If you are not fielding unsolicited opinions about your parenting, how do you even know you’re a parent?
Hearing “helpful advice” and commentary on parenting decisions is a daily, universal experience for most people with offspring, and it’s something we usually tolerate with a polite smile on our faces.
But occasionally a real response to the advice is required and we are driven to TOTALLY LOSE OUR SH*T.
This is the situation that Scary Mommy writer Elizabeth Broadbent found herself in recently regarding incessant commentary on the “unusual” names of her sons. Her frustration is clear in her recent piece on the Scary Mommy site called Yes, My Kids Have Weird Names, and IDGAF What You Think About That.
The mum-of-three, whose sons are called Blaise, Augustine and Simon, explains her choice of “unusual” names, even though, as she says, she shouldn’t have to.
“Yes, people mispronounce my kid’s names. My middle son is the worst: people say Au-gust-een instead of the proper Au-gust-in, which grates on my soul.”
She adds, “It’s so bad that I’ve taken to spelling it without the terminal e anywhere I can get away with it: name tags, doctor’s offices. This makes life easier for everyone. He has an easy nickname though — August — and no one fucks that up, thank God though they sometimes ask where September and October are. Not funny, done before, STFU thanks.”
Broadbent has also lost patience with people who don’t understand the name “Blaise”.
Top Comments
Yes it clearly looks like you 'don't give a fuck' . Lol. If you like them, so be it. If you don't want the names mispronounced I advise you get mental help, because in this day and age even the most simple of names will have a different pronunciations. Marie= Mar-ee etc. Chill the hell out and think about your kids and how they'll begin to react to innocent people querying how to say their names properly, as its not polite not to call someone the wrong name. Get a grip.
My child has an odd name and it gets mispronounced and misspelled frequently.. I don’t mind, because I choose not to get upset over something so small. I knew by choosing a different name, that people won’t automatically know how to say it - maybe I’m more ok with it because I grew up with a last name that 100% of the time was misspelled or mispronounced.
You claim that you get upset when people pronounce your sons name Augustine wrong - but surely you must realize that by adding an “e” after “in”, turns the sound “IN” into “EEN”.. people who learn English are taught this at school - so don’t get upset that people can read English! They simply do not know that you went against the rules of English that they learned.
Odd names are lovely and part of the charm is that you get to have conversations with strangers about how to pronounce/spell the name and even maybe tell the story behind why you chose it.