Someone in your life that “doesn’t get it”

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I know you could talk about whole branches of your family tree or the coworkers in THAT department or the neighbor that has issues, but for this thread you only get one.

My sister-in-law. She’s not really my sister-in-law but rather a family friend that thinks Mrs. Cad is her “spiritual sister” after they were pharohnic princesses together in a previous life. She also sees me as a spiritual brother which means apparently I’m married to my sister or something. She also told me that means that she would never have sex with me which was a weird comment to make considering.
I have never made advances to her
I am not attracted to her in the slightest
We were discussing her search for a second job at the time

To quote Dr. Evil: Very well, where do I begin. She got married to a guy she hated at work because she wanted to change her last name and move out of the house. Notice the lack of anything to base a marriage on in that sentence. On their first date, she told him that either he marries her or that’ll never go on another date again. Because he wanted to have sex with her, he agreed. Of course they got married and had a kid and got divorced and she doesn’t get why they don’t have a good post-divorce relationship. Oh wait she does – he’s an asshole. :rolleyes:

My SIL is very judgmental. Woe to you if you are 5 or more pounds overweight or she thinks you’re ugly (yes she is about 30 lbs over but that’s different), she will explain to me and Mrs (not realizing we don’t care) how they really should not exist. The ex has a new girlfriend and so SIL asks her 8 year-old daughter if the girlfriend is pretty and the reply is, “Yes.” That’s it. Just, “Yes”. That is immediately translated into SIL telling my niece, “You think she’s prettier than me.” followed up quickly by, “You think I’m ugly!”

So she’s living with us paying $500/mo. What does she get for that $500? A room and her own bathroom. All utilities and food for her and her daughter and free babysitting. We also take my niece out to dinner with us or the movies or the zoo – all the while she never offers to pay for these “extras”. I calculated it out that at $10 per hour that it would work out to over $1200 in babysitting costs she is saving. My SIL got upset with Mrs Cad and me that we had to run over to her work (I drove because of the snow) and my SIL couldn’t see her boyfriend that night because she had to watch her own child. Apparently we are to watch her daughter everytime she wants to run out. She has even left without telling us or asking if we could watch her daughter.

She actually thinks we are robbing her of that $500/mo. Get this, she is thinking she can get her own two-bedroom apartment with all utilities and food for less than $500 every month. And another reason we are “stealing from her” is that if she is not home then whoever is taking care of her daughter should pay for her food. This attitude has gotten so bad that for Christmas Mrs. Cad decided not to charge her $250 for the second half of December so the SIL has money to visit her family, buy presents, etc. The SIL’s reaction? “Meh.” But when someone offered her an extra $25 for a puppy (she can’t afford any more dogs but she feels it is not fair to the dog that she can’t have babies) she literally wept that she had that extra money.

Oh God the dogs. She refuses to train them. Instead she mentally talks to them. Not dog whispering but rather full conversations with them. Her female and one of her males are a couple apparently and when the male wrestles around with our female (“making out” in her words), she is afraid he female will see them and find out her “boyfriend” is cheating on her. And when the dogs do that whole mouth/submissive thing, she is disgusted that the dogs are “French kissing”.

So now we move on to the big thing – her job. She works at WallyWorld and like most there, she has worked for years and is not making a living wage ($25,000/yr gross). They have brevetted her to customer service manager which means she does all of the extra work without that $1/hr raise. She refuses to try to find another full time job because the new job may fire her. In response I asked what job security she has at WallyWorld and her reply was, “They like me.” She is willing to take on a second job but has made almost no effort to find one. She also wants to go to school and get an AA + certificate for vet tech but she can’t wrap her head around the fact that that requires time and money. So now she has decided that she needs a job that pays $60,000 to $70,000 and so she’s asked the universe to give her a job like that because apparently if you ask the universe for something really hard it has to give it to you.

So who is the clueless one in your life?

