One of my dad's favorite things was to try and turn us against each other. He always made a point of mentioning that Lucas was my mother's favorite (not true in the least; she never played favorites) and tended to punctuate compliments with a "not as good as -insert sibling here-. I like to think that we were able to ignore it, for the most part, but it got to us. Whenever we got into a particularly bad fight, dad inevitably came up at some point, no matter what started the argument.
Usually dad was a bit subtle about it. The incident with the demerits was not one of those times.
He decided (I can't remember what prompted it) that he would award his children points for doing things he wanted, such as getting him a glass of water or massaging his feet or taking his side in a fight.
Rather than rallying us to him, it pushed us together. When one of us got between him and mom, or pointed out one of his lies, we did it knowing we wouldn't hate each other for it.
Eventually, dad's shouting out the demerits given became a bit of a joke for us, and he moved on to other things. It might not seem like much, but it gave us hope to stand up together, even against something so simple.
No comments:
Post a Comment