My F-I-L was livid that my husband didn’t name our first son after my husband, my F-I-L and the two that came before them. My husband hates his first name, but it was also his dad’s grandpa’s and great-grandpa’s first name. My husband told me he already had that shouting match with his dad by the time he was 12. My F-I-L was also upset because we didn’t get our sons circumcised. My own mom disagrees with us about spanking and LGBTQIA issues, but she supports all of our other parenting decisions, such as what we don’t let the kids watch on TV.
(That’s reversed with my own mom, I’m more liberal than her she in some things, . . . )
You can’t be more liberal or less liberal than her is.
You can, however, be more liberal or less liberal than she is.
Neither sets of in-laws live close enough to have had any opportunity for that kind of influence. My children are adults now, by the way. As far as what you wrote about naming the children, there was something happened along those lines.
When my wife was in her eighth month of pregnancy with our second child, I was sent overseas on a six-month deployment. My mother went to stay with my wife to help out, spending that last month with her. The topic of the baby’s name came up between them, and all hell broke loose. I didn’t know anything about this until I made a phone call from Japan. My wife, already dealing with being pregnant and her husband being sent overseas, now had a nagging, meddling mother-in-law bending her ear over sheer nonsense. Imagine her mental state at the time. I calmed my wife down as best as can be done over a phone line thousands of miles away, and had her pass the phone to my mother.
I then listened to a litany about why my mother disagreed with the name. In fact, it was the middle name we had chosen for the baby that had my mother up in arms. It turns out that when my mother was growing up, she had had a relative with the same name who had been very mean to her. She claimed the memory of that would always be triggered if we gave our baby the same name. This was my first time in my entire life hearing about this relative.
My mother had browbeaten my poor little wife over the issue, trying to convince her not to use the name. Of course, my wife didn’t know what to do, my mother was making too much of o big deal about it, so my phone call came just in time. Granted, my mother had had no further contact with that relative for about 40 years by that time, and didn’t even know if the relative was dead or alive. Additionally, it is an extremely common name, many everyday people have it, as do countless famous people, so my mother had heard the name zillions of times since her childhood, without it sending her off the deep end. I thought her stance was sheer craziness. I listened to every word my mother had to say and promptly ignored it all. I informed her that we would be naming the baby exactly what we had already planned on, and if she had a problem with it, it was her problem alone.
Sure enough, when our baby was born, we did exactly that, neither knowing nor caring if my mother was still opposed. Today, more than two decades later, the matter has never come up even one time. I believe the way I handled it may have diverted my mother from even considering sticking her nose into our parenting, but like I stated above, we never lived very close to where she had day-to-day contact.
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How close are you to Minneapolis, and would you be interested in doing some snooping around there for me?
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SNOOPING AROUND for me; I said SNOOPING! And effective immediately, you’re officially banned from buying clothes for me! Grrrrrrr.
(Why is it I just can’t get any good help these days? Grrrrrrr.)
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Is she overdramatic with her protestations?
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Element 99 