2

There’s a clueless one in your life and it ain’t your fake sister in law. :slight_smile: Why are you letting this woman live with you, again?

Funny enough, my clueless one is also a sister in law, though not mine, my SO’s. She constantly claims how she does all the work in the house, and how she is practically a single mom. She has:

Dad doing all of the cooking and dishes and cleaning
Grandma drives over (it’s less than three minutes) every day to make sure the older child gets to school on the bus
Dad takes the baby to preschool
Dad is the disciplinarian
Dad buys all of the presents for the family for Christmas, birthdays, etc.
Dad gives the kids their baths, makes sure they dress right
Dad makes the big bucks (she makes good money, but he has two jobs)
Grandma and grandpa are available most any weekend for babysitting duty - they just don’t know how to say no.

I’m not really sure what she thinks she’s doing.

3

If you and Mrs Cad find her so difficult to live with - put her out.

Anaamika is spot on. Why should she change? It seems no matter what she does, or expects, y’all are okay with it. I’m thinking she ‘get’s it’ pretty clearly. You’re the ones being used = you’re the ones not ‘getting it’.

If you don’t like it, change it. If you can’t be arsed to change it, then suck it up as your choice to live this way. Which it totally is.

But I’m sure you have tons of good ‘reasons’ why you can’t change this circumstance. Tell yourself whatever you need to, but get right with it being how it is, or grow a spine and create change.

4

Because if we didn’t take her in, she literally would have been on the streets after being evicted for not paying rent. We didn’t know a lot of the issues when we offered to let us stay with us temporarily but the red flags came up the day of the move. My stepson and I loaded the entire truck and unloaded it without even a thank you (Oh yes, her shit is in my garage). Mrs Cad had to buy the Subway for everyone helping move but we figured that someone who can pay rent but just paid for the UHaul is probably broke so what else are you going to do.

What we didn’t realize is the complete lack of recognition of anything anyone else does and the leech behavior is her MO. We thought that she wanted to move in with us because we were in Northern Colorado (she was in Southern Colorado) but nope. She has apparently burned every bridge down south. Even her sister won’t take her in (they were roommates for a while bit but SIL got kicked out) saying she needs to be kicked to the curb and fend for herself. If it weren’t for the fact that an 8 year old would be out on the streets, the SIL would have had her ass out long ago. As it is she will move in with her new boyfriend soon (my prediction before the end of the year) but even if that doesn’t happen, she has been told that there will be new living arrangements made this summer.

5

Well, TBH, you really don’t owe my any justification! I just hope she’s out of your hair soon. I hate people intruding on my and my SO’s space.

6

Well, the Pharaohs were known for marrying their sisters…

7

I wonder if she COULD get something for under $500/mo? Or at least around that. With her income and a kid, doesn’t she qualify for Section 8?

Of course, you’d have to do all the work to get her there and you might end up with some spare dogs but…worth a shot?

8

From everything I’ve heard of, section 8 has an enormously long waiting list.

9

$500 for rent maybe but rent, utilities and food for her and her daughter? Oh and she will refuse to get rid of two of her dogs (the married ones) and now wants to be a breeder which limits her choices on housing methinks.

10

The woman sounds like a terrible leech, but my heart bleeds for the eight year old. From your story, I get the impression she is not at all like her mother. In fact, such children often learn to be extra selfless and sensible, because, how else are they going to survive?

Have you grown so attached to the eight year old that you want to keep helping her in some way after Cosmic SIL is out of your hair?

11

Just yesterday, we were in a meeting. All of a sudden the speaker on the phone came on and someone said “hello?” and then the phone went dead. Everyone kind of chuckled and someone said the office is haunted.

And this one woman said “it’s the ghost of Jill Smith (not the real name)”

Jill Smith being a colleague of ours who was killed while working in a conflict zone. Our company actually established a charity in her name and there were people around the table who a) knew her; b) helped get her body back to the US and c) delivered the news to her family.

The woman who made the comment comes from a division that doesn’t work in conflict zones and you could tell thought she was just the funniest person on the planet.

