A pregnant woman was left in tears over an answerphone message that ruined her plans for a gender reveal.
Gender-reveal parties have proved a divisive concept among Americans. An online YouGov poll of 1.2 million U.S. adults found that, while 25 percent of respondents considered them "fun," a further 35 percent felt that they were "unnecessary."
Expectant mom Ariel Johnson from Grass Valley, California, wanted a gender reveal for her unborn child but was determined to do something intimate to mark the news.
"I wanted a special moment with just my boyfriend," Johnson told Newsweek. "You always hear about giant gender reveals with fireworks. We just wanted a cute cake and each other's company."
The plan was to cut a cake revealing the gender in their kitchen together. "My boyfriend has been building our house for three years now, from the ground up, and this was going to be the first big moment in our new kitchen," Johnson said. "We just wanted to create a happy memory that we could cherish forever."
The plan was simple enough: Johnson handed a sealed envelope containing confirmation of the unborn child's gender to a local bakery who would then be tasked with making a cake with a filling that made clear if the baby was a boy or a girl.
"We were both expecting to be surprised when we cut into the cake," Johnson said. "The filling was supposed to have raspberries or strawberries for a girl, and black or blue berries for a boy; nothing too crazy."
Unfortunately, this particular cake ended up leaving a bitter taste in the mouth after Johnson received a voicemail from a member of staff saying they had run out of the blackberries needed to finish the cake.
In a video posted to TikTok under the handle @morbidmama7, Johnson shares audio of the message in which the member of staff, evidently unaware of what they have just done, mentions the fact it is a gender-reveal cake.
Johnson was devastated. "I was so sad," she said. "It feels like someone stole a moment in time from us. Something that was supposed to be magical instead turned sour."
Johnson immediately called the bakery and told them what they had done. "I was in tears," she said. To make matters worse, the couple subsequently discovered that the bakery had not even run out of blackberries to begin with.
In the meantime, Johnson decided she had little choice but to tell her partner, who had not been privy to the answerphone message. "I hated knowing when he didn't know," she said. "The moment was definitely different from I wanted it to be. When I told him, I was still in tears, but the dust has settled, and we are just happy to be having a baby at all."
The bakery went on to provide a refund and made the cake regardless. "It appears to just have been carelessness," Johnson said. "The woman who made the mistake called me as well and still tried to make excuses; no real explanation was given."
Though Johnson went on to share what happened with followers on TikTok, she made a point of not naming the bakery involved as she would rather not shame them. To her, what happened is just another step in her pregnancy journey, and she is focusing on the future.
"We are ecstatic about the upcoming boy! Of course, we would love a girl, too! We just wish for a healthy rest of the pregnancy," Johnson said.
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