I want to talk about imaginary friends. The ones you should invent before you next go see your family.
I threw this idea out in passing in my recent column about how to survive your family over the holidays. But the more I ponder it, the more I like it.
If you have one of those hypercritical or judgmental families that’s always on you about how you can improve yourself, here’s my tip:
Divert their attention away from your perceived failings by inventing an imaginary friend with a veritable mountain of problems.
Then, solicit your family’s advice about your imaginary decoy friend and what he or she should do about a cheating spouse, rotten teenager, nasty boss, messy apartment or the like.
Tell your family members that this person is calling you daily for advice, just to give it a little air of urgency.
“Linda’s husband was gone overnight and he claimed he had to work a double shift at the factory, but she found a key card from the Anaheim Hilton in his pants pocket,” you can tell them. “She’s asking me what she should do.”
Throw in a few kids, too, to complicate the scenario. “She doesn’t want to kick him out because of their eight children.”
Watch a few soap operas for potential ideas for future scenarios, though you might want to skip the brain surgery or amnesiac themes as potentially too far-fetched.
If you’re a guy, this works even better, because people love nothing better than to give advice to men who actually seem willing to take it.
If your apartment is being investigated by the health department, you recently wrecked your car and your boss is threatening to lay you off if you come in drunk one more time, no problem.
Your family doesn’t need to know about any of that.
Instead, just confide in them about your decoy co-worker, Justin, who got his third DUI and has to go to jail, but he doesn’t want his ex-wife to find out and talk trash about him to his kids.
Oh, and Justin hasn’t paid child support since 1997, which is creating a problem vis-a-vis getting a passport to take his girlfriend to Bermuda because he’s on the federal list of deadbeat dads, so he’s wondering if maybe they should just go to Hawaii instead.
Gee, what should you tell him?
That will keep your folks busy with advice for hours, my friend. They’ll forget to ask you about whether you’re going to your AA meetings.
Now, as an Official Mother, I don’t normally condone lying to your mom. This is a bad thing. Always tell your mother the truth.
Do you hear me, kids? Always, always tell your mother the truth about everything.
But, if you have a mother like I had, well-meaning but incredibly neurotic, don’t consider this a lie, consider it an act of self-preservation.
The famed battle strategist and philosopher Sun Tzu, who wrote “The Art of War,” said that a successful war is waged on deception, so commanders should make sure their opponents receive the wrong information.
“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting,” he wrote.
And, let’s face it, sometimes life with family is a battle. If you can avoid fighting, everyone wins.
I came up with the idea of the imaginary decoy friend when I was remembering conversations with my late mom about my life.
My mom was always anxious about everything, especially the many ways that my life wasn’t perfect. Even if I considered things going well, she was always there to point out how I was messing up.
One time I proudly told her – and I”m not making this up – that I got a promotion at work, and, five minutes later, she asked me if I thought I was going to lose my job.
I would always hang up the phone depressed.
Then, on some happy day, I realized that she could be easily distracted. So, every time she brought up something that she felt was wrong with my life, I pointed out something she could worry about in my brother’s world.
“I hear my brother has been fighting with his wife a lot,” I’d tell her, and it wasn’t a lie, because in those days he went through wives like Kleenex.
Then, Mom would spend the next 20 minutes on the phone with me going over the shortcomings of my brother and his latest spouse, the fate of his offspring and, basically, forget to criticize me any more.
This was kind of mean on my part, and I’m sure my brother didn’t appreciate it, so I don’t recommend it as a diversionary tactic.
So that’s why I came up with the imaginary friend.
If you try this, let me know. But please don’t show this column to my teenagers. They might get ideas.
Contact the writer: mfisher@scng.com or 714-796-7994
