Baby-naming can be serious business, especially when it comes to family members laying claim to a specific moniker. One new mom is learning this the hard way, telling Reddit that her sister-in-law has “flipped out” over sticking by her baby name decision, even though the SIL “stole” the name from her first.
Confused? Settle in for a sec, so you can hear the defendant’s arguments. The original poster clarified from the jump that her brother and his wife have “as much right to name their child whatever they want,” adding, “I do not own my name. I have no right to dictate to my brother what he names his kid.”
OP explained that her husband has a traditional Irish family name that she loves, and that they had landed on their name choice, Oisín, for a future child, long ago, before they were even married.
“My husband is Irish, she shared. “Not in the Boston, my great great great grandfather came over in the 1800s kind of way. In the born in Galway kind of way.”
“Neither my family or my sister-in-law have any other connection to Ireland,” OP continued. “She got pregnant right around when I did and her son was born two months before ours. They named my nephew Oisín Miguel. I did get upset or anything. When my son was born we named him Oisín Daniel. Like I had told her we would be doing. She has flipped out that two cousins will have the same name. She is nuts because our family is Hispanic and half of our cousins are named Carlos or Camilla. She is trying to insist we call him by his middle name or change his name. I told her to p-ss off.”
“My mom is staying neutral but she was very surprised that my brother gave his son an Irish name he knew I was planning on using,” she added. “She expected him to name him for our late father… My husband’s family thinks the whole thing is hilarious, my family thinks my sister-in-law is a weirdo and she thinks I’m an assh*le for copying her.”
The unanimous response from fellow commenters: OP is decidedly NTA, as this baby name decision goes both ways, and if her brother and SIL were allowed to choose whatever name they wanted, so too could she. Most agreed that the couple simply expected OP to switch gears, and that her sister-in-law was simply irritated when she didn’t.
“I love that you didn’t let it faze you, and named your child as intended,” reads one top-voted comment. “She’ll continue to flip out, and you can just continue to repeat: ‘You knew what we were going to name our child. You chose to use the same name, so you knew this in advance. Your decision is not my problem.’”
Others shared stories of similar baby-naming debacles from within their own families. “You’re right, anyone can use a name,” wrote another commenter. “That means even after she used a name that meant nothing to her, but so much to you and your hubby, it’s still OK to use that name. Tell the sis she can piss off. You didn’t get mad when she took the name you planned on using. My family is similar… We had four John’s, two Rick’s who were cousins around the same age, and most women have some variation of the name Anne.”
One person summed it all up perfectly, writing, “She thought she was going to own the name by claiming it first, even though her reasoning for the name was that you didn’t own it. So she can either call her son Miguel, or put on her big-girl pants and live with the fact that cousins have the same name. It’s been known to happen.”
Props to OP, both for standing her ground and for being so chill about the whole thing. It’s just not worth stressing over something so silly and giving anything to energy vampires, especially in those early days with a new baby, when there’s already so much going on in a new mom’s world.