12

Is she usually that clueless or was that a one off?

13

If she makes $25k a year with one child, she shouldn’t be in grinding poverty. That’s about 5-8k more than I made in grad school. I paid roughly $500 a month in rent and utilities, ate well, went out to the bar a little more than I should, and still managed to save enough to travel internationally on average once a year. Granted I was single and childless, but I also lived pretty high on the hog all things considered. Someone who doesn’t go on 2-week trips to Iceland and Australia, blow chunks of their paycheck at the bar every Friday, etc. and who makes $6,000 more than I did should be able to raise a kid.

I realize children are expensive, but there are plenty of people with more children and less money than SIL that live on their own. You could even continue to offer babysitting services for a while after she moves, if you want to help her out.

14

Hard to tell. She’s kind of junior but has recently moved up in the company. She’s been at more meetings with senior people lately and instead of maybe shutting up, she’s clearly trying to raise her profile…with mixed results. She makes jokes too much and always has an opinion. Couple more jokes like that and I won’t have to worry about her.

15

Am I the only one who started humming “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” here?

“So now I’m praying for the end of time…” :smack:

16

Around here I’m the one who doesn’t get it.

17

I believe this about sums it up for those looking for the tl;dr version. :smiley:

18

Kick her to the curb and keep the kid.

Not really; but I feel for this 8-year-old having such a moron for a mother. And having to move in with the new boyfriend. Odds on the phukwit pharaoh phaker will behave in just the same way she does now, and he’ll be jack of it after 6 months.

And Anaamika, I thought you were the SIL of my idiot SIL - except the ‘Grandpa’ bit gave it away.

19

It must be something about sisters-in-law. My husband’s brother was married to a little charmer we called “Attila” for a variety of reasons. In the course of their marriage, they were evicted from at least 3 apartments, had at least 2 vehicles repossessed, had their phone cut off more times than I can recall, and were constantly “borrowing” money from my in-laws. She refused to let my BIL work (he’s mildly mentally handicapped, but he’s held several jobs over the years, some for more than minimum, so he could have contributed.) She could never understand why all these things happened to her. At one point, she turned her own father in to the IRS for tax evasion or some such, then wondered why he didn’t want a relationship with her.

The kicker came when she decided she didn’t want to be married any more. She called our house (not the inlaws’) and said “I can’t take <BIL> any more - you have to come get him.” It was as if she wanted to get rid of a dog she’d gotten tired of. My inlaws ended up driving several hundred miles to pick up their youngest son, only to discover that he had ONE change of clothes and virtually nothing else. And soon-to-be ex-SIL was all smiley and happy as if it wasn’t out of the ordinary to give your destitute spouse back to his parents when you were tired of him…

The thing that I’m clueless about - she’d been married before BIL and she married again after. She was absolutely *not *a hottie, but for some reason, she was attractive to some men - at least 3 that I know of. I’m not being catty here - her looks were on the low side of average, her personality - at least to several of us - was plastic and insincere, her values - for all that she was a “good Christian girl” - pretty much encompassed “mine mine mine,” and her cooking was barely edible. Maybe she was dynamite in the sack, but as self-centered as she was in all other things, I find that hard to believe. I can’t help but wonder how many more eviction, repossessions, and husbands she’s been thru in the last 12 years or so.

20

I think the problem is there is a subset of inhumanity that falls in the blind spot of sane people: here there exists folks who are so self centered and yet have created such a story about themselves when a normal person meets them their make believe world is immediately taken as truth. This is because with sane people such self centered assholery could not possibly exist.

Then, like the proverbial frog in hot water, as you slowly relinquish every belief, value and possession in an attempt to help this person you have fallen for, you discover you have moved completely away from yourself and have been taken for a ride.

You’re a nice person; you wanted to believe the stories and you wanted to help. The children and all the others? They don’t have your patience, you’ll make it right.

… Doesn’t work.