Part Three: If Only You Loved Me, and Treated Me the Way You Should…

Triple Blame Whammy, Part 3, is for all the other people in your life who aren’t doing what they could to keep you on an even keel.

Sisters and brothers who consistently ‘make’ you uptight and are completely impregnable to your efforts to show them a better way to live.  And there are the friends you’ve tried to train…and also that sniggly therapist who isn’t buying into how you are the only person in your family who isn’t a complete wreck. 

Heck, I’m even including those people who cut in front of me.  (Okay, sometimes it’s the drivers ahead of me that let them in, but they are still slowing me down, they are still responsible for me gritting my teeth, still responsible for making me at least 20 seconds later getting home and that’s not fair!)  Coming off the freeway to reach our house, the road is two lanes.  Between the exit ramp and the main road heading to the hills, there are four stoplights.  Before the last light there are four signs indicating that only the right lane continues when the street breaks off to the right.  There are fifty foot fat painted arrows indicating the upcoming narrowing.  Any person looking out through the windshield can see that at the last light, the right lane, and only the right lanes peels off and continues through a yield.  I’m willing to wager that the majority of drivers in the five o’clock traffic drive the same route home every day.  Thus, the one lane only curving off to the right is no surprise. 

Yet, every day, a bunch of these people roar past the line of cars stacked up in the right lane –because we are kind, law-abiding, emotionally mature, just-plain-better-than-the-average people who can flippin read.  These people whizz past those of us in the stack–you know the rest.  They sit there in the left lane at the head of the line…and have the nerve to turn on their blinker, like, “Oh dear, I didn’t see this coming.”

As of this moment, I give those people the right to keep right on being themselves.  They no longer owe it to me to change.  I will find another way to deal with the extra 20 seconds I now choose to donate freely to my ride home. Now as for my siblings….