98 hard to shift from park

Hi all. My mom has a 98 bird, and lately she's been having a problem with the gearshift lever (automatic trans). When the car is first started each day, it's very hard to press the button in, and even then sometimes it's difficult to shift out of park. This usually goes away after it's driven each day, except once when she went out for something, got back to the car, and couldn't pull it out of park even after pressing the button.

Has anyone else run into this problem? And what should I look at first?

This is actually a common problem with fbody's expectially when parking on slops, try setting the parking breaks. The car transmission engages not to let the rear wheels move and it rolls back and is hard to pull it out of park, if you let your car roll back as you put it in park you were hear your transmission slip and it will be a bitch to even press the button when you go to pull it out of park.

I don't mean the standard, parking-pawl engaged hard to pull out. I actually took the whole thing apart today, and found that there's a plastic rod that goes down the center of the metal stick which disengages the lock. The end of the plastic rod was bent. So tomorrow I'm going to the Home Depot, Mecca of homemade car parts, and I'm replacing it with a METAL rod. That way I won't have to fix it again. :)