GRUDGE

Part of Speech: noun
Definition: bitterness
Synonyms: animosity, animus, antipathy, aversion, bad blood, dislike, enmity, grievance, hard feelings, hate, hatred, ill will, injury, injustice, malevolence, malice, maliciousness, malignancy, peeve, pet peeve, pique, rancor, resentment, spite, spitefulness, spleen, venom

Grudges, I am full of them, and I hold them for a long time. In the last year my mother has been trying to convince me that I should forgive a childhood friend (she wasn’t really my friend but a daughter of my parents friends who was also my age), this girl was mean and a bully. She liked making the other girls at my birthday parties cry and when I was 5 or 6 I was at her house and she locked me in her parents room and wouldn’t let me leave, I was in hysterics. When my parents decided I was old enough to choose my own friends I no longer had anything to do with her. I hate her to this day and I still want nothing to do with her. I don’t care that she has signed up to save the world through the Peace Corp or whatever. There is nothing she can do that will make me forget/forgive what she did to me when I had no say in whether I wanted to be around her. Yes it seems petty that 25-27 years later I am so adamant about my feelings, but when I hear my parents talk about how wonderful she is I can’t help but feel like that little girl screaming and pounding on that bedroom door begging to be let out and just go home. I see no reason to change my opinions about people who royally fucked me over. The guy who molested me when I was 13 could find the cure for cancer, AIDS and world hunger, I still want him dead. All those kids who treated me like shit at my parents church and the assholes from high school, I don’t want to hear about them. I just don’t care. For some reason my folks have a hard time understanding that I don’t want an update on the people who treated me like crap or thought they were better than me. I have spent my time clearing my life of people like that for a reason.

But then there is Kate. That was a whole other issue. I managed to get over that because I had to ask myself, what had Kate really done to me that earned my being so angry. The simple fact was, she had done nothing. We spent four very intense and emotional (it was high school) years together. There wasn’t a day that we didn’t see each other or at least spend an hour on the phone. Then we graduated and went on to separate schools and paths in life. We tried for awhile to make each other fit, but life being what it is it just wasn’t working and that hurt. A lot. It always hurts when someone important to you moves on without you. The anger (at least for me) came from not understanding why something that was important in my life was no longer as important in hers, and the other way around as well. From there the we just got stubborn. As adults (and yes Kate we qualify as adults) we were finally able to accept that we now can fit. Will we end up like Mom & Molly?? Who knows, but we will always have a connection.

The moral of the story?? I guess it’s just don’t screw me over. And if you do, I am not going to care what you are doing 5, 10, 15 or 25 years later.