Husband Won't Accept Pregnant Wife's Apology For Getting Angry That He Used A Scary Event From Her Childhood To 'Prank' Her
Pranks are only funny when both people are laughing. And trauma isn't involved. And the victim isn't 34 weeks pregnant.
Africa Studio | Shutterstock If a prank is to actually be a prank, it has to be funny to everyone involved. Otherwise, it's just outright humiliation — if not full-on abuse.
This really isn't a difficult concept, but it seems to be for an awful lot of men out there. One woman's husband truly takes the cake for not only pulling a prank that is downright twisted but then demanding he be compensated when his wife got upset about it.
Her husband 'pranked' her with a terrifying event from her childhood.
In her Reddit post, the woman explained that long before she and her husband met, her mom's house burned to the ground, taking with it all of their belongings, including her childhood pet cat.
"I remember my mom and brother waking me up screaming 'fire, fire, get up, get up!'" she wrote in her post. "We crawled out under the smoke and luckily my neighbors had already called the fire department and they pulled us out. We lost literally everything. We were devastated."
So we're not talking about the "trauma" that gets bandied about on social media all too often nowadays by people who think their mom yelling at them once when they were 8 has ruined them forever. We're talking about a literal, life-and-death trauma — one that is widely known to cause PTSD in people who survive it.
Case in point: "It still really scares me, and I check outlets and our stove and candles and everything all the time," the woman wrote. "My husband knows this about me." And unfortunately, he used it against her in a truly sick way.
Her husband staged a house fire as a 'prank' that absolutely terrified her in the midst of her pregnancy.
Here's the kicker: This woman is 34 weeks pregnant, "literally about to pop." If ever there was a worst possible time for a prank, it's at the tail-end of a pregnancy.
Stress is widely known to cause preterm labor and birth, for starters. You'd think a functioning human being would be able to do the math that triggering a life-threatening trauma at 34 weeks pregnant is a bad idea. But not this guy.
"Two nights ago, I went to bed early," she wrote. "I was sleeping for a while before, for some reason, my husband decided to wake me up by yelling, 'Baby! There’s a fire! Fire, fire, fire! Get up!'"
Imagine being near to term with a baby inside you and thinking you're both about to die in a fire. Obviously, the woman was terrified, but that terror quickly turned to shock and horror when she "made it all the way down the stairs, yelling for [her] husband to follow [her] before he started laughing and telling [her] it was a joke."
"It took a minute for that to process," she added. "I stood there with an open mouth while he laughed and ushered me down the rest of the stairs. I sat down on the couch and just started sobbing."
Her husband is now furious at her for making him feel bad about 'a harmless prank.'
"It was genuinely the hardest I’ve ever sobbed," she wrote, "it’s like I couldn’t get myself to stop, and my whole body was shaking. My heart was racing, and I couldn’t breathe." This is frequently how PTSD manifests when a traumatic event is triggered.
Africa Studio | Shutterstock
"I was so [expletive] upset," she went on to say, and while her husband initially apologized, he soon lost his patience. "He eventually was like, 'What the [expletive], it was just a prank, this is really dramatic.'"
She later apologized to him, which is a telling detail about the state of this couple's relationship since she had nothing to apologize for. Even more telling was the fact that he refused to accept her apology. "He said I was being over dramatic and made him feel like [expletive] for a harmless prank," she admitted.
There are no two ways about it — this kind of prank is abuse, especially since maternal trauma is known to harm fetuses.
People on Reddit, as they should be, were absolutely appalled by every detail of this story.
"That wasn’t a 'harmless prank,' ... that was psychological abuse," one person wrote. "The adrenaline spike from something like that could have easily sent you into preterm labor, and while I’m sure you feel ready to pop, you’re not yet full term, and the baby’s lungs are the last to develop."
They're absolutely right — therapists say that pranks become abusive when the victim is humiliated by the experience, or the prank triggers past trauma. And particularly because they destroy a person's trust in the person pranking them, they can destroy relationships. But perhaps even more concerning is what this could have done to their baby.
Multiple studies have shown that a mother's stress and trauma during pregnancy, whether from abuse, a natural disaster, or even just extreme worrying, can lead to both behavioral problems and mental illness in their child later in life due to the way the mother's stress hormones impact the fetus' brain development.
What this woman's husband did is sick, and she doesn't owe him anything, let alone an apology. And his response says everything.
As one Redditor put it, "If he was a decent guy who made a mistake, he would have held you and rocked you until you calmed down and apologized until he was hoarse." Instead, he did the opposite. You couldn't think of a redder flag.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.