Superficial

Keira and I were talking yesterday about friends. The kind you want and the kind you don’t want.
She was best friends last year with a girl (we’ll call her Sally) who didn’t treat her as an equal. Everything had to be Sally’s way. Keira didn’t usually get to have a say. Sally told Keira she embarrassed her at her birthday party. Keira doesn’t know why and Sally never could give her an explanation. Sally also pulled Keira’s pants down in front of Sally’s cousin (we’ll call him John). Sally thought that was really funny.

Not cool.


So Keira broke off the friendship. I backed her because I didn’t think that was the kind of friend I would want either. They are slowly mending their relationship, but I don’t believe it will ever get back to the way it was.


Then Keira told me about another girl (we’ll call her Jane) that she spent some time with last summer. When Jane’s parents brought Keira home from their house one day, our dog (a puppy at the time) jumped up on their driver’s side door to see them and scratched it. Apparently it was a new car (a Hummer no less). I spoke to the mom a few days later and offered to pay for any repairs. She told me her husband was able to buff it out and not to worry about it. Okay, I won’t.


But now Jane is telling Keira that she didn’t invite Keira to her birthday party/sleepover recently because our dog jumped up on her mom’s car and her mom doesn’t like us now.


What???!!!


Seriously???!!!


That happened like 9 months ago!


Can someone truly be that superficial that their car is more important than a friendship? Does she realize the example she is setting for her daughter?


Or is there more to it than that? I suspect there is. Now I’m just speculating here … but you see, when they dropped Keira off, we didn’t have the siding on our house yet. So we were still the silver house on our road. A fact, I will admit, embarrassed me some. But I knew we were working on it and siding was coming soon. (It did! And it looks great!).


So my suspicion is that the mom thinks she’s better than we are because they have a beautiful log home and two nice cars. And probably all the debt that goes along with it … which we don’t have.


She’s trying to “keep up with the Jones’s” – as Dave Ramsey would say. We’re not.


Would we like to have a nicer, bigger house and a couple of nicer cars? Uh, yeah! But we’re willing to wait and save and pay for the things we need. And we realize that is totally against the American way of thinking, but it is Dave Ramsey’s (and Grandma’s) way and IT WORKS!!!


If Jane doesn’t want to be Keira’s friend because she doesn’t like Keira for who she is … that’s one thing. But to not like her because her mom is too materialistic to get past stupid, petty things is just utterly ridiculous.


This makes me want to wring this woman’s neck! And it also makes me so sad. Are her material possessions really that important? Those things can be fixed/replaced, but a broken heart in a rejected little girl … that can take years to get over.

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