seemed too great a stress to inflict on them. That was likely part of the consideration. She also probably didn't want to bring harm to her husband's political career (wait until he's back to being an entertainer--an actor splitting up seldom causes a lasting ripple of shock.)

So, after 25 years, she takes her time trying to figure out how to transition to a new life. She makes her own vulnerability visible to the general public, and a couple of radio jocks giggle about it and call her whiny. If she had come out more decisively, she would have been called a bitch. Whiny or bitchy . . . a gal really can't win. I guess you've really just got to be confident enough in your words and your actions to not care what other people say.

It's hard not to anticipate the attacks, though. I've seen couples split up and their mutual friends take sides and line up as if poised for battle, prolonging the pain of at least one of their "friends". I'm reminded of the brutality of a couple mutual "friends" of Doug and I (remember, "My Best 'Just Friend'"?) Those mutual friends quickly became Doug's friends and my ex-friends . . . because I was "bitchy." They may not have used that exact word, but I vividly remember Doug's friend Matt muttering "Hi Hateful" and "Jezebel" every time I walked by him on campus. I had no idea why he was saying anything like that to me when it was Doug who had broken my heart so badly I was walking about on the verge of crumbling to pieces. I'm not sure if Matt ever realized that his future wife, Lisa, had carefully engineered the whole break up because she wanted me out of the way so she could date Doug. Now Matt and Lisa are happily married to each other, and apparently oblivious to the destruction they brought about. One day, way back then, when I confronted Matt and asked why he called me Jezebel, he simply said, "Well, at least you weren't married." When I see Matt and Lisa fawning all over each other now, those words come back, echoing in my pain, and I just want to catapult back in time so that I can boldly answer, "Well, maybe we would have been if it weren't for you and Lisa!"

Transitions. In the words of Maria Shriver: "It's so stressful to not know what you're doing next . . ."