The more our society requires us to present ourselves as being in order, in control or perfect, the less honest we become

We have a saying in our house. One excuse is a reason; two reasons are an excuse. 

So:

“I’m sorry that I couldn’t make it, my car broke down” means you could not make it because your car broke down.

But “I’m sorry that I couldn’t make it because my car broke down and I also had a stomach ache and besides that I had a meeting” means you just didn’t want to come.

It’s not foolproof, but it’s often true. 

Excuses sit on that fine line between truth and honesty. 

We generally manufacture them so that we dont offend people, or to avoid dealing with consequences. And, of course, nice honest people like you and I do not lie when we make excuses. 

I have a particularly vivid recollection of answering the phone for someone (back in the day when homes shared phones, remember?) who didn’t want to deal with the caller. They ran to the front door and stepped over the threshold. Right on cue I said, “I’m sorry, they’re out.” 

Which was true. Technically. And it really taught me to be sensitive to not saying things that are actually untrue. To this day, I’m a terrible liar, mainly because I didn’t have much practice. 

But there is a gap between not speaking non-truths and being honest. 

The more our society requires us to present ourselves as being in order, in control or perfect, the less honest we become. After all, perfection doesn’t really exist, so to look the part you have to hide the parity between where you’re really at and where you look good. 

Are we really all as fine, baruch Hashem, as we say we are? Are the excuses we present, which generally confer the message that whatever went wrong had nothing to do with us, the whole story? 

How much more do we find ourselves saying, “I was stuck behind a bus,” rather than “I was late because I didn’t leave when I should have”? Or “my alarm didn’t work,” rather than, “I overslept”? 

Not everyone has to know everything. Personal privacy is a great reason to not be completely transparent all the time. 

But perhaps, in our important relationships and in the way we teach our kids to communicate, we should consider risking a little more honesty and a little less perfection. When we do that, we give the people around us permission to be human too.