I met C and his wife for the first time when I was in middle school. They were friends of my parents but we had relocated from their town a while back so I had no recollection of them prior to that meeting. Mrs. C was quite the character - fashionable, loud and colorful. They had no kids at that time presumably because she was not ready to settle down quite yet. C had acquired himself a trophy wife and was willing to bide his time. The next time I met C, I was divorced and living alone with little J in an apartment here in America. My parents were visiting us at the time. C and his son (a college student at the time) were in the area and they stopped by. The meeting was enjoyable and gave my parents much to reminisce about given how far they go back. The kid was a bit bored because he had no shared history and there is only so much he could play with little J.
Since then C and I stayed in touch. He visited us if he was in town which was not too often, I was invited to visit his family in Oregon but that never came to pass. There was a decade long hiatus in our communication. Much had changed in my life during that period. After J left to college, I reached out to C hoping to resume where we had left off. I was not bound by the school calendar anymore so I could come by to meet them.
I reached out and he replied promptly. But it was sad to see that C was only interested in understanding if I had been able to survive and if my daughter had ended up a train-wreck. He clearly had not given me very good odds of making it as a single-mother. The fact that my life is more on even keel now and J is doing well greatly diminished his desire to stay in contact with me. I used to think of C as the next best thing to family but it turns out I had been a sideshow in his life - an unfolding disaster to look at from time to time and feel good about his own life circumstances. The fact that my hardest days were behind me and the flow was more normal now made me irrelevant to him.
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