Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Ms. Apologetic

The other night I woke up to the sound of Ladybug talking in her crib.

“I’m sorry train,” she said, her voice cracking as if she was going to cry. “I’m sorry nose. I’m sorry toe. I’m sorry rain. I’m sorry …”

She proceeded to fill in the blank with just about every word she knew. Usually I try to stay quiet during these middle-of-the-night one-sided chats lest she draw me into conversation, but I had to say something.

“What are you sorry for, Ladybug?” I called from our bedroom. “You didn’t do anything.”

“I’m sorry, Mommy,” she whimpered.

These days Ladybug is “sorry” for everything and to everyone for no apparent reason. She could be sitting on the sofa flipping through a board book by herself, and all of a sudden she’ll launch into a long list of apologies.

I feel awful when she does that, like it’s my fault. I start going over the preceding minutes: Did I inadvertently snap at her? Was she reading something from my body language? Did I make her feel as if she did something wrong? The majority of the time, I can’t find anything in my behavior to have prompted Ladybug’s apologies.

Then this afternoon as we were watching the home video from Ladybug’s birthday party, I think I found the source of the sorries: Me. Each time I’d bump into something, the recorded me would say, “Oops, sorry.” When Ladybug’s balloons came untied from her chair, it was followed by “sorry” from me. Every time I turned around, I seemed to be saying sorry, sorry, sorry.

I’m sorry that Ladybug is mirroring my habit. But if she has to mimic me, I’m just glad it was a five-letter word – not a four – she picked up on.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

simply stopping by to say hi

January 24, 2013 at 7:46 PM  

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