A 34-year-old woman says she’s done bringing homemade treats to work after her coworkers started calling her “the office mom.”
In a post shared on Reddit, the woman explained that she regularly brought in cookies, banana bread, and other baked goods for her colleagues.
“People seemed to appreciate it, until recently,” she wrote. “Last week, a coworker joked that I was ‘the office mom.’ Everyone laughed, but I felt weird about it. Then another guy said, ‘You should bring snacks more often, Mom.’”
The woman says she quickly shut it down, replying, “You can call me (my name), not mom.” But instead of taking her seriously, her coworkers laughed, and one told her not to be “so uptight.”
That moment was enough for her to draw a line. “I stopped baking. Simple as that,” she said.
When Monday rolled around, one coworker asked where the muffins were. Her reply: “‘Didn’t feel like being the office mom this week.’ It got quiet after that.”
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Now, she says, some colleagues are accusing her of “making things awkward” and “overreacting.” But she insists she didn’t cause a scene — she simply decided to stop doing “free labor that suddenly came with a nickname I didn’t like.”
“Am I overreacting for pulling back?” she asked Reddit.
In the comments, users overwhelmingly supported her decision to set a boundary.
“No. Good for you. You didn’t overreact,” one commenter wrote. “You asked nicely for the nickname to be dropped, and they decided to ignore you and not care about your feelings. Baked goods are a treat, not a right, and certainly not for anyone who calls you something you’ve said you don’t like.”
Another person shared a similar experience: “Makes all the sense in the world to me. I’ve been the one bringing in baked goods. It’s amazing how rude people can be — they defend their inconsiderate actions by saying, ‘Oh, come on, you’re overreacting,’ instead of simply saying, ‘I’m sorry.’ They had their chance. No banana bread for them.”
