Friend Tells Pregnant Woman She Spoiled Her Own Surprise Gender Reveal

Fireworks here, fireworks there.

Almost every celebration wants a pyrotechnic display. And among these events are gender reveal parties.

Blue for a boy, pink for a girl. From cakes and gifts to the colorful smoke of a pyrotechnic device, guests learn the good news from the happy parent-to-be couple.

But the surprise is not always good news. In the case of the El Dorado wildfire in September 2020, the disaster was caused by a smoke bomb during a gender reveal celebration. The fire raged on for more than two months, destroying more than 20,000 acres of valuable land, including homes and properties.

And that was not the first of its kind. Arizona suffered from a wildifire that consumed almost 47,000 acres owned by the state, private entities, and federal agencies in 2017. This was after an off-duty US border patrol agent and expectant dad fired his rifle at a target that would reveal the sex of their baby to guests. But he had unwittingly filled this target with a highly explosive substance, and, when it exploded, it quickly ignited the surrounding vegetation. The fire lasted almost a week, and the cost of the damage was up to more than $8 million.

However, these incidents have not put off the enthusiasm of parents-to-be to hold gender reveal parties. This viral story on Reddit’s popular r/AmItheA–hole forum is another one of them, but, as you may expect, it’s not the usual fairytale.

This time, it’s a friendship that got broken. And guess whose fault it was — two women were pointing fingers at each other. A friend who was told to keep a secret and a pregnant woman who couldn’t contain her excitement prior to the gender reveal.

With the username u/Alittlespice-, this friend posted her story for the AITA community to judge if she was a jerk. She started with the following details: “My (27f) friend (29F) is pregnant. She wanted to do a gender reveal, so at her 20-week ultrasound, she got the ultrasound technician to write the gender on a piece of paper, put it in an envelope, and gave it to me. She wanted me to order those smoke cannons for her, her husband, and their kids to pop at a photo session to reveal what their new baby is going to be. Personally, I don’t see the point in them, but it made my friend happy, and I felt honoured that she trusted me with such a secret. When she handed me the envelope, she made me swear that under no circumstances would I tell her what it is, no matter how much she begged, or tell anyone else. I agreed.”

Of course, before the gender reveal party, OP busied herself with buying the balloons and cannons for the celebration. But it was no longer a happy time for her. Over the past two weeks, her pregnant friend had been hounding her with text messages, asking about her baby’s gender. Then, the texts would be followed by “actually, no, I don’t want to know.”

The days grew even more irksome because her friend started calling her at work. OP’s schedule was packed with meetings, and she had to tell her friend to stop calling her and just chill out. The gender reveal party was just around the corner.

But OP’s patience finally snapped, as she wrote in her post, “Here is where I may be the a-hole: I’d been having a crappy day at work, with a particular client being a giant PAITA. I was stuck in a meeting with this client, and the receptionist stuck her head in and said I had an urgent phone call. I thought it may have been my kids’ school, so I excused myself and took the call. It was my ‘friend’ AGAIN. I just snapped and told her if she wanted to know so badly, it’s a boy!’ And then I hung up the phone.”

According to OP, her husband understood why it all happened. But their friends were now calling her an a-hole for revealing the secret ahead of the party. What’s worse, she learned from a mutual friend that their pregnant friend had told them a different story and claimed that OP was not a trustworthy person.

When OP straightened the facts to this mutual friend, she received a text from their pregnant friend, who this time accused her of being a horrible person for sharing her side of the story.

Well, in this kind of story, you’d be a total jerk if you disrupted your friend at work just to play this little back-and-forth game. Pregnancy does not excuse acts like this.