it's been months. it's on the birth certificate. every call with my parents still circles back to it somehow. tonight it was 'what will his school friends think'. he can't even sit up on his own yet
Our daughter has both our surnames, and my parents took about two years to stop commenting. What helped was not defending it on every call. I started saying 'it's done' and changing the subject, every single time. Boring, but they got bored first. School friends, for the record, have never once asked.
in my family half the cousins carry a house name, a father's name, or both, depending on who registered them and which year 🙂 nobody's school friends cared. the elders still argue about it at weddings though, so maybe it never fully stops
Speaking as a grandmother, I suspect your parents' worry is less about school friends and more about feeling left out of something. That may be worth addressing directly, once, and not late at night on a phone call. Is there some other way they are part of his name or his story? A middle name, a pet name they chose, a small ritual? Sometimes that softens things.
My son has the most ordinary surname possible, and my own mother still found something to object to in how we spelt his first name. Some elders will always have one thing. It doesn't mean you chose wrong.
It may help to agree with your partner on who answers what. In our home, criticism from my side of the family goes to me, and from my partner's side goes to my partner. It stopped a lot of resentment between the two of us, whatever the elders thought. Does your partner hear these calls?
Keep going
More from the parents who were here.