Navigating the delicate relationship between teenagers and their parents can be a challenging task, and tensions will undoubtedly rise at some point.
However, when a teenage girl found herself facing an immature act from her father, she opted for a unique form of retaliation – petty revenge.
Taking to Reddit, she detailed the amusing tale, highlighting the often unique dynamic between fathers and daughters! Keep reading to find out what happened…
A battle over tidiness
The story unfolds with the teenager, who is now 17, revealing her father’s penchant for strict tidiness. While he prefers meticulous organization, her own approach to arranging her room is rather different.
The start of their conflict arose when, at the age of 14, she kept a pile of books and files on her desk in a seemingly haphazard manner, albeit with a specific order known to her.
She further explained her reasoning, writing in her Reddit post: “It was organized based on usage and importance, as I have ADHD, and that’s just the easiest way for me to find things.
“Because of this, to the average eye, it looks a little bit like just a really tall pile of random stuff I put there to avoid looking at. To be fair, I had left it untouched for 4 months. But that was mostly because the pile consisted of stuff I needed for my summer and winter jobs, so I only really used it during those times,” she continued.
The misplaced folder
The issues begin occurring when the father decides to intervene during the girl’s absence, rearranging parts of her carefully organized pile that he believes to be unimportant.
“Honestly, I didn’t really notice for a while,” she explained. “But then one day, I decided that I’d scan some important files from my job so that I wouldn’t lose them, only to find that the entire folder full of files had disappeared. I looked around and even looked at my brother and mother’s desk, but it had completely vanished.”
The teen then explained that her father began “to yell” at her once she asked what happened to her folder. “He said that I never knew how to keep my things properly, that I was lazy, careless, forgetful, unorganized, etc., and that I was delusional for thinking that someone else had moved them. He said that having a job was a waste because I would never learn responsibility because I couldn’t even bother to be responsible for something important,” she said.
The father’s accusations continued for two years, with him using the lost folder as a weapon to criticize his daughter’s supposed shortcomings, especially when it came to tidiness.
“Then, one day, when he tasked the entire family to help find HIS important document,” the girl wrote. “I found a small box placed behind four larger boxes in the storage area of my house. Peaking out of it was a sticker I made for the lost folder. When I opened it, there it was in all its glory.”
She continued: “Finally, I had proof that he moved it!! It was HIS storage area, and it was behind boxes filled with HIS stuff. I was both relieved and livid.”
Clearly still incensed over the issue, the girl said: “He yelled at me about it for 2 years while I cried each time! After I showed him, he didn’t even apologize! He said that I should’ve kept it better, and if I did, I wouldn’t have ‘lost’ it.”
The petty revenge
Naturally, this teen was pretty frustrated at having been gaslit by her father for so long. She was also hurt that he wouldn’t apologize to her so, fueled by a desire for petty revenge, she embarked on a subtle mission to disrupt her father’s sense of order.
Over the course of a year, she strategically relocated bits and pieces of his belongings within a close radius.
“Not to obscure places,” she explained, “because then I would be found out immediately, but a 1-2 meter radius between where he actually put it. He put down his cup of water and then left to take a phone call? It’ll move from his desk to the random portable shelf thing he puts some of his stuff on top of.”
She added: “Put down his phone to go to the toilet? One side of the desk to the other. His vape? From the shelf to the pen holder he had on his desk. His shirts? (Yes, he puts them in order.) I’d change the order of shirts that had the same color.”
The father, initially weirded out and vocal about the mysterious displacements, eventually begins to believe that the items were moving because of his own forgetfulness due to aging.
A heartfelt ending
Throughout the year where she was moving her father’s things, the teen revealed that she was diagnosed with ADHD. Following her diagnosis, the girl’s father started to learn more about the neurodevelopmental disorder, and began to understand that her habit of creating piles of things in her room was actually common among other people with ADHD.
“He also started to notice the patterns in which I put my stuff and commented less on it, even when I knew he wanted to,” the girl explained in her post. “He actually went to a session with my therapist to ask more questions. Turns out! Most of the things he had issues with about me were all symptoms of my ADHD.”
The teen then continues by explaining that she and her father realized that they were “both mature enough” to have a sit-down conversation about the tidiness issue. “We worked things out between us and promised to not drive each other crazy,” she said.
In conclusion, the girl finished off her Reddit post by writing: “So after an entire year of moving his stuff, I confessed to him that he wasn’t developing sudden short-term memory loss; he just had a very petty daughter.”
How petty have you been? Let us know in the comments!
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