Prenatal Massage, One-Star Review, and Me Yelling at the Masseuse

For Abbey’s last birthday, my mom gave her a gift card to Hand and Stone here in Lehi, like five minutes from our house. Abbey had been saving it for months specifically for a prenatal massage near the end of pregnancy.

So Thursday night, May 8th, she finally went to use it. She was 38 weeks pregnant at the time. I took Beau and Blaire to swimming lessons while she went to her massage.

On our way home from swimming, I got a call from Abbey, crying, and immediately I thought, “Alright, this is it. We’re having the baby.”

Apparently when she got there, they scanned the gift card and said it didn’t have any money on it. The frustrating part was that before the massage, she specifically asked the front desk girls if everything was good, and they told her, “Yeah, you’re fine, we’ll figure it out.”

So she goes through with the massage thinking it’ll get resolved afterward.

Then afterward they basically tell her they can’t honor the gift card.

At that point she’s emotional, embarrassed, stressed, and stuck in one of those situations where you don’t really know what to do. She never would’ve gotten the massage and paid full price out of pocket had she known the gift card wasn’t going to work.

To make things worse, while trying to “figure it out,” they took my mom’s phone number since she had originally bought the gift card. Now Abbey’s worried they’re going to call my mom, tell her the card doesn’t work, and somehow involve her in the whole thing or make her feel like she needed to pay again.

So I’m sitting in my truck driving home with Beau and Blaire while listening to my very pregnant wife cry on speakerphone for like 15 minutes.

And the kids knew something was wrong.

At one point Beau asked, “Dad, what’s going on? Why is Mom sad? What happened?”

The truck was quiet for the whole ride home.

Which, if you know Beau and Blaire, a completely silent 20-minute car ride is unheard of.

At that point I had two options.

Option one: tell Abbey it’s not a big deal, move on, eat the cost, and forget about it.

Option two: go to war for my wife.

Unlike me, I chose war.

As I drove down I-15, I opened ChatGPT and started rage-dictating the entire story using speech-to-text while driving home from swim lessons. I told it my goal was to leave a one-star review.

To ChatGPT’s credit, it basically responded:

“If your goal is to hurt them with a one-star review, you need to sound calm and reasonable and not insane.”

Fair point.

So within a few minutes it helped me put together a very level-headed but brutal review, and I posted it to Google.

Honestly, it felt like one of the only things I had control over in that moment.

I remember thinking:

“You make my pregnant wife cry, I’ll hit your business where it hurts.”

Was it my brightest moment? Probably not.

Did I feel justified? Absolutely.

We got home, talked things through, and started calming down a little bit. We figured maybe nothing would happen and we’d just move on.

Then later that night, after we put the kids down, I decided the one thing I could still do was make Oreo shakes.

So I made us Oreo shakes where we mix our preferred milk and ice cream ratio in a cup until it’s perfect.

Honestly heavenly.

So now we’re sitting on the couch drinking Oreo shakes watching Survivor when Hand and Stone calls Abbey.

It’s the masseuse.

And to be clear, she actually seemed like she was trying to help the entire time.

Abbey answers the phone and puts it on speaker.

The masseuse starts trying to explain the situation, but she does an absolutely terrible job explaining what she’s actually trying to say.

All I hear is:

“Yeah sorry, you’re out of luck.”

Then she ends it with:

“Does that make sense?”

And I snapped.

I cut in and basically yelled:

“No, that doesn’t make sense. Just refund the damn money.”

Then I started laying into her.

I told her this wasn’t our problem, it wasn’t my mom’s problem, they’re the business, they need to figure it out and make it right. I even told her if they didn’t refund it, we’d just dispute the charge anyway.

Then there’s this pause.

And slowly she starts explaining:

“No… that’s what I’m trying to say. We ARE refunding the money. That’s why the charge happened.”

And instantly I realized:

“Well shit. This is awkward.”

I remember asking:

“Why didn’t you just say that initially?”

At that point I could hear that she was close to tears herself because I had just absolutely unloaded on the one employee who was actually trying to help fix the situation.

So we hung up.

And then Abbey and I just started laughing.

It was quite the emotional swing.

We went from:

pregnancy emotions,
crying,
silent children,
rage reviews,
protective husband mode,
threatening chargebacks,
accidentally yelling at the helpful employee,
then suddenly victory and guilt all at once while drinking Oreo shakes on the couch.

Afterward, Abbey felt terrible. She was embarrassed and stressed that we’d ruined someone else’s night, and she said she never wanted to show her face in that place again.

I also ended up texting my mom afterward just to make sure she didn’t get contacted and try paying a second time to “fix” things herself.

In the end, everything got resolved.

But honestly the whole thing just feels like such a perfect snapshot of this phase of life:

38 weeks pregnant, little kids absorbing everything, emotions running high, trying to protect each other, nobody communicating clearly, and Oreo shakes somehow solving at least part of the problem.

Looking back now, I think what I felt most in that moment was helplessness.

I couldn’t fix the emotions.

I couldn’t undo the awkwardness.

I couldn’t make the experience relaxing again for Abbey.

But I could stand up for her.

Even if I maybe overshot the landing a little.