Mom, I owe you an apology.
It has been a long time coming, but I was wrong about beans.
There. I said it.
For years, you put beans on my plate, and I treated them like you had personally betrayed me. Kidney beans. Yellow beans. Baked beans. It didn’t matter. If it was called a bean, I wanted nothing to do with it.
You would tell me to try one. I would tell you I already had. You would point out that I had not, so I would explain that I tried one last time. When you asked when, I would say something vague like, “Before.”
This was apparently not enough information.
So the bean would sit there. I would eat everything around it. Potatoes vanished. Meat disappeared. Gravy was dealt with. But the beans remained, untouched and very aware of the situation. Sometimes I moved them around so it looked like I’d made progress.
It had not.
I don’t know why I hated them so much. Maybe I didn’t. Maybe I just decided at six years old that beans were the enemy and then spent the next decade defending a position I no longer understood.
Children are very good at this.
“I don’t like it.”
“Have you tried it?”
“No.”
And somehow, to a child, this is a complete argument.
Then I became an adult, and somewhere along the way, without warning or ceremony, I ate a bean.
It was fine.
Worse than fine, actually. It was good.
Do you know how annoying that is? After everything I put us through? After the negotiations? The threats? The lonely little pile of cold beans still sitting on my plate twenty minutes after everyone else had finished eating?
Turns out you can put a little butter on them. Salt. Pepper. Maybe garlic. You can use them in a chili. Or in a salad! Suddenly I’m standing in my own kitchen at forty-something years old thinking, These beans are pretty good.
Absolutely humiliating.
And it didn’t stop there. Broccoli? Good. Brussels sprouts? Apparently we figured those out. Peas? Fine. I have willingly purchased spinach with my own money.
At some point, I became the person bringing vegetables into the house.
Which means there is now a small child sitting at my table looking at food I have prepared as though I have placed a dead beetle beside his potatoes.
“Just try it,” I say.
He says no.
“You might like it.”
No.
“One bite.”
No.
And then it hits me.
Oh.
Oh no.
This is what I did to you.
The truth is, I’ve known about the beans for a while. This isn’t some grand discovery I made last Tuesday. I’ve eaten them. I’ve enjoyed them. I’ve even cooked them myself. I’ve just never felt the need to formally acknowledge what all of that means.
So, Mom, I’m sorry about the beans. You were right. I was wrong. They were perfectly good.
But before you get too excited about this victory, please remember that it took me roughly thirty-five years to admit it.
And this apology is specifically about the beans.
Don’t start making a list.
The CJBuzz 