It’s an old school friend from where I grew up in New Zealand who for context I haven’t seen since we moved to the uk around 1998. She added me about ten years ago and the messages have been slowly creeping up since then to the point where it’s really annoying me.
It started with a chatty "hi what are you up to?" message once a month, then weekly then two or three times a week. Then three years ago she had her son and I’ve guessed from what she says that all her real life friends dropped away and suddenly she’s messaged me three or four times a day and it’s just too much. On the occasions I am happy to chat she never wants a ten minute catch up, it’s always the same repetitive questions and topics of conversation that she never listens to.
This weekend alone she sent my six messages about her lock down status, and four asking about what I’m up to despite the fact I last spoke on Thursday. Because of the time difference these are through the night and morning and I feel guilty but it’s got to the point where half the time I just ignore them in hopes she’ll assume I’m sleeping. When she realises I’m not replying when I get up in the morning she starts sending "hope you have a good *whichever day it happens to be." every night and hope you had a good day every morning on the off chance I’ll reply and get dragged into a long in depth chat about every aspect of her life.
I know the simple answer is block her but I’d feel awful doing it, after I moved away she had a traumatic brain injury so it’s not really her fault she repeats the same conversation over and over again, she’s said she has memory problems so I doubt she realises she’s doing it. She also very isolated, no family near by, no close family and a partner who has red flags flying all over him.
I’ve point blank told her several times that it’s too much messaging and she either gets in a shitty mood over it saying she’s just being friendly or forgets I’d said it after a few weeks which is why I tend to ignore most the messages and just check in once in a while.
Lately though I’m finding it impossible to deal with her as her sons being investigated for ASD and the messages I’m getting are just making me annoyed. My son is autistic so at first I tried to be supportive but her mum and partner don’t want to admit there’s something not right and after weeks of messaging me that she knew he had it etc etc she’s decided that the specialist are wrong and it’s totally normal for him to not speak at three and she’s not going to bother taking him back to see the specialists or to the speech therapy and it’s just winding me up. I know she’s entitled to think what she wants but she’s constantly doing stuff like this and keeps messaging me about it for back up that I just can’t in god consciousness give. An example of what I struggle with is the NZ equivalent of health visitor’s flagged up his behavioural and language issues and social services insisted she sent him to nursery as they suspected the fact he sees no other kids was a contributing factor, he caught the usual colds and had croup a couple of times so she pulled him out and wouldn’t be told that all kids catch colds from time to time. I kept getting messages about how those silly child protection people were trying to makes her send him but she knew better and I’ll be honest I just didn’t want to hear it anymore as I just can’t agree with her. It’s just so frustrating to hear.
So any advice on how to deal with it would be gratefully received as I’d feel guilty blocking her completely as she is very vulnerable in real life and it sounds weird but I don’t want to leave her entirely under her partner’s influence.