A woman wondered if she was wrong to refuse a slice of her birthday cake to a pregnant woman.
In a post shared on the Am I the A**hole forum on Reddit, a woman wrote that she celebrated her birthday with a barbecue, alongside her three children and her husband, as well as her best friend Matt, his pregnant girlfriend Jane and their three children. She explained that they had become closer as a family since they lived two houses away.
As the men cooked up more than $90 worth of hot dogs and hamburgers, a surplus that both the original poster and Matt had contributed, the original poster swam with the kids in their pond while Jane scrolled through pictures on her phone.
But around 5:30 p.m., the men called the children to grab their plates and eat, but the author of the article wrote that she and her middle child, aged nine, were not hungry at that time, so they continued swimming. After spending more than 40 more minutes in the pond, they finally got hungry around 6:15 p.m., when her husband went to get beer.
But by the time they got to the grill, the woman said Matt and Jane were gone too, as was the food.
“All the food was gone. Literally all of it,” she wrote. “I called my husband and asked him where all the food was and he said it must be on the grill. I told him it was all gone. There was a long pause before he said, ‘Jane asked if she could have some for leftovers, but I didn’t think she would have all of it.’”
He then told her that before he left for the store 10 minutes earlier, there were at least eight hamburgers and ten hot dogs left over, as well as a macaroni salad. Puzzled, she told her husband to call his friend to see what was going on. According to Matt, Jane said she had taken “a few” things with her that had already been eaten, but her oldest son, 13, said otherwise. The original article’s author wrote, “He saw Jane leaving our property carrying the whole pan (one of those really big aluminum barbecue pans).”
“I’m furious at this point,” she continued. “My son and I hadn’t eaten anything.”
Her husband, although also upset, bought them food from the store instead of confronting Matt about the situation since they work together. However, things still escalated when, 45 minutes later, Jane and her three children showed up at their house to ask if they could have a piece of the original poster’s birthday cake.
“I tell Jane her kids can do it, but she can’t,” she wrote. “She asks me why and I say, ‘I’m pretty sure you ate a lot, since you ran off with my entire barbecue dinner before my son and I could eat anything.'”
Jane defended herself by saying that the author’s husband not only said she could have it, but that she was entitled to it because “half of it was his.” She added that she didn’t know they hadn’t eaten, although she had been by the grill the whole time and probably didn’t see them eat.
“I just shrugged and left,” the author concluded. “She tells her kids to go check it out and they leave without a cake.”
In the comments section, people wrote that Jane was rude not only by taking all the food, but by leaving without saying goodbye to the hostess, then coming back as if nothing happened.
“Who leaves a barbecue without saying goodbye to the hostess?” one person wrote. “There were only two families. That’s rude in itself.”
“Who leaves a party with all the leftovers and then has the nerve to come back for more?!” someone else commented.
“If the party is still going on, there are no leftovers yet, it’s just food,” another added. “Why would she leave and come back? That’s just weird.”
