Somewhere tonight, a parent is lying awake with a phone on the nightstand that never rings. Not because they’ve stopped loving their son or daughter. Because the conversation that needs to happen can’t happen yet. The other side isn’t ready to have it in real time.
I’ve sat with enough of these parents to know the question that keeps them up. Not “will they ever call.” The harder one: “if they do, what do I say?”
You don’t get to script that moment. But you can prepare your heart for it, the way you’d leave a porch light on for someone still finding their way home in the dark. You don’t know which night it’ll be. You just know you want the light on when it happens.
So let me offer three phrases I learned. This is not a technique, it’s a posture.
I know..
Not “I know I was wrong,” not “I know you were wrong either.” Just, “I know things are not the way we both wish they were.” No defence, no ledger of who owes whom an apology. Just an honest acknowledgement that the distance is real and it has cost you both something.
I’m not..
This is the phrase most parents skip, and it’s the one that opens the door. Say the thing they’re already braced for, then tell them you’re not saying it. “I’m not asking you to apologise. I’m not asking you to tell me I was right.” Your child has rehearsed this conversation a hundred times in their head, and in most of those rehearsals, you’re the one demanding something. Take that off the table before they ask.
I’m ready..
Not ready to talk. Ready to listen. There’s a world of difference. Talking is what got you here.
A friend of mine, I’ll call him Doug, went eleven years without a real conversation with his daughter. Christmas cards, the odd text about a grandchild’s birthday, nothing more. When she finally phoned, he told me his first instinct was to explain himself. Decades of a father’s instinct to be understood. He didn’t. He said the three things and then he stopped talking. Forty minutes of near silence followed, most of it hers. He told me afterwards it was the hardest conversation of his life, precisely because he had so little to say in it.
I think of the father in Luke’s Gospel, watching the road long before there’s anything on it to see. Scripture doesn’t tell us what he rehearsed in those years, only that he ran while his son was still a long way off. That’s the part I can’t get past. He didn’t wait for the apology to reach the doorstep. He was already moving.
Some of you will do all of this right and the call still won’t come this year, or next. I won’t pretend that away. But the conversation still has to be lived out, even when it can’t be spoken. You live it out by staying steady. By not posting the passive-aggressive thing. By letting your child know, in small and consistent ways, that the door was never locked. They just couldn’t see the light under it yet.
What does that look like? Smaller than you’d think. Send the birthday text with no question mark at the end, nothing that demands a reply. Keep your address and your number the same for as long as you possibly can, so finding you is never the hard part. If there’s a family gathering, extend the invitation and then let it go, rather than turning silence into a reason to stop inviting. Resist the pull to use a sibling or a grandchild as a go-between carrying messages back and forth; that puts weight on a relationship that isn’t built to hold it. And if you’re a person of faith, pray for them by name rather than by category. “My daughter” is a prayer. “My estranged child” is a diagnosis. Do this for years if you have to, without keeping score of how long it’s been.
My prayer for you isn’t that the phone rings tomorrow. It’s that you keep being the parent worth calling, whether or not this is the year it happens. There will be a day when that conversation needs to happen on their end. I don’t want you sitting in the regret of having been unwilling on the day they were finally ready.
So what would it look like this week to leave the light on, with no promise it will ever be seen?
