I (23F) and my fiancé (25M) are expecting a baby girl next month. We’re incredibly excited because this is our first child, and we’ve been doing everything we can to prepare for becoming parents. Our families have been helping us get ready by giving us baby supplies, sharing advice, and offering support. Everyone is thrilled for us—especially my future mother-in-law.
Unfortunately, she has never really accepted me as part of the family. She regularly tells my fiancé that he could have done so much better than me and claims he has fallen into the trap of having "my" child. Those comments have hurt me more than she probably realizes. My fiancé has confronted her about it more than once, but she has never apologized or taken responsibility for what she said. At this point, I mostly try to ignore it and avoid unnecessary conflict.
She is also the type of person who posts absolutely everything on Facebook. When my fiancé proposed to me, she announced our engagement online before we even had the chance to tell our own friends and relatives. Ever since then, we've become much more careful about what information we share with her.
Recently, my fiancé and I finally settled on the perfect name for our daughter. A few days ago, during a phone conversation, he accidentally mentioned that we had chosen one. Since then, my future mother-in-law has been calling and texting nonstop, trying to convince us to tell her what it is. We decided we wanted to keep it private until our daughter is born because we wanted the announcement to come from us—not from a Facebook post before we've even met our baby.
She started guilt-tripping my fiancé, saying he was hurting her by refusing to tell his own mother the name of her granddaughter. She claimed he didn't love her anymore and even suggested that we—especially me—were planning to keep her from seeing the baby. Nothing we've ever said or done would justify her believing that.
At one point, a close family friend even suggested that we should think carefully about how much personal information we share before the baby arrives. They explained that once private family details are published online, it's almost impossible to take them back, and that parents have every right to decide when and how their child's identity is shared. They also recommended documenting situations where personal information is posted without permission in case it becomes an ongoing issue affecting our family's privacy. Hearing that only reinforced our decision to keep our daughter's real name between the two of us until she is born.
Eventually, just to stop the constant messages, I sent her a text saying that if she truly wanted to know the name, she absolutely could not post it anywhere on social media. She promised she wouldn't.
So I gave her a fake name.
About five minutes later, I opened Facebook.
"I can't believe I'm going to be a granny to baby Charlotte next month. So proud of (fiancé's name) and his partner!"
My fiancé was absolutely furious. He called her immediately and told her she had no right to announce something that wasn't hers to share. She tried to defend herself by saying she was simply so excited that she couldn't resist telling everyone. That's when he informed her that Charlotte wasn't even our daughter's real name, that we had deliberately given her a fake name because we didn't trust her to keep it private, and that she wouldn't be told the real name until after the baby was born.
Then he hung up.
It's been a few days now, and my fiancé has continued receiving messages from her saying she never intended to cause any harm. According to her, I'm the one who acted unfairly because I deliberately told her the wrong name.
Her exact words were:
"Who even tells their future mother-in-law the wrong name of their own grandchild?"
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