Woman offers pregnant sister hundreds of dollars to not use dream baby name
In a recent post shared to the popular 'Am I The Asshole?' Reddit forum, a 30-year-old woman questioned if she was in the wrong for asking her sibling, who's about to have a baby, not to use her 'dream baby name.' The woman's sister, 27, is eight months pregnant with a baby girl.
The Reddit user explained that while it's her dream to have children, she's not sure if she can carry them due to fertility issues.
She was recently talking about baby names with her sister, who 'proudly said they chose' the name Isla for her baby girl because it's 'unique and special.' However, the 30-year-old said that she'd always wanted to name her child Isla, which her sister knew.
'I have been saying this since I was a teenager. Everyone in our family knows this,' she explained. 'So when she told me her name choice, I told her that she cannot use it because it has been my dream name forever. I explained that if she uses it, she will ruin my future experience if I ever get pregnant.'
While the pregnant woman laughed at this conversation, she later realized her sister was being serious. The soon-to-be mother then told her older sibling: 'You might never have kids. I am literally about to give birth,' which the Reddit user thought was a 'cruel' comment.
The 30-year-old also told her sibling that if she cared about her, she'd pick a different name. But the mother-to-be is firm on naming her child Isla, which has caused a divide between the family.
However, the older sibling still wanted the name for her baby one day, so she offered to pay her sister a hefty sum to pick a different moniker.
'My parents think she should keep her name because she is the one having the baby, but some cousins agree with me that it is messed up for her to take the name she knows I have wanted for years,' the post continued. 'I even offered to pay her $500 to pick something else. She said I am being controlling and weird. She posted about it on Facebook, and now I am getting hate from strangers calling me unhinged.'
In an update to her post, after receiving a lot of criticism in the comments, the Reddit user doubled down on wanting to keep the baby name for her future child.
'People saying 'you don't own a name' — technically true, but morally, I think family should respect each other's wishes. Second, things have escalated,' she wrote. 'My sister posted screenshots of our private messages on Facebook, calling me 'toxic' and 'controlling,' and now half the family is gossiping.'
She said that if her sibling uses the baby name, she wouldn't be there when the soon-to-be-parent has a baby shower or even gives birth. The woman's sister 'laughed in [her] face' about this remark.
However, the Reddit user said that she'll still name her daughter Isla, even if her sister uses that name for her soon-to-be-born baby. While the pregnant woman called this 'psychotic,' her older sister 'said it's called consistency.'
The 30-year-old added that she's taking the next steps to have a child, explaining she's booked her first IVF consultation. She also noted that her fiancé agrees with her in this situation with her family, and he's even urging her to announce the baby name now on Instagram as one 'reserved for [their] daughter.'
Many Reddit users in the comments encouraged the woman to let her pregnant sister use the name Isla for her baby.
'When you get pregnant, find a new, wonderful name you can use. Would I do what your sister did? No. It's hurtful. But you're making yourself look bad by throwing a fit about this,' a stranger wrote. 'Let it go and focus on your own life. When you eventually get pregnant, you'll have a wonderful experience regardless.'
'What your sister said was thoughtless and unkind, but you can't put 'dibs' on a name. Plus, there's nothing to stop you from calling your daughter Isla as well, or maybe changing it to something similar, e.g. Isla-Marie,' another wrote. 'I also think it's poor form that your sister has put it on Facebook. It is something that should be dealt with privately.'
