“My fiancée Jane found out she was pregnant in June 2021, and we announced it to our immediate families in August. At first, my stepmother was completely uninterested in our baby. Not that I expected much from the woman whose reaction to our pregnancy announcement was to ask Jane if she was ‘sure it was mine’ (even my dad berated her for that one), but she barely seemed to acknowledge the fact that we were expecting. Instead, she was more interested in my stepbrother, who was also engaged, and would ‘give her beautiful grandbabies soon.’
No complaints. We didn’t want her involved, and we didn’t even have to say anything. If only it had stayed that way.”
She Sounds Delightful
“Planning our baby shower was complicated. Both Jane and I would have to work until the holidays, and I wanted to be involved. The due date was in February 2022, so we decided on early January as the best period of time. We enlisted two people as planners: my sister Laura and Jane’s best friend Nina.
Jane and I are mostly laid-back people. We didn’t want a big party, nor did we want to spend too much money on it (we were saving for both our baby and the wedding). We decided early on that the shower would be co-ed. It would also have to be indoors (again, January), and we settled on a guest list of 25 people (plus about a dozen kids).
We came up with the idea of a pizza party. Nina found an event venue with a pizza oven, and Laura figured out ways to incorporate classic baby shower stuff into the theme.
The resulting plans were awesome. Make-your-own pizzas, non-alcoholic drinks, and plain bodysuits for the kids to customize. Nina and Laura mixed pizza decor with baby decor and found pizza-shaped sweets. It almost seemed messy, and I was surprised they made it work, but we loved it. Most of the planning was finished by the middle of November.
Well, later that month, my stepbrother’s fiancée left him for her ex. They’d been together for 4 years at that point, and it was both sudden and traumatizing for him. He was devastated.
SM then realized the grandkids she dreamed of would take longer to come than she’d thought. So naturally, without her son’s milestones to obsess over, she moved on to mine.
Suddenly, she went from aloof relative to an excited grandma-to-be. Facebook posts, tacky ‘Promoted to Nana’ shirts, the whole nine. At first, we were too busy finishing things up at work and getting ready for the holidays to worry about that, but it didn’t take long for her to start pestering us about planning the baby shower, as well as a gender reveal.
We denied the possibility of a gender reveal party. No offense to those who like them, but we don’t. Plus, we had decided to wait until birth to find out the gender. SM tried to get us to find out and tell her ‘as a Christmas present,’ but we didn’t. We also denied her the baby shower.
She told my father, and he talked Laura into letting SM help out with the plans. She was still living with them at the time, so she didn’t have much of a choice. She called Nina, and they met SM for coffee. Though I wasn’t there for that meeting, Laura told me what happened later.
Before they could even mention their plans, SM started talking about hers. According to Laura, she pulled a shockingly thick binder (complete with the words ‘Oh, Baby!’ on the cover, colorful tabs, and pieces of fabric poking out) from her bag and skipped to the shower section. It was short compared to the rest of the binder, but still long. And it was all to describe her one and only baby shower project. Laura sent me pictures, and oh boy.
I’ll give her this: it looked like the most Instagrammable baby shower ever. That being said, it was also barely functional and obviously expensive. There were balloons, oversized teddy bears, giant alphabet blocks, and cringe-worthy signs everywhere. SM was going for pretty over cozy, with uncomfortable chairs and some fancy food ideas that didn’t look edible (most of them had soft cheeses, which Jane couldn’t eat).
The color palette was just three different shades of pink with gold accents. We’d be fine with a pink baby shower if it at least tried to mix things up a little, but SM’s pictures looked like Barbie had puked all over Hello Kitty’s birthday party. When Nina tried to remind her that we didn’t know the gender, SM said she ‘just knew that it was a girl.’ Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.
SM also wanted an all-female, child-free party with fancy caterers and alcohol. She had written down a ‘guest suggestion list’ containing some of her closest friends (neither mine nor Jane’s moms were on it) and planned party games no one had any interest in trying out. Basically, the only thing everyone could agree on was to hold the party indoors.
