Right and Wrong

My parents tried to teach me right and wrong when I was a child. Lying was wrong, obeying them was right, coveting was wrong, and so on and so forth. I assimilated all (I mean some…well ok… hardly any :))) of those lessons and yeah it was all good stuff. But one thing they did not possibly pay as much attention was the other right-Right and Left. I am PATHETIC at that. The worst is when my husband drives and I navigate. I will be gesticulating wildly with my right hand and yelling LEFT! LEFT!! all the time. And before hubby was aware of this particular disability of mine, he would obediently take a Left and I would shout, WHY did you take Left? We had to go there and point in the opposite direction. And hubby would reply in a patient voice “But you said Left” and I say “So what, you should only see where my hands are pointing”, thereby destroying all chances of having my husband listen to anything I say in the future. I have only myself to blame if that happens. Some time back I was traveling with two of my friends in the car-one male, one female. The guy was making a joke about the girl not being able to recognize right and left by a demonstration just like the one I described above. But the bigger joke was that I did not get the joke. How would I when I can’t identify them myself? That was the moment of truth for me, when I realized HUH, this is a problem.

Now you might think, what’s the biggie? Well, even though it hasn’t killed me yet, I’ve had my share of troubles with it. I was once driving my car to the airport and was on the road at 4pm. I had a flight at 6 and the driving time is 45 minutes. I was taking a slightly different route to avoid the traffic (Orlando traffic at this time is no joke) and had map quest directions with me. To cut a long story short, I took a left instead of right and ended up missing the flight. I was new to the area and did not even realize I was on the wrong track for about 15 minutes. Consider the scenario. I was going to meet my husband, we had been married for 5 weeks, we were not living together due to jobs 3000 miles apart and were doing the long-distance thing. We had precious 72 hours together every 2 weeks or so and because of the left-right thing, we missed out. That wasn’t fun.

I’ve had some women tell me about this and set me wondering if it’s a woman thing. I googled it and the only information I came up with is in this page. I think it says there is actually no relation. http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=17522071 . If my gentle reader is suffering from this, please know you are not alone. We can figure it out. Slow but sure, we will get there. Hang in there!