His mother looked at him for a long moment and said, “Because for years I thought I had to apologize for being pregnant.” My son frowned and asked why she would ever have needed to apologize for that. She told him that when she was thirty-one, she had been terrified and had taken a test at work, and his father had convinced her that the pregnancy was her fault. She said she believed him because he sounded so certain, and because she was afraid that disagreeing with him would cost her the marriage. My son looked across the table at me and asked whether that was true.
I told him it was. I told him I had called his mother a trap because I needed someone else to blame for a life I was afraid to choose. I said she hadn’t planned the pregnancy, hadn’t deceived me, and had never tried to force me into anything. She had simply become pregnant, and I had reacted by making her responsible for my fear. My son asked why she had apologized for four years, and I said because I had trained her to believe that my unhappiness was something she had caused. Nobody spoke after that.
Later that evening, my son came to my room and asked whether I had ever apologized to his mother. I told him I had, but not enough and not soon enough. He said that didn’t make sense because his mother still apologized whenever she thought she had upset me. I realized then that the behavior I had started years ago had survived long after I stopped consciously thinking about it. My son told me his aunt had once said that his mother used to apologize before asking anyone for anything because she expected to be told she was causing a problem. I had never known anyone had noticed.
The next morning, I went to my wife and told her what our son had asked me. I told her I was finally ready to say the sentence I should have said years ago: she had never trapped me. I had been frightened, selfish, and desperate to make my fear someone else’s responsibility. She cried quietly and said she had known that for a long time, but hearing me admit it still mattered. I didn’t ask her to forgive me, because forgiveness wasn’t something I was entitled to. I only told her that from that day forward, if she ever caught herself saying sorry for something she hadn’t done, I would remind her that she didn’t owe me an apology.
