Young Woman Asks if She’s a Jerk for Refusing to Hyphenate Her Last Name to Please Her Mom

I might be in the minority, but this whole name hyphenation thing seems to have gotten a little bit out of hand.

Check out this story about a woman who is having some issues with being pressured into hyphenating her name…here we go!

AITA for being harsh on my “mom” and refusing to get my last name hyphenated?

“Okay I’ve been holding off a while posting this because I know a lot of my family uses reddit and it’ll be easy for them to know it’s me but I don’t care anymore.

I (f19) am the product of an affair. I have 4 siblings (between 25 and 30) and i haven’t talked to any of them since i was like 10. I lived with my mom til i was 5 then went to ‘visit’ my aunt and uncle for weeks at a time. i’d stay with them 2-4 weeks then go back home for a weekend and back with them for the same time.

That soon became my new normal. The days i was “home” my mom and her husband would argue and it was obviously about me. He couldn’t stand to be in the same room as me, look at me, just acknowledge me at all and she acted like it was ok.

I can’t blame him for not liking me but it was still f**ked up on a level. Then maybe a year and a half later i stopped going home and my aunt and uncle became my guardians. My belongings were shipped to me and that was about it.

My mom visited me on holidays but that was all i seen/heard of her. Then around 9 years old she stopped contacting me altogether. As i got older i no longer seen my mom as a mother seen my aunt and uncle as my parents instead.

I’ll skip all the boring details but fast forward before my high school graduation (back in June), they sent out emails to us asking if we’d like to make any changes to our personal info before everything was put in our yearbooks and I took that chance to change my last name to the same as aunt and uncle.

Because we didn’t get a regular graduation and our diplomas was mailed to us, we didn’t receive them until 2 months after we graduated (i got it 3 weeks ago). I posted it on social media and showed my aunt and uncle things got a super emotional but they loved it.

Now i don’t have any of my siblings or mom on social media so i’m assuming a distant family member that i do have must have told her about it because she got in contact with me that same day on messenger and asked why people were asking her about my name. When I told her i changed my last name on my diploma she got mad that i didn’t check with her to see if it was okay.

This is where i feel i might be the AH. I told her she was barely a mother to me and she cared more about being with her husband than raising her daughter.

I said i was legally going to change my last name anyways and don’t need/want her permission. She said i should at least get my name hyphenated and i told her i didn’t want any part of her last name as it meant nothing to me.

AITA?”