Anybody mind if I gripe about my inlaws a bit?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

This isn’t in the Pit because everything I’m going to say is really petty. I’m aware of that. The truth is that my in-laws are very nice, very generous people, and I’m lucky to have them as opposed to some of the other horror stories of in-laws I’ve heard about.

But…sometimes they just get.on.my.nerves!

This is almost all from our brief visit with them yesterday.

To Mom-In-Law:

1.) You know, my daughter did inherit some traits from me and my side of the family. So far you’ve claimed her curly hair, biggish feet, tendency to tiptoe, liking of sweets, late teething, easy-going personality, liking of sweet potatoes, enjoyment of banging on the toy piano, the list goes on. Anything she does is a result of her genes from her Dad’s side, according to you. She’s half me, too, lady!

2.) No, the world would not come to an end if our daughter turns out to be gay. Geesh, you’d think it would be more acceptable for her to be a serial murderer or something.

3.) My birthday gift. Good lord, woman, do you not know my tastes even a little bit by now? I’ve been in your life for over nine years now. Stop giving me things to decorate my house with! You and I have completely divergent tastes when it comes to decor, and it puts me in the horrible position of either living with something I hate up in my house, or hurting your feelings. Stop it!! Sorry, I will not be hanging up the jigsaw-puzzle-glued-together picture of wild birds, and especially not in the “perfect place” you had picked out for it in my kitchen, because I already have a painting that I like there. It may go up in my daughter’s room. Maybe.

4.)Yes, my daughter will get dirty if she climbs back there. Guess what? She’s already dirty, so who cares? Guess what else? Dirt washes off, and kids like making messes. That’s my decision to make, not yours.

5.) What? What’s that you say? My daughter doesn’t like strawberries? And now you’re upset because she’s thrown them all over the floor? Well, sorry, I don’t feel bad a bit because I only told you five times that’s what would happen but you insisted that these were special magical strawberries from Grandma’s house that she would love. Have fun picking those up!

6.) This one is just general: You know, you didn’t do your sons any favors when you never taught them how to do laundry, wash dishes, make beds, or do anything that you consider “feminine” housework. Please don’t look at me like I have two heads when I ask my husband to change a diaper, or to help wash up after dinner. I know you think it makes you a great Mom that you spoiled them so much, but these are necessary life skills that everyone, male or female, needs to have. In this area you failed as a parent. Otherwise, good job.

To Dad-In-Law:

1.) Please stop talking. Please. Or, if you absolutely must talk, please enunciate your words. Thanks.

Other than that, I’m pretty cool with you right now.

To both of you:

I want my daughter to call me Mama. Not Mommy. Have you not noticed that I make a point of referring to myself as Mama about fifty gazillion times when I’m at your house in the hopes you’ll catch on? Not to mention the time when I told you straight out my choice of “Mom-name.” But you choose to ignore that for some reason. It’s confusing to my daughter. Please stop.

Okay, deep breath. Just had to get that off my chest. Like I said, I know most of this stuff is really petty. And it’s especially egregious to criticize a gift. But sometimes, I just need to vent.

Surely I’m not the only one? Come on, share your petty rants about your in-laws or family members. Gotta love 'em, gotta hate 'em, right?

2

I’m lucky, I’ve mostly gotten the in-laws trained out of the stuff that used to drive me nuts. My husband’s mom and grandma used to come into my house and start cleaning. Or offering to pay for us to hire a cleaning lady. I know they only meant to help, but…yeesh. And after they stopped that, granny started trotting out to the yard after lunch to weed my flower beds. Again, only meant to help, but yeesh.

Of course, I was pretty lucky to start with, since that’s the worst I’ve ever had to deal with from my in-laws.

