Family Feuds·
SIMONE'S NEW NAME
A custody saga centering on a six-month-old swapped into a relative's care, a controversial name change, and a family's decades-long rift over loyalty and identity.
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A six-month-old baby was handed to a relative, and years later her mother's name for her still sounded like a joke gone wrong: Synnamin. Pronounced cinnamon.
That is where the story begins, in a family split so wide the writer opens by saying, "I think it will become obvious that my sister and I have taken very different paths in life." The writer says they love their sister "very much," but adds bluntly, "she is not well."
The niece had been in the writer's custody since she was six months old. Meanwhile, the sister was headed to prison for at least the next seven years and was "ineligible for parole for that long." In the writer's telling, the child's original name was one more example of how the sister thought. "Synnamin. Pronounced cinnamon," the writer wrote.
Custody did not settle the family dispute. It deepened it.
The writer says they fought through resistance from both the sister and their parents to sever the mother's parental rights. "I have had my sister's parental rights severed," the writer said. The parents, the writer says, had never contributed to the child's upbringing, but had offered "lots of unwanted advice" along the way.
Then came the adoption.
The writer adopted the child, and with that paperwork came a new name: Simone.
That change is what set off the latest round of family outrage. The writer says their parents think they are being cruel to the sister. The writer's answer is simple: the sister's feelings are not part of the equation. "My parents think I'm being cruel to my sister," the writer said. "So I feel completely justified in changing her name."
The post reads like a check-in with a family argument that has been running for years: a sister in prison, parents still objecting, and a child who has been raised by someone else since infancy. The writer does not hide where they stand. "I do not think I'm wrong," they said. "I am not looking for validation."
What they want is something more specific, a reality check on whether there is something being missed in the outrage coming from the parents and the sister, who, the writer says, "can't communicate coherently."
For the writer, the answer is already settled. The child has a new legal parent, a new name, and a new life. Simone, not Synnamin.