“I don’t want you to be sorry. I want you to be better.”
I remembered saying it as soon as my child repeated it back to me. What I hadn’t remembered was what it felt like to be on the receiving end.
We were having one of those conversations that requires you to resist the urge to reach for your emotional armor. My child was telling me about things that had hurt them while they were growing up, and I was listening. Then they reminded me of that sentence.
“I don’t want you to be sorry. I want you to be better.”
In my memory, I knew exactly what I had meant. I wanted changed behavior. I wanted the apology to mean something. Somewhere in my parenting brain, I had apparently decided that accepting an apology with a little grace might interfere with the lesson. In retrospect, it was the rationalization of a tired mom wanting her kids to stop doing the things that kids do that made her day harder. What my child heard was something entirely different. Who I am isn’t good enough.
That one hurt.
There were moments during the conversation when defensiveness was standing just offstage waiting for its cue. It had notes, context, and exhibits A through Q and would have been delighted to explain why I was misunderstood. I could have given it the microphone. Instead, I leaned on the emotional work I had already done, and I listened. The woman who said those words all those years ago was carrying a lot. I was raising children while navigating stress they knew very little about. There were things happening in my life that I intentionally kept away from them because I thought that was part of protecting them.
All they saw were my decisions so they didn’t always have the context surrounding them. For years, that context remained mine. Since the space had been made in our conversation, I shared some of it. I told them what had been happening in my life at the time, what I had been trying to manage, and what I understood then that I understand differently now. The context helped explain some things that had previously felt confusing to them.
And still, there was room for their hurt. I understood why I had behaved a certain way and was intentional about owning the impact of my behavior. Both truths sat at the same table. There was a time when that would have been much harder for me. I would have wanted understanding from them, and might not have had the emotional space left to understand them. Thankfully, I’ve done enough of my own work now to recognize that urge when it arrives. What I carry into relationships now has changed.
And here is why that matters. We don’t enter conversations empty-handed. We bring old hurts, disappointments, fears, assumptions, memories, expectations, and stories we’ve been telling ourselves for years. Some of those things belong to the relationship we’re standing in. Some were packed long before the person in front of us ever arrived. All of it affects what we see. And what we see affects how we interpret. How we interpret influences what we do. And what we do teaches other people how safe it is to be in relationship with us.
That’s a lot of luggage for one conversation.
Sometimes in order for us to have connection we have to put down the thing we are carrying. Sometimes the thing we’re carrying needs to be examined because we’ve been lugging around one interpretation of a story for twenty years without ever considering another. Sometimes the weight doesn’t disappear, but understanding it changes the way we carry it. That’s what happened in those conversations with my children.
Over the course of two days, I had beautiful, healing conversations with both of them. I heard things that were difficult to hear and things that I needed to own. I also got to tell them things about my experience that I had never shared before. We walked out of those conversations understanding each other better.
But those conversations could easily have gone differently if I had become defensive, or if any of us had needed our version of the story to be the only version in the room. Instead, we made room and that is what healthy connection asks of us. It asks for enough emotional space to let someone else’s experience exist without immediately rearranging it to make ourselves more comfortable. That space doesn’t magically appear because we love somebody. We create it by doing our own work.
We learn what makes us defensive. We become curious about the stories we automatically tell ourselves. We figure out which wounds still have us responding to today’s people with yesterday’s pain. We get better at noticing when we’re listening to understand and when we’re simply waiting for our turn to present the defense. And occasionally we discover that something we’ve been carrying for years can finally be put down.
In those conversations, I also learned that there is a grace to receiving an apology that I didn’t understand when my children were young. “I’m sorry” is a statement of vulnerability. Someone is handing you an acknowledgment that they got it wrong. This will change the way I receive that offering. I can receive it with tenderness and still expect changed behavior, because grace and accountability are perfectly capable of occupying the same room. I wish younger me had known that. I do now.
And perhaps that’s part of what our emotional work gives us. We can’t go back and become the people we are today in the yesterdays when we needed today’s wisdom. What we can do is show up differently when those moments come around again. That’s what I got with my children, another opportunity to listen. And in that space, a landing strip was created for connection.
This got me to thinking about my own emotional luggage. What am I carrying that helps me understand myself? What stories am I telling myself that need a new perspective? What experiences have I carried for so long that they have become a burden?
I think this is where making room for connection begins. Before we ask who is showing up for us, we might gently notice what we’re bringing with us when they do.
