When my kids roll their eyes at me after I correct their vocabulary, or their manners, I feel a deep sense of satisfaction. It means I have harassed them about a subject so many times that we have reached a tipping point. They have ceased openly resisting, or mocking me, and accepted that they are being parented on a loop. 

That is good news, because when they head off to college they will have banked thousands of hours of reminders about when to say “fewer” instead of “less than,” and they will kick into proper-language mode without me. The eye rolls are confirmation that the parental programming is working.

Conditioning my children to show up in the world in a way that says, “I wasn’t raised in a barn,” is, in part, for my own benefit. Yet it is ultimately to their advantage to present as refined, well-spoken, and responsible adults. They will thank me later.

My daughter’s eyes roll the most when I talk to her about apologies. I have noticed her coming out of elevators or through doorways and navigating someone else coming in. “Sorry,” she always says, reflexively, shifting to avoid bumping into the other person. “You mean, excuse me,” I correct her. “Are you sorry for taking up space? Did you do something to be sorry for?” I rhetorically ask her, pointing out the importance of choosing the right words.

I don’t want my daughter to be sorry for being. I don’t want her to be sorry every time she and another person nearly collide, on the street or in life. She will find herself in other people’s way sometimes, and they in hers. That will require negotiation and self-respect, as well as respect for others, not an apology. 

It’s a battle to break her habit of saying she is “sorry” for everything. She and her girlfriends are seemingly locked in a never-ending emotional drama of apology extractions. Someone’s feelings are always hurt by something someone else said, or should have said, or should have said differently than she said it. A series of group texts ensues involving the interested parties’ best friends and former camp bunkmates and third cousins, all of whom chime in. 

Eventually, after an exhaustive interrogation of everyone’s motives and emotions, the defendant must apologize for something she didn’t even know she did so everyone can “move on.” It is a dangerous game.

This game is not just for girls. Women play, too. The “Real Housewives” shows, which really are just a big mean-girls mousetrap of verbal-gotchas designed to bring grown women to their knees on national television, is the “sorry” Olympics. Without meaningless apologies for imagined offenses, there would be no show. 

I teach my daughter that the apology extraction ritual is a tell-tale sign that the “offended” party wants her soul, not her “sorry,” and I won’t allow her to hand over either. If I have raised her right, and not “in a barn,” she will be the first to say she is sorry when she has truly done something wrong.

If I can help it, though, she will not be apologizing for who she is, where she is, or where she comes from. Everyone else can roll their eyes at that.