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Jewish World Review Nov. 12, 2010 / 5 Kislev, 5771 The power of an apology By Betsy Hart
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
I had to ask my children — again — for forgiveness recently. It's something I said that had wounded. My words were thoughtless and they stung. I was truly sorry.
I'm always amazed and grateful at how quickly my children forgive me when I genuinely ask them to do so. But I shouldn't be surprised. An apology is such a powerful thing. If we can put aside our egos and offer a real one when it's called for — sometimes even when we don't understand why it's called for — the balm to the relationship is extraordinary.
I confess that I didn't really experience this much before I had kids. Very often, my pride was more important to me than mending a relationship. But I think having children made me a little more vulnerable than I'd ever been before to another's pain, and that's when things finally started to change.
I found that one can't offer a "but" or an "if" along with an apology — "I'm sorry if I offended you … I know what I said was ugly, but …" Nope. Just: "I'm so sorry I said (or did) an ugly thing. I'm going to work hard not to do it again."
No, I don't believe one should offer an apology when one can't in good conscience. If a child is angry at me for not getting her off the hook with a teacher for willingly not doing her homework, she is not getting an apology from me. But if my attitude seems mean-spirited — "Hah! You got caught; too bad for you." — I might well apologize for coming off coldly to her.
I tell my children all the time that the relationship with their siblings is more important than the thing they are fighting over in the moment. Surely that has to extend to egos, too.
G.K. Chesterton wisely said: "The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt."
Healing. What a gift. Even when we didn't intend to hurt another, if we have done so, then why not heal with an apology when we can?
Interestingly, a study from the University of Illinois at Chicago showed that when officials at its medical center instituted a policy of having staff members apologize for instances of malpractice, the number of malpractice lawsuits against the university, as well as the liability costs for the remaining lawsuits, dropped dramatically.
Repentance, healing. If more public figures made it part of their vocabulary, how much better off our world might be.
But I'm most concerned with the small world of my family.
I've noticed that my children are quick to apologize to me — to very genuinely say, "I'm so sorry, Mom." And I'm grateful for that, too. I think that's because they know that I'm likely to say, "Thanks for apologizing, honey," instead of, as I might have said some years ago, "Well, you SHOULD be sorry." Who wants to apologize if they are just going to walk into that buzz saw?
They are not so good about apologizing to each other, however, I think, because a buzz-saw response can be pretty common from their siblings. Sigh. We're all a work in progress. For my part, being a "work in progress" means I can still often get defensive, instead of repentant, especially if I'm approached in anger. There, I try to remember that my calling is to respond rightly, whether or not the other person is responding rightly.
Still, the big picture is that I hope when my children are adults they will say, as writer Margaret Laurence remembered it: "In some families, 'please' is described as the magic word. In our house, however, it was 'sorry.' "
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. JWR contributor Betsy Hart, a frequent commentator on CNN and the Fox News Channel, can be reached by clicking here.
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