3

My ex-MIL did the same thing about attributing all of my daughter’s characteristics to her side of the family. We were once at a family gathering where they were assigning all her parts to their people…ooh, she’s got Aunt J’s nose, she giggles like Cousin P…all while my daughter is sitting on my lap, her blue eyes beaming, just inches from my blue eyes. None of their family has blue eyes…not a one. I can understand that they might assign the blonde hair to someone else, not knowing mine was almost blonde as a child…but I thought I had a lock on the eyes! So you can imagine my dismay when Uncle Boobe from Germany got credit for the eyes! I even sat there, pointing from my eyes to hers, saying, “Look…blue eyes…!” and I got nothin’!

Add that to the inappropriate, insulting gifts, and the total lack of even one sensitive word when my marriage to her son broke up, and you can see why I haven’t regretted not speaking to her for 14 years. My kids haven’t talked to her in over 5, despite my encouraging them to do so… they are adults, I don’t have the ability to force them anymore. She made her choice…she absolutely adored the second wife, who dropped her son like a stone, but not before making sure my kids and their dad had no relationship.

Oh, an example of an insulting gift…this one wasn’t even to me! It was to her granddaughter who lived with her…my niece. This poor girl took after HER dad’s side of the family…she’s very tall, and heavily built, and ever since babyhood they have overfed that girl…she weighed 23 pounds at three months, and they thought it was adorable (my daughter didn’t hit 23 pounds until she was 18 months). So you’ve got a chubby, awkward, big second grader…and you give her earmuffs that are pink furry pig faces and make her wear them and then making oinking noises. Really nice people…

4

Okay, you know them better than I do based on this OP, but your MIL sounds like a passive-aggressive meddler to me. She may be generous but she’s slipping some ugly shit under the radar.

Petty, I dunno…I hope you don’t have to spend much time with them. It sounds like she’s doing her best to NOT say (in the loudest voice possible) that she disapproves of much of who you are. I know these examples aren’t blatant and Earth-shattering, and yes, some people have much worse, in-your-face experiences with their in-laws, but the message is clear to me, anyway. :frowning:

5

My ex-MIL used to get down on her hands and knees and wipe up microscopic spots on her kitchen floor with a kleenex moistened with her own saliva.

You tell me what you do when a grown woman jumps up and does that in a middle of a conversation.

6

Heh. I can see how it would come across that way, and maybe there’s even a little bit of truth in what you say. But see, the thing is, I know she has the best intentions and that goes a long way towards soothing any hurt feelings I might have.

My MIL is just one of those people who knows everything about everything. And now that she has a granddaughter, I’m sure it just kills her that she can’t just take over and raise my daughter HER way. But she does her best not to interfere, really. It’s not that she disapproves of my way necessarily, but it’s just not HER way, so it’s hard for her to bite her tongue. Does that make sense?

And some of it is just cluelessness about appropriate social interaction. For instance, the time she bought me a bedspread as a Christmas gift. What had happened was that at the end of November, just a few days after my daughter was born, we found an absolute steal on a King-size bed that we couldn’t pass up. Between learning how to deal with a newborn and the usual Christmas craziness, I hadn’t bought a King-sized bedspread yet, so she gave me one as a gift for Christmas.

Cluelessness. She honestly thought she was helping. It never entered her head that I was looking forward to picking out my own bed set once things settled down. Or that I didn’t really care for what she had picked out. But she had good intentions, so that excuses a lot in my book.

Doesn’t stop it from being annoying, though. :slight_smile:

7

OK, so they focused only on “their” characteristics. So? Both families do that with my nephews. His mother and maternal grandmom were befuddled by many behaviours which neither SiL nor her brother ever had, like trying to reach for any object that attracted his attention… but which Mom had no problem with, as us three did it. The Niece doesn’t do it: like her mom and uncle, she stares at things but doesn’t try to grab them. We call it “the features game.” Physically, the people they resemble the most are each other; behaviourally, the Kid is more “ours” and the Kidlette more “theirs” but of course there’s things, both physical and behavioural, from both sides in both.

8

Just to nitpick, genetically she would have gotten the blue eyes from both sides of the family. Blue eyes are a recessive trait.

