What I Wanted to Say in My Defense

This is the final post in a three-part series on building a relationship with your kids that lasts into their adulthood. If you're just finding it, start with The season of parenting nobody prepared you for, and The assignment one of my kids gave me.

Dear Friend,

Kerry here!

Over the past few weeks, I've been writing about repairing relationships with our adult kids. I left you with a warning: the moment you start owning the ways you may have hurt your kids, something in you fights back. I want to show you what that fight actually sounds like. Because mine was loud.

When my kids and I started having conversations about ways I may have hurt them during their childhoods, especially during my divorce and blending family, here are the defenses that rose up in me, almost involuntarily:

I didn't have control over those situations.

I was doing my best.

I didn't know that was your experience.

I couldn't control your other parent.

Don't you realize how far I've come from how I was raised?

Don't you realize how much therapy I've done? How much parent coaching? How many things nobody was ever able to give ME when I was a kid?

I'm here to tell you: every single one of those excuses is true.

I did do my best. I did work hard on my parenting. I did make the best choices I could, trying to balance everyone's quality of life after my divorce. None of that is a lie, and none of it is something I invented to feel better. It's real.

And here's the thing I had to learn: it is also completely beside the point.

Because none of those true things change the impact. My six kids and stepkids still felt what they felt. Some of my choices, even the ones I would make again, caused them pain. My good intentions didn't reach them. My growth didn't undo their experience. My own childhood challenges didn't soften the landing for theirs.

So I had to learn to hold two things at the same time, without letting either one cancel the other:

I am a person who did her best, who worked hard, who deserves compassion.

I am also a person whose choices caused real pain to my kids.

Both. At once. Not "I did my best, so you shouldn't be hurt." Not "I hurt you, so I must be a terrible mother." Both true, sitting side by side, neither one erasing the other.

That, for me, has been the whole skill. I started saying it to myself like this: "Own the impact, regardless of my intentions. Own the wounding, regardless of my own wounds."

That's the move. And it is so much harder than it sounds, because every defense I listed above is a perfectly good reason to feel defensive. The wounds I carry from my own childhood are real. They are reasons. But they are not permission slips. Having good intentions doesn't mean there wasn't negative impact.

I'll be honest about how strong that pull is. There are years, especially the early ones of blending a family with five teenage boys and one little girl, that I would so much rather tie a bow on and set on a high shelf than ever open again. Looking squarely at those years means admitting that some of what I did in the thick of it, doing the best I knew how, still landed as pain. I've done a lot of work to make peace with the younger version of me who made those calls, the one who was overwhelmed and under-resourced and improvising most days. But making peace with her is not the same as pretending the box is empty. I can hold her with compassion and still lift the lid.

I know that move is possible, because someone once made it for me.

When I was 20 and deep in my own therapy, I wrote my mom a letter. Everything I was angry at her for, all of it, on the page. Then I handed it to her. She sat down and read the whole thing. She cried. And she apologized. She didn't explain, didn't defend, didn't tell me I'd remembered it wrong. She just received it. It was a healing balm I've carried for the rest of my life.

I don't take that for granted. I know not everyone reading this had a parent who could do that. Some of you wrote the letter, or wanted to, and got defensiveness or silence in return. If that's you, I'm so sorry. You deserved someone who could sit, read it, and cry.

I think that's part of why I'm so determined to be the parent who can receive it. My mom showed me it was possible. Now I'm trying to hand the same thing down to the next generation.

Here's why I keep calling this the hardest skill in this season of parenting, and the one that makes everything else possible.

If I can't sit with my kid's pain without rushing to defend myself, then every repair conversation quietly collapses into a debate about me. My defensiveness turns the moment into a referendum on my innocence instead of an honoring of their experience. And a kid who has to manage their parent's guilt learns very quickly to stop being honest.

So the work isn't to walk around feeling like a bad parent. It's to become someone safe enough to be honest with. Someone who can hear "that hurt me" without flinching into self-defense.

I'm not all the way there. (You'll remember I told you I'm only about halfway through this with my six kids.) But I've come to believe this is the real assignment of the season after launch, the one nobody warned us about:

To stay soft enough to be told the truth. To take accountability without erasing ourselves. To own the wounding, regardless of our wounds.

It is not easy. But I would so much rather practice it now, while the relationships are warm, than learn it too late to have a loving family with adult children.

Have a wonderful day!

Kerry and Palmer

P.S. If you want to try this with your own kid this week: the next time they tell you something hurt them, see how far you can get into just receiving it before you explain yourself, like "That makes sense. I can see why that hurts." Full stop. You can come back to your side of it later, if you really must. But start there.