New mom had on-point response after husband's stepmom demanded they name granddaughter after her
Having dysfunctional families can create significant rifts between the long-term relationships of parents and their kids. A woman who goes by u/ElectricalLeague1580 on Reddit opened up about her complicated family situation and sought advice from the online community. The woman who wrote the post revealed how the parents of her 29-year-old husband divorced when he was 2 years old. A couple of years later, the woman's father-in-law married a woman named Sharon. It turned out, Sharon and the woman's late mother-in-law were on bad terms.
"Sharon said my MIL made her life hell, wished her dead, laughed when she suffered three miscarriages, tried to get CPS to take custody from FIL and her and tried to get her out of the picture for good with CPS," the post read. The Reddit user's husband refused to call Sharon anything other than her name and Sharon blamed it on her husband's ex-wife. However, from various accounts of extended family members, the woman deduced that Sharon was exaggerating about the sour relationship she had with the biological mom. The relationship between the woman's husband, his stepmother and his father deteriorated further after his biological mom died.
"He forbade them from attending the funeral for him and said if they tried to come he would run away until he was placed with other family members. My husband told me about this himself," the woman wrote about her husband. "By the time we met in college, he was pretty low on contact with them." Then things took a surprising turn when Sharon introduced herself to the woman. "Sharon calls my husband her son. She actually introduced herself to me as his mom and was shocked that I knew she wasn't his mom." When the woman and her husband welcomed their daughter, the couple decided to name the baby after her deceased mother-in-law. The woman's husband did not invite his father and stepmother to meet his newborn baby but they found out about her birth from social media posts.
"Then they approached me at the mall a couple of days ago and asked me to talk to them. They told me they found out her name and they wanted to know why we'd do that to Sharon. They said I should insist on a different name and name her after Sharon because she's been here all this time," the post continued. The woman added to her story by mentioning how she told her father-in-law and Sharon that she was not willing to change her daughter's name at any cost. "We are getting inundated with texts from them calling me rude and disgusting for dismissing Sharon's feelings," the woman concluded, wondering if she was in the wrong for her actions. The Reddit community sided with the mother and criticized Sharon for inserting herself in scenarios where she wasn't welcomed.
u/EchoMountain158 remarked, "It's your pregnancy. Your child. Your husband's child. Not theirs. It sounds like she tried to take over, got mad it didn't work and then resorted to smothering him, which drove your husband further away from them." u/VastConsideration126 joked, "You can still honor Sharon! The Bronx Zoo gives out certificates for Valentine's Day. You can name a hissing cockroach after someone. I would pay to name the cockroach Sharon and then send her the certificate." u/dncrmom added, "Sharon seems to suffer from main character syndrome. The name of your child has nothing to do with her. Your husband barely has a relationship with her. Suggest therapy."