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He said, "It was as though I wasn't there. So, I'm not very fond of them." On The Skinny Confidential, Kathy Griffin said, "I had never met [Jerry] until I was on the show, and he was such a dick that I then went and told a story about him in my special. He actually, to his credit, thought it was funny. He didn't clutch his pearls and go, 'How dare you? I'm a star!' So they wrote the second episode where my character becomes a stand-up comic whose whole act is making fun of Jerry Seinfeld. And that was amazing." Heidi Swedberg's character Susan was killed off because the rest of the cast thought she was "impossible" to play off of. On the Howard Stern Show, Jason Alexander said, "Her instincts for doing a scene, where the comedy was, and mine were always misfiring... Julia actually said, 'Don't you want to just kill her?' And Larry went, 'Ka-bang!'" However, Jason later apologized for how he told that story, tweeting, "OK, folks, I feel officially awful. 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However, the cast went on to describe an incident where Lawrence allegedly stole one of Jerry's knives from the set and hid it in his jacket. After Jerry called him out on it, Lawrence tried to make a joke then pulled the knife out, made the Psycho sound, and advanced on Jerry a bit. Jason added, "Lawrence Tierney, I think, scared the living crap out of all of us." On her podcast Wiser Than Me, Julia revealed one of the strangest places a Seinfeld fan has ever recognized her — the maternity ward! She said, "I was giving birth, and, when you're in labor, they put that monitor around your tummy. And I was in the bathroom, and I was naked, and I had the thing around my tummy, and I was massive, by the way. I gained like 50 pounds when I was pregnant. And I was standing there, and my water broke, and all of a sudden a nurse came into the room, and I went, 'My water broke!' Okay, reminding you [I'm] naked. And she goes, 'Elaine!' ...It was so awful. Isn't that crazy?" To Jerry, the funniest moment they ever filmed was when George saved a whale by pulling Kramer's lost golfball out of its blowhole "The Marine Biologist." At the 2017 New Yorker Festival, Jerry said, "The hardest thing in comedy is to have the biggest laugh at the end, and it's the most satisfying thing... We got very lucky. Larry and I came up with it the night before we were shooting. We wrote it late at night, and Jason memorized the whole speech in one day." "The Revenge" was partially based on Larry's experience quitting his job as a writer for Saturday Night Live — and the immediate regret that followed. On The David Letterman Show, Larry said, "I decided, that's it. They're fooling with the wrong guy. I walked up to the producer, it was like five minutes before the show was about to begin, I walked up and I said, 'That's it. I'm done! I've had it! Take your show! Shove it." However, his real-life neighbor, Kevin Kramer, advised him, "Why don't you just go back on Monday and pretend it never happened?" So, that's exactly what Larry did. "The Junior Mint" was not an instance of paid product placement. Andy Robin, who wrote the episode, told the Hollywood Reporter, "I knew I wanted Kramer to think of watching the operation like going to see a movie. At first, I thought maybe a piece of popcorn falls into the patient. I ran that by my brother, and he said, 'No, Junior Mints are just funnier.'" Julia came up with Elaine's iconic terrible dancing from "The Little Kicks" herself. She told Vanity Fair, "The night before the table read, I had the script, and frankly, I just stood in front of a mirror and tried to do movements that looked incredibly bad. I had a few of them, and I remember my mom was staying with us at the time, and I came downstairs, and I sort of auditioned these different movements for my mom and my husband — and they all voted on the one that I did." In an essay for Parade, writer Peter Mehlman explained that the sheer amount of Superman references wasn't planned. He said, "Much like the infant who fell from the sky into small-town America, Superman simply dropped into the orbit of Seinfeld. Contrary to rumor, it was never planned to make the Man of Steel a recurring theme, and the writing staff, on which I worked for six seasons, never got an edict dictating regular mentions of him. He just magically appeared early in the series and evolved into a go-to guy for humor — another superpower for a being faster than a speeding bullet." "That happy accident made it doubly amazing that, in the hopelessly earthbound, self-absorbed, conniving world of Seinfeld, Superman was not merely a comic-book hero — he was a role model. Great Caesar's Ghost … so much comedy gold arose from that berserk dynamic. Just consider: Superman was devoted to truth, justice, and the American way:" the Seinfeld characters were devoted to lying, cheating, and getting their own way," he said. "The Bizarro Jerry" was born from writer David Mandel and Jerry's shared love of Superman. David told Cracked, "When I pitched