Let’s pick up where we left off with the ACTION of Observe as it regards coping with Un-cope-able Parents.
As mentioned, you will need to draw upon your finely-honed powers of observation – listening, noticing and picking up on verbal or non-verbal cues.
Some days, it feels like your parents could pull the wool over your eyes if you let down your guard for even a moment. Rest assured! You’ll be able to spot their ruses from a mile away!
You can sniff out parental trickery.
Now, those of you are parents may have an advantage. Draw upon the instincts you use to watch out for your children and teenagers. Don’t you need hawk-like observational skills and animal-like listening acuity to sleuth out any game-playing, deceit or avoidance tactics?
Still, those who are childless like me can rely on our equivalent talents sharpened in business and elsewhere.
If nothing else, haul out the resources you developed as a child to gauge how far you could stretch the envelope of manipulation to get your way with Mom and Dad!
Or, perhaps it’s more apropos to take you back to teen-hood when you had to sneak past curfew on a hot date.
Part 1 – “The Stolen Garage Door Opener”
Either way, are you ready for another story? You know I have a limitless supply in my arsenal!
Just when everything was going along peacefully in the household – Bam! Another emergency hit. In 2011, around the one-year anniversary of my mother’s transition, my increasingly-disarrayed father did a wholesale replacement of the garage door system.
A second time! It was a fait accompli before I even had a chance to utter a syllable of sense. Yes, we talked every day, but he never even mentioned he was “considering” it!
Do you want to know my Dad’s ingrained theory? He refused to ever be swayed.
Here is my father’s theory.
He would argue you into the ground if you suggest anything other than the woman delivering his mail somehow broke through the front door (he kept it religiously locked day and night), immediately found the old device on a littered bench in the hall and stole it with the objective of creeping back during the dark to commit who-knows-what nefarious acts in his garage!
Unhappily, the case for logic was not aided by the fact she was apparently nowhere to be found on the postal route several weeks later or since! “Aha, I was right all along”, my father chortled. “They must have uncovered her scheme and summarily dismissed her.”
To discover what actually happened, tune in next time…
Carol-Ann Hamilton
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