Have you ever heard the idiom, “to steal someone’s thunder”?
It describes the experience of having someone snatch the spotlight right away from someone else. Those people take credit, praise, or even just attention away from others, usually in an effort to place it on themselves instead.
If you’ve ever had a person steal your thunder, then you know how heart-crushing and devastating of an experience that can be.
One woman recently had her thunder quite unfairly stolen when her sister-in-law had the *audacity* to steal her pregnancy announcement.
In a post shared to the subreddit r/AmITheAsshole, the unidentified woman begins by explaining that after years of wanting to have a child, she recently found out she’s pregnant.
“I was excited to tell my family the big news,” she wrote. “My older sister has one child, my nephew… My brother is married but he and his wife have made it very clear they will always be child free.”
An upcoming family dinner seemed like the perfect opportunity to reveal her pregnancy to all the most important people in her life.
To make it even more exciting for everyone, the woman decided to involve her nephew in the big reveal.
Before sitting down for dinner, she gave the seven-year-old boy a t-shirt to put on which read, “This is what an awesome big cousin looks like.”
Next, he put on a sweater to conceal the big news with instructions to take it off “whenever he wanted” while everyone was eating together.
In the middle of the dinner, the woman’s nephew casually took off his sweater and then waited for someone to notice his new shirt.
His mom was the first one to notice, and everyone began reacting with excitement at the prospect of a new baby in the family. But unfortunately, no one figured out who was actually pregnant.
Instead, they all congratulated her sister-in-law.
The worst part of it all is that her SIL didn’t even attempt to correct anyone — she sat there and soaked up all the praise that belonged to someone else at the table.
“She just went along with it and began to rub her flat belly while laughing,” the woman wrote. “I must have looked completely hurt because my mother yelled at me to stop being rude and to congratulate them.”
Even after she attempted to tell everyone she was the pregnant one, they continued to fawn over her SIL and her understandably confused husband. So eventually, the woman just got up and left.
For the rest of the night, the woman endured scolding texts from her family members who told her she was acting out of “jealousy” and she should be happy for her pregnant SIL.
It wasn’t until the next morning that her brother’s wife finally told everyone that, no, she was not expecting a baby.
Of course, the woman’s family began calling her to apologize, but also told her she shouldn’t have left the dinner that night.
And in fact, it was her fault that there was any sort of a mix-up because apparently she wasn’t “acting” like she was the pregnant one.
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So why did the woman’s sister-in-law let the “joke” go on for so long?
Apparently that was the way she had always planned on announcing her own pregnancy, if it were to ever happen for her and her husband.
As the woman explained in her post , “She said that since she is not ever having a child that she just wanted to experience what the moment would be like.”
In an attempt to remedy the situation, the woman’s family wants to throw another dinner so she can “redo” her big announcement.
But not so surprisingly, she’s quite firm that she does not want a redo. In fact, she doesn’t feel much like celebrating her pregnancy with her family anymore.
In the aftermath of this entire situation, she asked the good people of Reddit if she reacted wrongly and if she was the one in the wrong here.
Of course, the answer was a resounding “no.”
“[Your sister-in-law] so wanted the attention,” one user wrote. “She pretty much pretended to be pregnant which is so weird. This was supposed to be a happy moment for you and your family and she hijacked it.”
Another person added, “I could see in a fit of confusion pretending for, like, 20 seconds, a minute tops… But it sounds like she did this THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE NIGHT.”
Not only did Reddit users blast the woman’s sister-in-law, they also took aim at her unreasonably upset family members.
“Your family actually turned this around and made you the bad guy?” one person implored. “Your SIL is a piece of work all right but dear God, your parents actually sided with her.”
They weren’t too impressed by the family’s attempts to reconcile things either.
Someone else chimed in, “So far, they’ve failed to apologize, and you don’t OWE them an opportunity to make it up to you. As long as they insist that you owe them something, they are not truly contrite.”
What do you think of this situation? Is the woman in the wrong or is she right to be upset with her family? Let us know!
h/t: Reddit