Laura and Nina weren’t given an opportunity to show her their plans until she was done. Once they could, they explained that, while they could find a way to incorporate some of SM’s ideas, they’d already settled on the pizza theme. She tried to protest, but Laura stated that it was kind of them to even offer that, as the shower was a month away and we’d already greenlit their plans. SM even called me to try to get them to change their minds, but I just repeated their words. My dad had found out he couldn’t come to the shower, so he didn’t get a say in anything anymore.
The holidays came around, and the subject was dropped. SM seemed to be okay with the pizza party. Nina managed to pair some of the pink decor she’d wanted with matching blue stuff and even added one of the huge teddy bears.
Fast-forward to a week before the shower. Jane was almost 8 months pregnant. Everything had been bought, all guests had RSVP’d, and pretty much anything was ready to go. The shower was set to start at 7 PM. SM offered to get to the venue earlier to prepare everything. Laura agreed, mostly because she knew SM would complain if she ‘didn’t get to do anything,’ and the venue even let them drop off their decorations before the party. Jane and I promised to get there at 6.
Two days before the shower, however, the venue called Nina. They told her that SM had stopped by to drop off large, heavy boxes of what she called ‘a little surprise’ for us. She’d informed them that she planned on showing up at 3:30 PM to start setting it up. They were calling to reinforce that the venue was only booked past 4 PM, since SM almost threw a tantrum when told that.
All of the decor was still at Nina’s place, so she called Laura to check if they’d left anything with SM. Thankfully, my sister is both smart and used to this sh*t, so she drove to the venue the next day and asked to see SM’s boxes. She told me she wasn’t even surprised at its contents when she opened them, but was still shocked at SM’s audacity.
All of the boxes were filled with pink, frilly decorations. Some of them seemed to be the exact same items SM had initially shown Laura and Nina. The signs, the balloons, the placemats, everything.
Laura realized that’s why SM intended to get to the venue earlier: to set up the baby shower she’d planned and pretty much force us all to party in Barbie hell with her.
She called Nina to figure out what to do. Neither of them could come at 4 PM, so it was almost inevitable for SM to get her way. The most obvious solution they came up with was to throw everything away. But Laura had a better idea. That night, they called me and Jane:
‘Hey, wanna destroy a party in two hours?’
Laura got home and invited SM to go to a salon with her, lying about having coupons. SM agreed, and they planned on going right after SM was done preparing for the baby shower.
At 4 PM the next day, SM got to the venue. She was done setting things up by 5 (I’ll admit, the woman is fast) and quickly left to meet Laura at the salon. Once they were together, Laura texted Nina that ‘the coast was clear.’
At that, Jane, Nina, and I went to the venue. Sure enough, SM had prepared her party. To make this shorter, I won’t describe it, but I will say it was so pink it almost gave Jane nausea.
For the next two hours, Laura distracted SM at the salon while the three of us quickly took down every piece of decor SM had put up and replaced it with the pizza party stuff. We set up the activities, made up the tables, and put every pink item we found back in SM’s boxes. It was actually really fun. We were done only minutes before the shower started.
A handful of guests arrived before SM did, so I barely saw her all night. Laura told me that when they got there, SM’s jaw dropped as she tried to make sense of what had happened to all her pink decor. My sister just smiled and whispered ‘nice try’ in her ear.
Overall, the baby shower was everything we’d hoped for. Our friends were there, people had fun and we had a ton of pizza. So I didn’t really care that SM spent the whole party literally sulking in the corner. Nina did catch her trying to put little pink bows on top of the cupcakes, but she quickly shut that down. I give Laura and Nina full credit for saving the day.
SM’s interest in our baby quickly died after that. She stopped wearing her Nana shirts, didn’t come to see us at the hospital when he was born, and refused to even acknowledge that he was a boy until she met him weeks later. Up until we went no contact, she was a very loose definition of the word grandmother.
I couldn’t be more grateful my son will never know her.”
