The assignment one of my kids gave me

This is part two of a three-part series on building a relationship with your kids that lasts into their adulthood. If you missed it, start with part one, Will You Have a Close Family When Your Kids Are Adults?

Dear Friend,

Last week I (Kerry) asked you a question: will you have a close family when your kids are adults? And I told you I'd started doing something about it in my own family. Here's what repairing your relationship with your adult kids actually looks like.

I have made a decision not to wait any longer.

I should be candid with you up front: I have five twenty-somethings and one thirty-year-old, and I am only part-way through this process. It is not finished. With some of them I've had these conversations; with others I haven't even started. This is a season I'm still standing in, not one I've graduated from.

But as they have moved into their mid-20s, I've gone to them, on purpose and out loud, and said something close to this: I'm sure I've caused wounds I don't even know about. I want to understand your perspective, own my part, and repair it.

I didn't wait for them to bring it up. I didn't wait until something blew up, like I've seen happen in other families.

My reasoning was the same instinct I've parented with all along: looking at the stage ahead and thinking about the skills my kids will need. I'd rather do this now than wait until resentment has built up, or until everyone's gotten good at burying old hurts from childhood. Repair is so much easier in a warm relationship than a cold one.

Then one of my kids took me up on it in a way I didn't expect.

He asked me to make a list of the things I thought I had done that might have hurt him.

Oof.

I'll be honest, that was a big challenge. It was the assignment I mentioned at the end of last week's post, and it turned out to be one of the best I've ever been given.

Because making that list meant going back through the years in full humility. No defending. No explaining. Just honestly asking myself:

When was I short with him?
When was I selfish?
When did I have a bad parenting idea and run with it anyway?
When did I cover my eyes because the truth was hard to face?

Even knowing what I know professionally, I couldn't do it alone. I called my own therapist to help me think through what some of those things might even be, the ones I'd never quite let myself look at directly.

And here's the part I didn't expect: the work had two halves.

The first half was naming the wounds. That was hard enough.

The second half was forgiving myself for them. Sitting with the fact that I was an imperfect person doing her best, and that both things are true at once: that I caused some real pain, and that I wasn't a villain. I needed a couple of sessions just for that second half.

I want to be straight with you about something, though. Doing this work did not make it easy for my kids. Owning it on my end didn't erase their experience of it. It was still hard. That's part of the deal. Repair isn't a magic eraser. It's just the honest beginning.

And that's the other thing I'm learning. Like almost everything in parenting, this doesn't come down to one big, brave conversation. It comes down to a thousand little demonstrations, over months and years, that I can be trusted with their hearts. The list mattered. But it's the small, repeated proof, offered again and again, that matters most. And I have a lot of that proof still left to give.

If you've never made a list like that, I'd gently invite you to try it, even before anyone asks you to, even if you never hand it to a single soul. The willingness to look is most of the work. (And if you're thinking about what you actually want to pass on to your kids, this post on what I hope my kids inherit is a good companion to this one.)

But I'll warn you: the moment you start, something in you is going to fight back. Everything in me wanted to defend myself, to explain how far I'd come, how hard I'd worked, what I didn't get when I was a kid.

That fight is what the final post in this series is about. Before I get there, though, next week this space belongs to my son Palmer, who's writing a Father's Day post I think you're going to love. Then I'll be back the following week to finish the series, because learning to own the impact without erasing yourself in the process might be the hardest skill in this whole season, and it's the one that makes all the rest possible.

Whether you're the parent doing this work or the grown kid who wishes your parent would, I'd love to hear how this sits with you. And if you've been thinking about how to keep those lines of communication open with your teen before they're grown, this post is worth a read.

With love and laughter,
Kerry and Palmer