My mother-in-law hates our baby’s name but I think it’s lovely – I kicked her out after the final straw comment

CHOOSING the perfect baby name can be tough, so when this mum landed on a popular name for her son she thought she’d nailed it.

But despite the name being pretty common, her mother-in-law had other ideas and refused to use it.

Getty

The gran insisted on calling the newborn a completely different name[/caption]

Getty

The mum was shocked her husband didn’t stand up to his him over the situation[/caption]

The new mum took to Reddit to explain that she called the newborn Elijah, and she and her husband love it.

“We put a lot of thought into his name, we loved the meaning, and it just felt right,” she said.

And since the moniker isn’t exactly unique she was pretty surprised when her mother-in-law started using a totally different name for him after he was born.

This was a total shock to the couple, especially since the gran “had no strong opinions about it at first”.

Although she didn’t “gush” over the name when they told her, she didn’t voice any objections, so the couple thought she was ok with it.

The mum explained: “The first time she met Elijah at the hospital, she looked at him and said, ‘oh little David you’re so perfect’, I thought I misheard her, so I ignored it.”

But when she called the baby David again the mum asked who she was referring to.

“I asked her, ‘who’s David?’ and she just smiled and said, ‘oh it just suits him better.’”

Since she had just gone through labour, the mum was too tired to argue about the name, so decided to let it go, but things just got worse.

“She kept calling him David, texting us things like ‘how’s my little David doing today?’ or ‘give David a kiss for me!’

” I told her, firmly, that his name is Elijah. She laughed and said, ‘oh, I know! But I think he just feels like a David’,” the mum said.

The weirdest part is that David isn’t an important name to the family, in fact, it’s just a “totally random name” the mum noted.

But when the mother-in-law was still calling him David weeks later she knew things had to change.

During FaceTime calls the gran would still call him David, and would even coo at him using to name.

“She even started knitting a baby blanket with the name David embroidered on it,” the mum said.

Things came to a head during a family dinner when the gran was still calling him David in front of everyone else, which raised some eyebrows from other family members who knew he was called Elijah, not David.

The mum explained: “My sister-in-law asked, ‘why do you keep calling him David?’ and my mother-in-law just laughed and said, “because that’s his name to me.’”

That’s when the mum had had enough and decided to put her foot down and told her mother-in-law to call him by his real name or to leave.

“She rolled her eyes and tried to wave me off, but I wasn’t having it,” the mum added.

Eventually the gran did leave without much of a fight, but the altercation annoyed the woman’s husband.

Although he agreed his mum was being “weird and disrespectful” he thought kicking her out was “too extreme.”

According to the mum, the baby’s gran used the alternation as an excuse to “play the victim” and has been telling people she’s being kept from seeing her grandson because of a “harmless nickname.”

£Some family members think I overreacted. Others agree that her behaviour was bizarre,” the mum wrote, before asking fellow Reddit users if she was in the wrong for putting her foot down.

Largely, people agreed it was fair to kick the gran out and that the husband also needed to stand up to his mum.

“I find it odd that your husband thinks you overreacted, but you literally just told her to use the correct name or to leave,” one person commented, “it sounds like she made her choice and now she’s upset with you.”

Meanwhile, others thought the mum should get her own back by calling her mother-in-law a different name.

“The solution is so easy. Simply start calling her Karen. It’s a perfectly nice name, with a lovely derogatory cast to it,” one person said.

Another agreed: “Yes! Come up with a bad Grandma name for her or start referring to her as Mrs. Last Name to your baby.

“For example, you are FaceTiming with her and she calls the baby David. You look at the baby and say “Elijah, isn’t Mrs. Smith silly? Mrs. Smith doesn’t even know your name.”

But others thought the mum should be more harsh: “No no no. Anytime she says David say wrong number and hang up. And she doesn’t see Elijah anymore. She wants a David, let her go find one,” one suggested.

“Make a policy that every time she calls him David she doesn’t get to see him for a week and tell your husband he needs to have your back. Being a parent means you need to be willing to protect your child from all things and if he cannot even stand up to his mother on this then he’s not much of a parent,” another chimed in.