Mostly musings: everyday life, funny stuff, kids, friends, and more.

Nuisance neighbors – I’m not sure if they’re over-protective or trying to stir it up June 19, 2009

I have this neighbor. I’ll call her Lela. She and I used to be friends. We started this Thursday night girls thing together and had so much friend. We ended up having a steady group of great girls who would get together on Thursdays, watch Gray’s Anatomy, drink wine, talk about our kids and husbands, laugh and have a good time. Then, out of nowhere, Lela starts going weird on us and abruptly stops the Thursday night get-togethers which she had always wanted at her house. Then she starts doing this hot-cold thing where she was her normal self for a while and then she’d seemingly turn into her alternate personality which is angry, short and grudge-holding.

Over the past 2 years or so, my other friends and I have missed the old Lela and have been cautiously happy when she seemed to come back to the good Lela for a while. But we knew that history dictates she will turn back to her other self soon.

One of the sort of understandable but strange things is that she and her husband are so overprotective of their kids. No I can almost set the record on being over-protective but they put me to shame by a mile. I know that being over-protective can be a bad thing. I still tell Kate to look both ways before she crosses the street – and she’s 8. Periodically when Howard hears me do it, he will ask me if she remembers to wipe her butt if I don’t tell her.

But, a couple times Lela told us stories about things that happened to one of her kids like an argument with another 5-yr old and she would start crying! It was like she could feel their pain. While this empathy is a good quality, we have to put the pain that a 5-yr old feels when they are in an argument with another 5-yr old.

So, the other night, I was on the phone with my grandmother. I hear the cell phone ring but I don’t check it. Then my phone rings. I quickly look at the caller ID. It’s Lela. I realize that she’s the person that probably just called my cell phone a minute ago but I don’t think anything about it and keep talking to Grandma. Then she calls through again. I tell my grandmother I have to go because it must be an emergency. I answer the phone and she says “What HAPPENED”?!?!?!?! I know how dramatic she is so I say “huh”? She tells me that my son was swinging a rope and it hit her son. Now this does sound like it’s something that could happen. But, I’m not upset. I tell her I’ll go check it out and let her know. I go up the street. My son is there w/ 3 other boys. They don’t know I’m coming so they haven’t had time to check their stories or anything – as if this is such a BFD that Lela thinks it is. I ask them what happened. They say “Huh”? Either like mother like son and friends or this certainly isn’t such a BFD. I give them the context of her son, my son, rope… One of the boys says that my son was swinging a rope in the middle of the street. Her son was riding by on his bike on the sidewalk. He was watching my son, not paying attention, and brushed the pavers with his leg. Because Lela is making such a BFD, I ask the boys every which way if there is any chance that the rope could have come within even a foot of her son. They all say the rope was yards away and that her son was just watching and not paying attention.

So, I take my son and the other 3 boys down to tell Lela what happened. They tell her, of course she’s crying, she says that’s not what happened. I tell her all I can do is have the boys tell her what happened. She says her 2 boys say that’s not what happened. I say that’s all we can do and we leave.

Oh, BTW, while I was talking to my son and his friends, both of their parents – in sequence – came out of their houses asking “what happened”? Lela was on the warpath calling everyone down the street. So last night Lela’s husband calls one of the other parents and wants to have “a talk”. He’s on the way to take boy scouts to the store to prepare for a campout but generously goes down there for about 45 minutes to talk about this non-event. Don’t they realize that they’re hurting their relationships with their neighbors? After all, the bottom line was that there was no bruise, scrape, bump, mark or anything. Nothing really happened. I could pull my hair out. But perhaps that’s just what they want.