New Ways

"You're smiling like the cat that ate the canary," I said to Michaela. "Care to share with the group?"

Michaela said, "My son's dim-witted, egomaniac father brought his nineteen year old wife with him to pick up Jayson. As they were getting in their car, she went on a tirade about how I should be raising Jayson. She says I'm making all the mistakes her parents made. At the end of her tirade, she asked me if Jayson had a set bedtime."

"How did you answer this woman?" James asked. "Did you curse her?"

"As I was rummaging through my purse for my keys, I saw a nail file. My first thought was to drive it through her eye socket into her empty head. Instead, I just told her to put him in bed half an hour before whatever bedtime her dim-witted, egomaniac husband had set for her."

Ann snorted, everybody else laughed.
"And how did this woman respond?" James asked

"She didn't. She had nothing to say. I walked away smiling. It was so strange."

"How would you have handled an encounter like this in the past?" I asked.

"You mean when I was drinking?" Michaela asked. "I would have called her every name I could think of, threatened her, and stormed off to get loaded. That's how I handled everything that annoyed me. That's how just about everything became a trigger for me to drink."

"Progress," was all I needed to say.

Today I will consider new ways to handle people, places, and things that annoy me.

AArdvarks (c) 2013 by Ken Montrose