Your Son Smashed the Flatscreen!

Nothing good comes after you get a text from your husband that reads, “Call me ASAP.” Heart palpitations begin along with random sweat. Images of stair tumbles, car accidents, broken bones or concussions start to whirr through my mind. My nerves were shot by the time I called him back. “I have some bad news” he said. “Whaa…” I squeaked out. “Your son took his light saber and smashed the flat screen. No more ultimate fight night this weekend.”

Really? Really? Did I almost have a heart attack over a broken flat screen television? Truth be told, it was a very inopportune thing to happen given that it’s in Paul’s man cave (AKA – where the children play and mess things up), that it was less than 8 months old and that the new season of True Blood is premiering this month. But, c’est la vie! A broken TV is better than broken bones any day of the week and twice on Sundays.

When I got home, Aidan hid behind my husband’s thigh thinking I was going to let him have it. The first thing I heard was, “Sorry mommy. So sorry Mommy. I broke the TV.” Clearly, he had rehearsed. It was the first time he had used the word sorry. With his 2-year old limited vocabulary, new words are always met with clapping and whoo whoo’s. This time I try to maintain a stern face, crouched down so we were eye level, and explained to him why it was bad that he smashed the TV with his light saber. As I spoke, he began tapping his foot as if to signal to me that Dad had already gone over this and that his perfunctory “Sorry mommy,” should have been enough.

The whole episode got me thinking about apologies and the world that we live in today. For eight years, even as more and more evidence mounted that no WMDs were in Iraq, no one in the former administration ever said, “My bad, sorry we started a preemptive war.” Even as young men and women died, billions of dollars in debt piled up and we nearly squandered all of the goodwill of the international community after 9/11, no one stepped up to the plate to apologize. Now we have a president who is willing to admit when he is wrong, and has publicly done so in the first 100 days of his job.

Maybe Aidan didn’t know what sorry really meant and didn’t feel that bad for smashing the flatscreen. The point is he’s 2 and managed to get the words out. Maybe we really are entering a new era of personal responsibility. I hope so.