In the post, user aitanamespost describes how her ex-husband, 35, got married less than six months ago and is now expecting a child with his girlfriend, 25. Explaining that she is a “huge fan of the movie Frozen, so when our daughter, 6, was born I wanted to name her Elsa.” She goes on to explain that she and her ex-husband divorced when their daughter was 3, “we don’t hate each other but we are not best friends either.”
According to The Step Family Foundation, over 50 percent of U.S families are remarried or recoupled.
The problem arose within this blended family after the ex-husband’s pregnant new partner expressed an interest in wanting to call her new baby Anna, “so they could be sisters like in the movie.”
“For me it is totally unfair that they are stealing my naming process from me like that,” she explains. “What if I have another daughter? It would have been perfect to name her Anna and now I wouldn’t be able to do it without it looking like I am stealing from them. My husband doesn’t even like Frozen that much. He always said his favorite Disney animated movie was Bolt.”
Describing how she called her divorce lawyer, who “doesn’t think there is anything we can do about this,” the user called her mother who “just laughed at me.” She then called her ex and told him that she would everything she could to sabotage the relationship between the daughters. “I want to insist on them picking another name but without going too far,” she wrote.
Newsweek spoke to Ruth E. Freeman, president and founder of Peace at Home Parenting Solutions, about the tense situation.
Freeman said: “Mom’s feelings are certainly understandable, but the degree to which she is feeling the pain suggests there may be something more going on. Divorcing the partner with whom you have children can be incredibly painful, even in unconscious ways.
“You may not like the person but the process of creating and raising children together is simply very powerful and we are often left with residual emotions that lead divorced parents to do things that seem unreasonable. Clinicians who work with separating parents often use the metaphor of an iceberg where you see certain behaviors above water, but underneath may lie many unrecognized hurts, sadness, anger and even feelings of abandonment—rational or not.”
Freeman continued: “Actually even when we are clear about separation from a partner, one of the lingering experiences is the grief about giving up the dream of the relationship that we imagined. Clearly this mom had a dream of how she saw her family growing. Now that dream has been shattered by the way her ex-husband’s wife is using such an important element from the first family.
“Mom is in pain and she lacks the skills to process it, so she is expressing it through extreme behaviors which she herself said she regrets. It’s interesting that she notes her mother’s dismissal of her feelings. That makes it a lot worse for her.
“It would help if she had someone in her circle who could validate her emotions even if not the content of her concern. Mom deserves kindness and compassion for the depth of what she is feeling and she’d likely be acting less dramatically if she felt heard by someone who cares about her.”
Most Reddit users believed the mom was being unreasonable, voting that she was the a******.
The top rated comment received over 41,000 upvotes, it read: “YTA. Take a cue from your favorite movie and let it go.”
Another user wrote: “The part that killed me was her calling her divorce lawyer about it.”
Newsweek has reached out to u/aitanamespost for comment.
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