A woman attended her friend’s baby shower and showered the pregnant mom-to-be with a $400 gift. However, the pregnant woman went on to suffer a traumatic miscarriage. The friend who gave her the gift saw this as an opportunity to get her gift back so she could return it for a full refund and get her money back. However, people online are calling the gift-giver cruel for trying to get the gift back as her friend grieves the loss of her pregnancy.
The friend posted her concern online and was faced with immediate backlash for being a “heartless” person who was only thinking about themselves. Many people claimed that it was bad etiquette to ask for the baby shower gift back after the miscarriage since the person who suffered the miscarriage is going through a range of terrible emotions.
The woman argued that while it does sound like a “terrible thing to do,” she wanted the gift back since it would “go to waste and likely never be used.” She and her husband spent about four hundred dollars on the gift and were hoping to get their money back so they could put the money toward something more useful in their lives.
The woman also explained that she spent $300 on a baby shower gift for the same woman only a few years ago when she had a previous child.
“It’s one thing if she’s able to get a few years of use out of the item, that’s money well spent, but it’s a problem if it’s going to sit in a box in her attic for years,” the gift giver explained.
The woman opened up about her ordeal on the Reddit forum “Am I the A**hole?” in which people talk about issues in their lives and strangers judge them on whether or not they are the ones who were the problem.
“My husband has a family friend named Jen,” she began. “Jen and I aren’t friends at all, but we are friendly. When Jen had her first kid, my husband purchased an expensive item off of her baby shower registry as a gift (around $300 USD if I recall correctly).”
The woman explained that she was happy to buy Jen a gift because she and her husband were happy that she was having another baby. However, the woman did find it strange that Jen was throwing an equally large baby shower for her second child only a few years after the first one.
“Personally, I thought she should still have most of the items from her first kid, and I didn’t think people usually did full-blown baby showers/registries after their first,” the woman said. “I was also surprised she was asking for gifts when she was still in the first trimester, but I’m a cautious person who didn’t announce my pregnancy until 20 weeks. I left it up to my husband but mentioned to him that I was surprised she was organizing another shower/gifting event since she already has a young child and received brand new stuff then.”
She added, “It’s one thing if she’s able to get a few years of use out of it; that’s money well spent. But if it’s going to sit in a box for years . . . that’s where we are getting stuck.”
She hoped to “ideally” get a refund but was also thinking she could regift it to someone who could use it.