When you are having a child with someone who you aren’t married to, communication is important, and working to make decisions together is critical.

What would you do if you were upset with the baby’s father after you broke up, and even though you agreed to hyphenate the baby’s last name, you no longer wanted to?

That is the situation the new mom in this story is in, so she decided not to hyphenate the name, and now the dad is hardly in the baby’s life.

AITA for giving my child my last name

So, this required a bit of context, but for personal reasons a few details are being omitted.

Hey, it happens.

I (27 F) got pregnant by my now EX (26 M) who I’ll call D. We had been on a relationship for about 3 years, and both were in agreement on not caring about marriage and were satisfied simply being partners.

A year before this I had an unplanned pregnancy that didn’t make it to term and with that pregnancy I found out I had a genetic condition called hyperemesis gravidarum (HG), which is pretty much morning sickness but to an extreme.

Morning sickness can be terrible.

Both of us were aware I would likely get sick again with this current pregnancy and discussed me staying with my mother if it got bad. It definitely got bad.

I was so nauseated 24/7 that I stopped being able to both eat and drink and had to go to the ER multiple times as well as be hospitalized twice.

He doesn’t seem very caring.

While D did take me to the ER he didn’t visit me more than once in the hospital, as he doesn’t like hospitals.

Eventually I decided I needed to stay with my mother, which I’m glad I did. She helped a lot with connecting me to a decent OB and getting me on benefits as I was unemployed and couldn’t work while sick.

Wow, this sounds miserable.

For my whole 1st trimester, I was sick and bedridden, barely able to eat more than Jello until my doctor was able to get me a medical pump and slowly, I was able to eat more. During this time, I had lost about 50 lbs.

Around my 2nd trimester I started to finally feel like a person again, still connected to a medical device but able to eat and move around without throwing up.

It can be sad when people grow apart.

This is when I noticed how distant D had gotten. Up until this point I had been too sick to even watch videos on social media, so I hadn’t been putting a lot of effort into trying to text every day. I spent most of my 1st trimester just sleeping and attempting to survive.

D hadn’t made much of an attempt at coming to visit me, but my mother lived an hour away from our apartment, so I didn’t push him to come. I tried to be better about texting (I hate phone calls) but it just seemed like he wasn’t interested.

I’m wondering if she felt betrayed.

The only time we really interacted was when he would come to pick me up and bring me back to our apartment, I had gotten approved for EBT and so I would buy him groceries for the month.

These visits felt odd, almost impersonal, and I didn’t really know what to do.

Is the relationship over?

It wasn’t until my 3rd trimester that things came to a head. I was supposed to come over to help rearrange the apartment and pack a few of my things away to make room for baby stuff.

I had specifically asked that D let me know ahead of time what day we would do this on as I had potential plans, but he forgot. When the day came I told him I had plans already and he blew up. A fight ensued and ultimately it ended our relationship.

Hopefully they can remain civil.

From here things were somewhat amicable, I stopped communicating with him unless it involved me getting my things or our child. We discussed coparenting and things for the future.

It was during this that 2 points were brought up.

This is an important decision that needs to be made soon.

Initially when we were still in a relationship I had decided I wanted to hyphenate our child’s last name, so he would have both of our last names. D reminded me of this during our discussions and I somewhat dismissed but didn’t disagree with it.

Nothing wrong with thinking ahead.

Then he asked an odd question about what we would do about future partners. We’d only been broken up for less than a week so I thought this was a wild thing to bring up.

Fast forward a month and right before my baby shower I had gotten a call that D had been arrested (minor charge that got dropped), and a few days later he called me from jail. I still don’t know why he did this but I picked up regardless.

I can see where this is going.

During this call I asked him how our car got home. The car was only in my name, so I figured it would have been towed but I hadn’t been informed. He told me a “friend” was with him when he was arrested and drove it home for him.

I asked which friend and he got quiet. I finally asked “what, did you get a girlfriend?”

Some people move on faster than others.

Jokingly, and he responded, “yeah.” The call didn’t last long after that.

After I told a few of my friends about this one of them checked the new girlfriend out on Facebook (D updated his relationship status very quickly after he told me) and found that their relationship status stated that they’d been in a relationship for 4 months.

Yikes, that is not ok at all.

We’d been broken up for barely a month by then.

I asked him about it later, trying to give him the benefit of the doubt that it had been a mistake, but he admitted that he’d been dating this girl for a while, stating that she “Knew about everything and understood.” He also insisted that it wasn’t cheating because they “didn’t do anything technically.”

Ending contact (except about the child) is a good idea here.

I pretty much stopped contacting him except to get my stuff and give him information regarding our child.

He has a right to know that his child is coming.

I didn’t tell him when I went into labor- I didn’t want him in the hospital while I gave birth- but I let him know shortly after that his son had been born.

He showed up that night, spent an hour with his son, then went home.

This is all pretty normal.

The next morning was when I started signing the absurd amount of paperwork after you give birth, and one of those papers was his birth certificate.

On it I put only my last name for my son, instead of the hyphenated dual last names I had initially agreed to.

I mean, he isn’t wrong here.

When D eventually came back to the hospital to sign his part of the birth certificate, he noticed this and freaked out, claiming I was being petty and depriving him of his “legacy.”

(Relevant information: he has another child who also doesn’t have his last name, so that probably doesn’t help)

This isn’t her decision to make on her own.

Honestly, I didn’t do it out of pettiness, I did it because I knew I wouldn’t go anywhere but Ds recent behavior made me realize he could dip out at any time, and I didn’t want my son saddled with the name of someone who’d potentially abandon him.

As of right now our son is almost a year old and D has visited him a total of 4 times, the last time being when our son was 4 months old, which does make me feel like I made the right decision.

She should have discussed it with him before making the decision.

Still, I do feel like it might have been a bit out of line considering we’d discussed both names.

Should I have just hyphenated it on the off chance that he sticks around?

AITA?

Yes, he has a lot of blame here, but the decision was to hyphenate and she backed out on that without talking to him. That was out of line.

Let’s see what the people in the comments think about it.

What is easier is not always what is right.

Here is someone who thinks she did the right thing.

I definitely don’t agree with this commenter.

He should still make an effort to be in the child’s life.

This commenter says it will be more convenient.

She backed out on an agreement.

If you liked that story, read this one about grandparents who set up a college fund for their grandkid because his parents won’t, but then his parents want to use the money to cover sibling’s medical expenses.