I need some perspective from the ladies here.
A long time ago when I moved to a new area I made a huge effort to make some new friends, in fact I got together a group of women all in a similar phase of life and we started to have a great thing going. I wasn't able to get together as often as they did because they were stay home moms and I worked, so its probably safe to say that their friendships were more close knitt than mine with them, but we were still all good friends for years and would always invite each other to events and so on.
I was nothing but super nice to those group of women.
Then a couple years ago or so, times for me got extremely busy because of a ton of life events hitting- some of them pretty traumatic, but I was hardly able to see and socialize with anyone for quite a while. My friends didn't make any extra efforts to check up on me and didnt do much other than say a few things here and there once in a while on facebook. One of them in particular that I was great friends with, I was especially sad when after a long hiatus from me when I finally showed up on a girls night out, she didn't even bother to ask how I was doing and was just too busy talking about herself.
Then I noticed that she had stopped inviting me to any of the events she used to (birthdays etc) and was always too busy to come to mine. It seems like the group of friendships that I'd started moved on to simply be friends amongst themselves and I became "excluded" out of the club.
I wondered and wondered and wondered why until I got sick of wondering and confronted some of them simply asking if anything is wrong or if I'd done anything wrong (I can't imagine what since I didn't even around to have done anything wrong). Noone gave me a straight answer and rather said that nothing's really going on with me and that I'd certainly done nothing to offend them.
However the friendships continued without me.
I mourn them in a way, since they represented a very special time of my life and I thought we'd be friends for a long time. Aside of that, I'm ticked off that I'd spent so much time and effort to try to make these friendships in the first place and then in the end, couldn't hold on to them. Now I have to start from scratch building new friendships and I have some great friends (not part of that original group) but I'm bitter about why it is now so obvious that they don't care to be friends anymore.
Because I work fulltime, have kids etc, time that I can spend on building friendships is extremely limitted, and I'm upset that I had put in all this time into something that ended up fruitless long term.
Im hurt and not sure how to process my feelings. Any advice?