Hi Arfie,
This showed up on my feed. When you say your friends abandoned you do you mean that they all went back to "normal" while you are still taking covid precautions?

I have several friends who are involved in active grand parenting. Meaning they babysit a lot. All summer they take care of grandkids. You know how my adult daughters have estranged from me so I don't see my GC at all right now. I think you have the opposite of my situation. Your old friendships died away when your life changed. But this is the same for me when I was first estranged. I tend to think people avoid other human being's trauma or emotional pain. We maybe find a few people who can handle other's problems or emotional pain or big life changes. I was just reading a story about how many GP are raising their GC. You are to be commended for being willing to do this hard work, but loving work.

Maybe sometimes our life trauma scares people so much they can't handle it. I have heard that friends abandon those whose spouses die sometimes.

So are you blaming yourself for mistaking them for true friends who can handle the big traumas of your own life? Please don't. Please think of them as people you learned from in some way and who need to be out of your life now for whatever reason.

If yes, well me, too -- easy to be bitter when people abandon you. I was very upset at all the friends who have dumped me over the estrangement situation or showed deep non-understanding and some even blamed me for it. I carry this wish to still have their friendship but I know I have changed tremendously and they aren't right for the life I have now.

I also want to let go of the bitterness of abandonment. In responding to you, I think we simply have to decide we won't be bitter and change what we say to ourselves. Say goodbye with love. I finally realized my one friend who switched to how she only did Facebook friendships had this controlling husband and it finally dawned on me years later that he didn't like our friendship. He wanted her attention all on himself. It took me over 10 years to understand this. Plus I was going through a divorce and I think I overwhelmed her. Then came the parental alienation and estrangements. When I got remarried, she said she wanted to go and she was going to ask her husband could they buy her a plane ticket. Then crickets, I got excited and I never heard nothing from her again. Now I understand more in that her husband told her no and she didn't want to tell me what he said.

There is truth to the say about how people are in our lives for a season, and then they are not. Doesn't mean we are bad people or they are bad people. Just means life gets messy. And sometimes we have to pivot and wish people well instead of being pissed off. I am glad you wrote this post. I got to pivot and tell my ghost friendships "I wish you well" instead of constantly mourning them. And I need to call this woman back and check on her. I've had too much to do and I'd like to blow it off. But thank you, you reminded me she needs me to call her and see how she is doing. Hugs.

Peace Arfie. Ouch… but maybe there is opportunity here to find folks in similar situations? Grandparents who raise their grandkids? Maybe there’s a meetup or a support group online for this? It just might be an opportunity to make new friends who share a sympatico lifestyle and maybe similar experience with loss of friends?
Sending a big hug!

no artgirl. i mean they used the covidic precautions as an excuse to abandon us, en masse. and completely. as a 65 year old with 3 freshly traumatized children, it was not even possible for me to go covidic. by the end of march, 2020, the children (then ages 6, 3 and 8 months) were grieving the loss of their world (school, etc) at least as deeply as they were grieving the loss of both parents.

ditto for your scenario, hasty. being involved with your gk's is not the same thing as being all the gk's have in this world. i miss being a real grandmother. these days i call my gk's, "foster kids" because it better describes the scope of the situation and saves us grand stereotypes which serve as a cruel reminder of just how much we lost in that fatal car wreck.

thanks mark, i keep hearing that grandfamilies are the fastest growing trend in the industrial world, but we are not finding each other. the precious few i have found don't have time or energy for meet-ups. however, the social opportunities are starting up, mostly with the parents of friends the children are making. i am beginning to think i'll never again socialize with anyone who remembers all the same presidents i do. still, hope springs eternal. i've never admired the youthenization of the "young at heart" philosophy, but i can deal with cross-generational friendships.

It sounds like you really want to stay in touch.

yes, i really wanted to stay in touch with those old friends, but it was not meant to be. choosing between losing these children in the foster care system and keeping in touch with old friends is a no-brainer. enjoy your age-segregated geriatric life, old friends. i confess to a great deal of envy in that acceptance. i miss retirement fiercely.

processing. . .

Arfie, it's hard. I feel for you, and wish you the best in processing the feelings and moving through the challenges.

thank you, mid. for me, an important part of processing is keeping ^it^ out in the open and talking about ^it^. for three years, the mandates, isolation and censorship has blocked discussion. we still don't know if ^it^ is over and nobody's talking.

cultural gas-lighting? ^it^ never happened.

Dr Pauline Boss has a book about her theory of ambiguous loss and the pandemic called "The Myth of Closure". Short and with tips for helping ourselves. I think our ghost friendships become ambiguous loss, and I call them that because they in our minds where we think about them and miss them and wish they were still around. The person is not deceased but gone from our lives = ambiguous loss. Unclear, uncertain, hard to cope with. Thus you can see how the pandemic fits into ambiguous loss = unclear, uncertain, hard to cope with.

You have had a lot of losses. Some ambiguous, some more of the clear cut type. It takes a while to process all of this. Of course you miss the just being grandmother not mother figure, not full time parenting. Our feelings about this are normal.

And the pandemic was a huge kick in the pants to the whole world. What is the truth and are we being gaslighted is a good question. We are not wrong to feel that this has been a crazy 3 years and feel some kind of loss about it. I myself have lost friendships with various people relating to covid and how they are or were reacting to it. Some had this great anxiety that caused them to lash out at others and become the blamers from the hate on TV news. They don't know it but they were spewing hate about people like me to me. It is frankly just painful.

I get depressed when I live in the ambiguous loss stuff. I try to stay looking forward, and sometimes I have to force myself out of the old ambiguous loss mine field. I have a friend who simply shuts her mind to all the past and she actually never heals from it and has bouts of irrational anger at times. I have another friend who lives in such fear and anxiety (mostly about covid) that she goes into the gaslighting of others mode and that is pretty terrible, too. I'm trying to stay educated, logical, and out of anxiety as best I can. We can stay strong together.

high fiber chew food, hasty. thank you. it is resonating loudly.

in october, 2019 when the fatal accident called me out of retirement for my second parenting career, the change of lifestyle was enormous, starting with the loss of the beloved rivers i was happily researching at the time. the return to the dust bowl and the rocky creeks the locals dare to call, "rivers" was big, all by its lonesome. i miss my retired life as much as i miss the river region. i miss being a real grandma who gets to hand the kids back, spoiled rotten, after the fun is done. all ambiguous losses, if i am defining "ambiguous loss" reasonably.

and then along came corona. . . does loss get more ambiguous than that? is ^it^ over yet? are we safe yet? for sure, the covidic inflation has me doubting our safety, big time. i'm supposed to raise three children on a fixed income with groceries more expensive every time the cupboards are bare?

yea, that coronaphobia seems to be more pandemic than the virus ever was, especially among my age peers. i gots to admit, my give a damn is busted. i have enough to deal with already. healing hopes for all. no exceptions.