This article first published on American Web Media. Mothers-in-law may be difficult, but this one seems especially demanding! One new parent shared a particularly harrowing story with Slate’s advice column. Her mother-in-law persuaded her husband to officially alter the name of her kid while she was healing in the hospital. “My kid is two months old, and I recently realized that my husband misspelled our son’s middle name as “Finlay” instead of “Finley” on all of his legal paperwork,”
the new mom — code name Mama Bear — wrote to Slate’s advice columnist. “Of course, I’m enraged because I told him I was alright with the middle name, but it had to be spelt Finley—and he agreed before our baby was born.” To add insult to injury, this cruel mother-in-law sent a Christmas gift to baby Finlay, but the baby’s mother felt it was an innocent error. Later, she’d discover that this cunning grandmother even contrived to name the kid Finlay, despite the fact that the baby’s mother wanted this as his middle name.
Mama Bear is understandably enraged. “He just let me think for two months that our son’s middle name was Finley when it officially isn’t!” she wrote. “I found everything when I searched for his Social Security card and birth certificate to properly put them away.” When Mama Bear approached her husband, he said that he regretted giving in to his mother and had been gathering the confidence to inform his wife. It is unclear how the spouse saw this situation playing out.
“Now comes the tough part,” Mama Bear wrote. “His mother apparently guilt-tripped him into doing this when I was sleeping following my emergency C-section.” Remember, she lives a few states away, so this was all done over the phone. She attempted to persuade him to give our kid a first name I despised, claiming that I would “get furious, but get over it.” “My husband is equally to blame for doing this in the first place, and we’re working through it together, but I feel like something has to be said to my mother-in-law.”
Should I contact her about it? Should I allow my spouse to contact her about this? Do we go up to her together? “How should I respond?” “I have no desire to have any kind of contact with her going ahead, therefore I am not concerned about playing nice,” she said, adding that she would soon change her son’s name to the right spelling.