People who make you go Arrrggghhh!!!!

Arghhhhh! There are some people in one’s life that will always make you feel inferior. One suspects that actually they go out of their way to do so.
These people are subtle and so the insult comes upon one unaware and even if you know it’s coming it still has the power to devastate.
This I call the Sugar Sweet Viper Modus operandi; one Sadie is a black belt in. She is quite incessant and incredibly patient and she tends to drip drip her poison all the time wearing away at your soul and even when you feel totally crushed she seems to take great delight in grinding her heel in; why not? It’s in her nature anyway.
Sadie’s parents and mine have been friends for years and we holiday together as our husbands are mates too: it gets complicated. But I loathe her and always will. She’s just plain mean.
Not that it was always so but I think I was a sucker. It wasn’t until I got married that she went really funny. At the time she was unmarried and being older than I this, I think, really got her goat. She was cleverer and prettier than me and certainly a lot thinner, so why did I get there first and not her? I suppose that was the problem but life’s like that.
I must admit it did come as a shock for even though I would never have counted her as one of my closet friends I did think she was one.
After my marriage she went on a whispering campaign letting people infer that I had kicked her out of the flat she was sharing with my husband prior to our marriage but come on he was never going to be sharing a flat with her while married to me there wasn’t enough room to start with and anyway we had told her months before that that was going to have to come to an end. Believe it or not she was still in the flat when we returned from honeymoon and she left owing my husband £300. You would have thought that would have been the end of a beautiful friendship but as I said it was complicated and anyway she worms out of trouble like an eel.
Over the years I weigh Sadie's words carefully and try to look at the bigger picture in line with her way of thinking. If she bounds up to me and wraps her arms round me in a big hug I can’t take it at face value. I have to think who’s she trying to impress, who has she been talking to and will she use my response for or against me? If I respond joyously then she doesn’t lose face with whomever she is trying to impress, if I respond unfavourably will it mean that she can tell whoever it is: “But you saw her reaction to me, she (meaning me) is just awful, weird, loopy etc”
I’ve been caught out in that one far too many times to count. I never know how I am meant to respond. If I throw my arms back people wouldn’t believe me and if I don’t well you know!
I have been bad too; I deliberately down play my sons in favour of her girls because let’s face it the last thing I want to do is get them involved in her games. If the boys are misbehaving, i.e. running around and being loud like boys should do, I say I can’t do a thing with them and don’t. I say my boys are behind in school work and everything. Just so that she can be comforted in the knowledge that she’s the better Mum. I find it easier but it still hurts when she seeks reassurance that she’s the better one all that false caring for me and my sons’ welfare - arrrggghhhh! Thing is it didn’t have to be this way.