Ah ... so it seems that the "best friend" issue was big for you -- did you feel guilty, it sounds like, for your best friend's tough time?
No, I did not feel guilt then and I don't now. Most of my life, I just "knew" in a gut-feeling way, that skipping had been a bad thing for me. It was only when confronted in the last few years with the data that skipping was "good" that I came up with the best-friend theory to make sense of why my experience deviated from the data. But the BF theory makes sense and I do now feel sorry for my friend.
She never articulated the resentment per se. She also never clearly articulated the "rule": we could be friends at home, but I was not to hang with her and her friends at school. It became clear, though, that that was The Rule and I respected it. We remained friends at home until middle school and I have many fond memories of playing in the woods, riding bikes, baking in the easy-bake oven, swimming and practicing cheer-leading moves with her (I even have a permanent scar from one of the moves!).
