We all know what it means to be responsible. It’s something we try to teach our children so that they clean up after themselves, take care of their possessions and ultimately learn to be good adults someday. But there are other aspects of responsibility that require a little more finesse and awareness.

Take for instance, you’ve found yourself complaining to your spouse about a mess someone left behind (which is a pet peeve of mine. Don’t leave messes for other people to clean up!) and you cast blame on him or perhaps one of your children. As parents, sometimes we just ‘assume’ certain individuals have done things because of past experience with them. But if you were to have blamed the wrong person and had gotten in their face about it, do you take responsibility for your mistake and go apologize? When I’ve been wrongly accused, I remember in certain situations how it stung even as the truth came out and no one sought to make amends. What if you let a co-worker take the blame and an admonishment for something that you did? Would you confess to the co-worker or your manager?

These types of minor injustices can be embarrassing to take responsibility for. You might even think, in the case of having wronged a child, it would make you look weak to apologize to them. But if we don’t do our part to make amends and be responsible adults in these little things, we allow others to begin to harbour resentment against us. In the case of not apologizing to your child, you give them a strong example to follow. One that won’t serve them well in the future. You might want to put the onus on the injured party and say, well that person just needs to forgive me, that’s on them. And to some degree that is true. But if you know you did wrong , or you stood by and let somebody else do wrong because of your inaction, well, that’s really on you, isn’t it?

Trust me, humble pie doesn’t taste as bad as you think it will. And that feeling of relief and reconnection is worth the little bit of embarrassment or humility it might take to set things right.

It’s too easy in our current culture to blame everyone but ourselves. Just like we’ve learned to be responsible for our bills, our possessions and our children, let’s learn to be responsible with our words and actions as well. You’ll be a better person for it!