Apologies

She apologized to me for being “negligent” and out of touch. She felt badly that she might not have called or emailed as much as she should have. She wanted me to know she knew this – her misdeeds as she saw them – and that she really, truly felt bad about it.

She is 22, pretty much bald, wickedly cool and funny and smart, a very recent college graduate, who likes a cocktail and loud music and gossip, and she is back in the hospital dealing with the side effects of her battle against leukemia. Which she started less than six months ago. At about the same time she should have been whooping it up after four years of hard work that should have paid off into the fun of Senior Spring.

I get saying sorry. I have done my share of apologizing over the last 8 years or so. I apologize to my kids at least five times a week. The little sorries are easy, as in, “I know I said we could, but now we can’t and I am sorry.” The bigger ones suck (but have the biggest payback overall I think), as in “I am sorry I got so angry/yelled/made you feel sad about something you did do (that really didn’t matter)/something you didn’t do (that I thought you did)/or because I was just having a bad day and felt tired and grumpy and was crabby, and I feel bad about that, and I am sorry.”

Inevitably, the short-term payback comes in a sweet voice and gentle swipe of a cheek and a kid saying, “I know, mama, I feel that way too sometimes.” In the long term, I am hoping the payback will multiply, adding up to a human being who can admit fault just as well as she can accept a true apology, or better yet, find forgiveness when one isn’t even offered, which is, after all, the true secret to life.

But lately, I’ve been making apologies of another kind -- to my own college friends, who for better or worse, right or wrong, were often last on my list of calls to make or things to do, in the years that followed our own Senior Spring. I was married and a mother long before they were. When they were experiencing first pregnancies, I was realizing how much I hated my third. When they were reading books to newborns, I was tossing mine into a crib with a bottle that I taught him to hold by himself. When they were joining playgroups, I was sneaking out of all of mine. Plus we were thick in a lawsuit with a crooked builder, I seemed to be pregnant all the time, or at a meeting, was becoming if not so much depressed than manic with anxiety, and well, I just figured life was going on without me.

It was. They, pretty much on a similar timeline, had managed to keep their interests in line with one another. But me? Not so much.

Hurt happened. It went both ways I suppose, but I guess I didn’t really notice mine amongst all the other minor and major heartbreaks happening inside these four (not quite plastered) walls. I didn’t notice theirs, at least not enough. So over the last month or so, I’ve had to face up to that – the consequences of my absence – and while I don’t regret having made the choices (were they?) that I did, I tried to explain myself nonetheless. I took my lumps, and against the wishes of some very close friends (who say: and why? and for what?) I said: I am sorry. And I was, and I am. No matter what my friends say, I could have done better.

You gotta do what you gotta do.

Like when I say to my kids, APOLOGIZE NOW (!!!) about a million times a day, and MEAN IT, I add when they don’t (which is most of the time). Really saying sorry means accepting fault fully, and only a grown-up (at least one whose self-centered ways have been shoved aside) can do that. I get that these kids are little and maybe not yet equipped. But say sorry, I say anyway, after which they do so, half-assed.

But the “sorries” that fly in the nano-second after they have done something bad or mean or against the rules because they think just saying it (without being asked to) absolves them, which it doesn’t -- these are the only apologies I have, until now, really despised.

Now, I have a new one.

Listen up little sister, sister by another mister, my cousin. Rule number one when becoming a grown-up woman: we DON’T apologize for being busy when we are KICKING THE ASS OUT OF CANCER. We never, ever apologize for that. Ever.

In fact, and if truth be told this is the hardest rule to learn, Rule Number Two: we never apologize for doing pretty much anything that makes or keeps us healthy enough to do more ass kicking.

The world needs more women who follow these rules, so get to it. I’ve got two little girls who are counting on me to do the same – and you too.