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When a certain man's son was in the fifth grade at a private school, the task of picking the boy up after school was shared by both the working mother and the working father. The father traveled a significant amount of time as a sales rep with a big territory to cover, so when he was working from home he would often get to pick the boy up after school and have quality time with him.

One particular morning the wife, as she was herding the boy out the door to the car to take him to school, said back over her shoulder in a not loud enough voice, 'You need to pick up **** after school today', then shut the door and was gone. The father did not hear this instruction, being in another part of the house perhaps making noises with morning routine.

The wife/mother used this passive-aggressive methodology to entrap the father into failures to function as she wanted him to do. She created these episodes as a means to leverage the feelings of others toward her husband, most significantly the feelings of the son and the in-laws.

The time came for the boy to be picked up after school. He was expecting the father since he had heard the instructions from a closer vantage point, being in front of the mother as she left the house. When the father did not show up, the boy walked to the end of the school parking lot, to the house of his babysitter and asked to call his grandparents to pick him up. They arrived and took him to their house.

On the way to their home the grandparents stopped where they expected the father to be, and sure enough he was there on he tennis courts with three men, playing doubles with clients for the sales position. The father played too much tennis ...

The shaming of the father was by then a routine the grandparents (the mother's parents) had been enlisted for on several occasions, using just such passive-aggressive trapping as this occurrence.

Now, the father, knowing that he was on the road too much, did not try to correct the record since he believed that the son's trust in his mother, for security daily, out weighed the need to correct the passive-aggressive trap.

This conclusion did not fix the problem of passive-aggressive behavior, nor end the trapping game, nor reduce the father's escapes through tennis and golf. It did not even remain a significant episode to the father, except when he failed to meet the wife/mother's expectations on some other issue and she would pull the episode from her gunnysack of 'offenses' to make fresh once again this triumph of her passive-aggressive manipulations of the family, the father, and the son.

What the episode did cause, every time it was raised again and again, was to feed a root of bitterness the father had toward the mother whom he loved but could not understand fully. The repeated gunnysack reliving episodes caused a growing bitterness in the wife, as she was unconscious that her continued harboring a sense of being wronged only made her more passive-aggressive in ever more devious ways.

The husband's bitterness caused more escape to golf and tennis and less involvement in the home. A vicious cycle was thus kept active until the end of the marriage.

Eventually the marriage was abruptly ended by the wife and for years the son harbored distrust of the father and a sense that the father did not really care about him growing up.

The only hope for cleansing of such life lessons is that the son become conscious of the mother's passive-aggressive behaviors throughout the home life and then the understanding evolved to show how this causes the root of bitterness in both parents and the son. This can but does not always, lead to forgiveness and a heightened love for the parents and on rare occasions between the defunct marriage partners.