Sunday, October 14, 2012

The lies "we" tell

There is a family at our former preschool that we got to know on a somewhat decent basis – only through school events and birthday parties though. The husband works for my same company, but in a position far removed from my own. The wife, works for one of the same contractors as my husband. Our kids are the same ages – though the older ones are opposite genders and never really got to know each other. Our younger girls though were fast friends from age 1.
 
The husband would tend to take their kids to birthday parties where he and my husband hit it off well. They frequently talked about “we gotta get the kids together for a playdate”. Well believe it or not, after 4 years of saying this, it never happened.
 
It wasn’t for lack of trying on our part – after about the third time I invited the kids over to play and it just didn’t work out, I have to admit, I quit trying. AB kept insisting, “we should have them over for dinner sometime”, and I would usually retort something along the lines of how he and the husband tend to get along, but I had nothing in common with wife and I wasn’t sure they really wanted to do anything with us – that maybe they were just “talking the talk”. And AB would shrug and accept whatever my reason was for that day.
 
Well then as things happen, we left the school and moved Skadi to public kindergarten (OMG the horror!) and they kind of fell off our radar.
 
Then last weekend I escaped to Target for a few things and lo and behold ran into the wife with the two girls.
 
“Hey guys, good to see you. How are you doing?” I ask.
 
“Good,” wife says seeming apparently uncomfortable and like she wants to run the other way.
 
“I haven’t seen you girls in ages, how is school?” I ask.
 
“I thought you guys moved far away?” littlest 5 year old pipes up.
 
(Duh, I didn’t quite grasp it.)
 
“Nope, we are still here, Skadi is just at another school,” I reply.
 
“Mom and dad said you moved far away,” she says again.
 
(At this point I am assuming she is mistaking us for someone else.)
 
“Nope, we are still in our same house,” I said. “You should come over for a playdate sometime, Skadi would love to see you!”
 
I smile at wife and realize the arm waving.
 
Her arms waving. As in what you do to your spouse at a party when he starts inviting your boss over for dinner and not realizing it is your boss… or something like that.
 
“Oh,” I stopped. “I guess we will have to talk about that.”
 
“Well, we will see you later!” says wife and hurries off down the aisle.
 
Ok.
 
WTF?
 
Analysis?
 
AB assumes that it was just easier to push of little girl’s incessant whining (which we heard every day we picked our daughter up from preschool) for a playdate with Skadi by lying and saying we moved away then to actually make it work? But why wouldn’t they want to just make it work, get the girls together?
 
Have we at some point offended them?
 
Do they not realize what a freaking small town we all live in and that we were BOUND to run into each other at some point?
 
Analysis welcome.

2 comments:

Jay said...

How very odd! And then to wave arms at you to perpetuate their lie to the child -ODD very odd.

Unknown said...

People never cease to amaze me. It honestly seems to me that maybe she kinda felt the same way you did, maybe that you and her don't really have much in common, so why pursue something that's been so troublesome for 4 years? Rather than taking the logical route, as you obviously did, she decided that deceiving her child was an easier and simpler solution. This is where rational people (like you or I) would stop and go "wha..??" because we can't understand there being any rational thought behind that. The only answer I can offer you is this-people are stupid.
-S