9

Yes, I see what you mean. My MIL is awesome. My ex-MIL was a horrid person. I’m still a little bittah about that. Gee…can ya tell? :wink:

10

Sunday, my boyfriend’s parents came into town to trade out cars with him. (They live maybe two, two and a half hours away.) Now, you can’t tell when the fuck these people are ever going to show up to anything, if at all, because clocks run different in their world or something. I’d come to the conclusion they weren’t coming at all. If I knew they WERE coming maybe I would have set up dinner with my parents and them. So they have dinner with him and go all on about how I obviously don’t like them because I wasn’t there, whenever they decided to show up.

Frankly, I don’t like them all that much. Sorry. But it’s not my fault I didn’t have dinner!

11

I’ve posted this one before…

My mother in law is fine. My wife’s mother in law is a royal pain in the ass!

12

I have a SIL who’s like that. She comes into town and you invite her over. She’s like, well, maybe…and I dont’ know what time, and blah, blah, blah. I love her, but jesus, girl. COMMIT to something and stick to it. So she came late and then hung around longer than expected, so I just started dinner, of which I didn’t have enough to serve her and her friend. Oh well…they got the hint and beat feet before I actually started setting the table.

13

Based on these comments, I’d swear we had the same MIL, if not for the fact that mine’s been dead for seven years. You have my sympathies.

14

Totally off-topic, but this sort of “fact” drives me absolutely up the wall every time I see someone assert it.

Blue eyes are NOT recessive.

Despite that they may have taught you in your school textbooks (and for some strange reason, continue to teach to this day despite substantial studies proving otherwise), human eye colour isn’t inherited by a simple Mendellian concept of dominant/recessive. Like hair colour and various other traits, it’s influenced by multiple genes working in combination (Wiki link).

So, to nitpick your nitpick, just about everyone on this planet has both their parents to thank for their eye colour - regardless of whether it’s blue or brown or anything else.

15

I kind of got the hint that I wasn’t one of my MIL’s favorites when we found a Glamour Shot photo we’d given her of me gathering dust in the garage.

Ivylad grabbed it, cleaned it up, and now it’s at our house. She claims she put it there when Ivylad and I were having problems and briefly separated, but jeebus woman, that was 15-odd years ago!

I believe she loves me, and I love her, but we can only take so much of each other. I think we realize that and have managed to work civil joking fun/love into our relationship, knowing that visits shouldn’t be more than three days. Ivylad’s on my side, so we’re all good. We both love her son.

16

You gave your MIL a picture of you, just you, not you and your husband, as a gift? That seems…odd.

17

She has pictures of both of us. But Ivylad gave me a Glamour Shots session for a birthday present and we gave pictures of me to my in-laws and my folks, sort of like class pictures of kids.

18

My wife has more justifiable issues with my parents than I do with hers - even though her parents are, in lifestyle, quite alien to me (they are quite religious Ukranian Catholics, whose first language was Ukranian; I am from a mixed Jewish-Wasp background).

I guess the issues can be summed up in a single incident: at a party with both sides of the family present, my dad had a long and amicable conversation with my mother in law’s brother - and afterwards, with my wife present, said something like “you know, I was talking to [uncle], and - he reads!”

Words cannot express the surprise he put into that statement, which conveyed like a slap in the face his utter conviction that my wife’s family are a bunch of illiterate boors.

My wife somewhat resents this attitude, though it is based on a grain of truth - they aren’t pariculary intellectual compared to my father and the rest of my side of the family (my father is a professor, hers was a technician); but they have lots of other good qualities and do not deserve scorn. The conviction that my parents apparently have that they are better people is, I admit, offensive in no small degree. It smacks strongly of snobbery.

19

My only complaint about my MIL is that she drives her daughter absolutely berserk, and I have to try to peel her off the ceiling after Mom leaves. It’s even harder than getting the kitty out from under the couch after the big bad vacuum has finally left.

20

You tell her she missed a spot?