Woman Asks Reddit If She's a Jerk for Accidentally Ruining Her Sister-in-Law's Gender Reveal

From serving Jell-O to a hippo to starting forest fires, many couples have gone to extremes for the sake of a gender reveal party. It's no wonder the trend has been questioned as potentially harmful for a variety of reasons, such as leading to problematic assumptions and limiting stereotypes about a baby's gender. It's also caused far too many parents-to-be to get totally freaked about the time, place, and other details around sharing the simple, but surely exciting news of their baby's sex with loved ones.

Case in point: One expectant mom seems to have completely lost her cool after her sister-in-law accidentally spilled the beans ahead of her Thanksgiving-timed reveal. In a new post in the Am I the Ass**** subreddit, the mom-to-be's SIL asked whether she's a jerk for ruining the surprise.

Writing under the handle ctreasure, the original poster (OP), shared, "I can't believe I'm about to type this crap, but my sister-in-law asked me to be the 'secret keeper' for her baby (first one) and have a gender reveal at Thanksgiving." She went on to explain that the ultrasound tech was going to give the parents an envelope which would then be mailed to her, and then she "planned a whole part of Thanksgiving to be a big hoorah where they and everyone else find out what they're having." She said she planned it for weeks, set it up days in advance, took every precaution not to tell anyone one. "I was gonna kill it," she wrote.

But the night before Thanksgiving, she was going through how it would all go down. "I had an indoor set-up and then an outdoor setup, since we were using smoke bombs for the big reveal. SIL asked me something about the smoke bombs, and I said, 'Once you pull the pin, it'll smoke white for ten seconds, and then it'll smoke blue.' ... and before I could recover, we both realized I had slipped," the OP wrote.

The expectant mom locked herself in the bathroom, saying it's all ruined, and she doesn't even want to do it now because there's no point, refusing to talk to her SIL, according to ctreasure. "I gave her some space, obviously felt HORRIBLE." The OP tried to apologize and point out that people would be at the party who didn't know, and no one would know that she found out.

Following the heart-to-heart, the OP thought the dust had settled. But after returning from a dinner that her sister-in-law didn't attend, she saw a post on Facebook, in which the mom-to-be wrote about her gender reveal being accidentally ruined. "It was supposed to be a special moment and it was ripped away and I'll never get it back," she wrote, according to ctreasure. Someone asked how it was ruined, and the expectant mom pointed the finger at the OP, noting that she accidentally said the color.

"Mind you, her parents didn't know, his parents didn't know, our other SIL didn't know, and she really just wanted it on Facebook Live and to have the stupid pics anyway," ctreasure said.

Ultimately, they went through with it as planned, the OP shared. "It was streamed live so her 'intimate' gathering could get all the likes and comments," she noted. "Normally, she tags me and everyone in her posts but this time it was noticeably not tagged. So, Reddit, am I the ass**** for spilling the beans? Or is my SIL overdramatic and petty for blasting me all over social media?"

The post has since been deleted by the OP, but it was screenshot and tweeted.

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Most of the 1.3K commenters who weighed in agreed that the OP was, indeed, not the ass**** (NTA).

Plenty of people chalked it up to run-of-the-mill human error. One Redditor named Mother_of_Salmon wrote, "One of my friends had an ultrasound tech ask, 'So do you want to know if she’s a boy or a girl?' Mistakes happen, and it really shouldn’t be a big deal."

Wandlore agreed, writing, "It was an honest mistake. She’s completely overreacting. On the plus side, now you guys are safe from any unforeseen injuries that are now par for the course with these reveal parties."

Redditor Used_Patience even noted that in most cases, it seems the couples doing the reveal are in on the sex, writing, "Every gender reveal party I've ever been to—thankfully not many—has had the couple knowing and this is how they tell everyone. Who wants to find out their own child's gender on camera? I can't stop thinking about the posts we get here about people who want one specific gender more than the other and imagine their face dropping. This is a horrible idea."

Many Redditors were critical of gender reveals in general. Hanks_Hill said, "Gender reveal parties are some of the most narcissistic events I've ever heard of to be quite honest, so NTA even if it isn't a mistake." And XxmilleniumXx said they're problematic, "especially in an era where society is increasingly realizing that gender isn’t black and white or, as the case may be, blue and pink."

The bottom line summed up by PM_ME_YOUR_FLAIR: "NTA and f*** her for not just being grateful to have a child on the way."

Who knows how long it'll take for the expectant SIL to realize this, but in the meantime, here's hoping the OP heard her fellow Redditors' messages of support loud and clear—and forgives herself.