the concept of the Bizarro Jerry, Jerry was all over it. He knew what it was and loved it and he saw why that would be funny. I always give him credit because he was the one to say 'take it further.' It's because of Jerry that there's that ending scene of the show where they actually talk in Bizarro-speak. That was Jerry saying, 'Go for it.' That happened a lot in those final two seasons, Jerry encouraged the writers to go further." In the same episode, the "Man Hands" storyline was "loosely" inspired by David's wife. He told Cracked, "She has entirely normal-sized hands, but she grew up on a farm, and she always said her hands were 'farmy,' so that story grew out of that." Julia was able to bring her kids to work. Guest star Jami Gertz told GQ, "[She] had just had a baby, and she had a little nursery on set. So I brought my son, and our kids were able to play together on set." Originally, the show was reportedly titled The Seinfeld Chronicles. However, it had to change its name because of The Marshall Chronicles, another sitcom that was airing at the time. Production designer Thomas Azzari told the Santa Fe New Mexican, "My philosophy is that you should never be aware of the sets. You want to make sure they're appropriate, but you don't want to take anything away from what's going on. That's why Jerry's apartment is gray. … The color is the actors." By Season 9, the show was reportedly "the most expensive sitcom to produce in TV history." Each episode cost $3-3.5 million to make, and Jerry was paid $1 million per episode! The show made an estimated $1.1 billion in revenue in just the second round of syndication. After filming ended for the final season, Jerry took home a pretty big piece of memorabilia — his apartment's front wall! The rest of the set went into storage at Warner Bros. The Season 9 episode "The Puerto Rican Day" was pulled after criticism from the National Puerto Rican Coalition, who called out the show for — among other depictions of harmful stereotypes — joking that rioting and vandalizing were part of "everyday" in Puerto Rico. The scene where Kramer accidentally catches a Puerto Rican flag on fire was particularly called into question. Manuel Mirabal, president of the National Puerto Rican Coalition, told the New York Times, "It is unacceptable that the Puerto Rican flag be used by 'Seinfeld' as a stage prop under any circumstances." In a statement, NBC said, "We do not feel that the show lends itself to damaging ethnic stereotypes, because the audience for Seinfeld knows the humor is derived from watching the core group of characters get themselves into difficult situations." However, the episode was put back on air in 2002. In hindsight, Jerry would "absolutely" like to redo a few episodes differently. In 2021, he told People, "There's a number of them that I would love to have a crack at, but I don't really believe, philosophically, in changing or even thinking about the past. My philosophy of life is that just happened the way it happened, and we're going to go from here. And that's the best way to ... live. I think regret is a philosophical position that I disagree with. It kind of assumes you could have changed the past, so I wouldn't even think of that. But if you forced me or you gave me a time machine, yeah, there's a few [where] I would fix some things." One episode Jerry might like to change — the controversial finale. At the 2017 New Yorker Festival, he said, "I sometimes think we really shouldn't have even done it. There was a lot of pressure on us at that time to do one big last show, but big is always bad in comedy." The poor audience reactions to the finale changed the way Larry approached TV. He told Grantland, "Well, you know, I got so much grief from the Seinfeld finale, which a lot of people intensely disliked, that I no longer feel a need to wrap things up... I wouldn't say I'm mad about it, but it taught me a lesson that if I ever did another show, I wasn't going to wrap it up." However, he stood by the episode, saying, "No, I was not interested in an emotional ride, and neither was Jerry. No wonder why they would dislike it, yeah. But let me toot my own horn for a second. I thought it was clever to bring back all those characters in a courtroom and testify against them for what they did, and then show those clips, and also for why they even got arrested in the first place. And then to wind up — forget the self-aggrandizement here... I thought it was clever." And finally, ending the show was a mutual decision among the four leads. Jerry told People, "I do remember when I was in the ninth season, and I was thinking, maybe it's time to wrap this up. I remember inviting Michael and Julia and Jason to my dressing room, and we all just sat there and we stared at each other. And I went, 'You know, I was thinking maybe this is our moment to make a good exit. We've had a lot of good fortune here. Maybe we shouldn't push our luck too far.' And we all agreed that this was the right moment." Do you love all things TV and movies? 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