By Mitch Gaynor
SORRY seems to be the hardest word these days?
I know this because I’ve just returned from an extended family holiday where the seven of us were living in each other’s back pockets, in what turned out to be a tropical island-style pressure cooker situation.
Think Lord of the Flies meets The Beach meets povo White Lotus.
The warning signs were always there. We’d forced our eldest daughters to farewell their Romeos and hang out with their boring “you’re both so hard to listen to” parents, and their immature siblings.
Case in point was one morning when I insisted we all go out and learn some culture.
My wife looked me up and down before saying I was “asking to be scammed, aren’t you, with your flower shirt, board shorts and bum bag?”
“And you’re dumb,” my daughter chimed in, with perfect timing.
But am I that stupid?
As we reached the end of our holiday, our eldest two spent one night screaming at each other while we all tried to sleep. It was, ostensibly, about the room temperature.
The next morning there were tears and devastation, with the younger genuinely upset at the thought of her sister carrying out a threat of wanting nothing more to do with her: EVER.
“I’m going to pretend to be nice to you but when we get home I’m never talking to you again,” she said.
Seems unlikely, but okay. Let’s just imagine that.
I gave her my best calm-dad debrief: what happened, what led to it, what she could’ve done differently, and what might’ve been brewing under the surface.
Then I offered a radical solution.
“You could say sorry.”
Not a fake one. Not a qualified one. Not a “sorry you feel that way” apology.
A real sorry.
The kind where you admit you were part of it. That your choices land on other people.
That saying sorry doesn’t just smooth things over, it forces you to acknowledge your role and do better next time.
She looked at me like I’d just invented fire.
Thanked me for the advice.
There you go. I can’t be that dumb.
A night later and things took another turn for the worse. More tears later and then we had it: a real-life sorry.
The world seems a strange place at the moment.
Social media allows no room for nuance, grey areas, or the right to be wrong.
It’s impacting our younger generation who, even though they know the difference, can’t always express it at the right time.
Our politics is even worse. An apology is seen as weakness, or worse, as ugly.
It’s not.
It clears the air. It resets relationships. And there’s something cathartic about admitting you’re not perfect.
Here’s to being dumb enough to be sorry.
