Furious mom sends scolding email to son's fiance re her etiquette lapses. Are her criticisms valid?

In My Humble Opinion
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Dear Mother-in-Law to be:

Thank you for your unsolicited advice on how to be a better person. Considering the source, I will give your advice on manners all the consideration they are due. I have discussed the matter with my husband to be, and he agrees it would be best for me to avoid discomforting you with my presence until such a time as I can meet your standards.

On an unrelated note, he’s going to be unable to make his usual Sunday night phone calls. Possibly for quite a while. He apologizes, but his mouth is going to be busy doing something else during that time.

We won’t be bothering you again about the wedding, as we’ve decided to go with a much more modest, personal ceremony. Friends and family only. My fiance’s father should be receiving an invitation soon. If he wishes to bring a . . . companion, please send us a handwritten letter requesting it, and we will find somewhere to seat them.

P.S.
Please give your husband my best wishes, and let him know how much I’m looking forward to the day I can call him Father.

P.P.S: I apologize if I used the incorrect salutation. Does marring my soon-to-be husband’s father make you my Mother-in-Law or my Mother-in-Law twice removed? I’d hoped to avoid this question by asking my fiance if he had a loving nickname of some kind for you, but he only laughed bitterly. And looked sad.

142

Wow, I am trippin’ right now. I thought that foreign cultures (yes, in my mind I grouped every damn culture outside of the U.S. into one) had that thing where you were rude as hell if you didn’t accept everything that was offered. Now, I was aware that many cultures have that thing where people respond to your requests with ‘yes’ even when they mean no because they are too ‘polite’ to refuse you, no matter what; but I always thought when something WAS offered, you were rude not to take it.

I have eaten things like goat when I don’t even like to eat any meat at all. And I did that because I thought I would be rude not to accept, since this man was West African and I assumed he would take offense. Now I gotta wonder if I was right about West African custom, also.

Anyways, I am enlightened to hear this, Anaamika. If I ever get a chance to eat some authentic Indian home cooking at someone’s house, I will try to remember the dance.

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I think perhaps different Indians do things differently. The refuse-insist-refuse-insist-take dance, as such, is not something de rigeur at the gatherings I’ve been to (my family is Indian as well). They’re more often just straightforwardly like what you suggested, Nzinga; the host insists on giving food, and one takes it, even if they’d rather not.

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No, it’s not just you. I always bring some token with me when I’m visiting someone, whether it just be for dinner or sleeping over. Nothing fancy, but still something. I wasn’t raised to do this (my parents were not big on precise rules of etiquette beyond the major ones like please and thank you). It’s just something I picked up from somewhere and I have always done.

Because I just picked it up from “somewhere”, however, I would never judge someone harshly for not following this custom.

(Getting flashbacks of “Six Degrees of Separation”, when Will Smith’s character is being tutored on high-class etiquette. Bottle of beer.)

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In case anyone’s interested this is what Miss Post had to say about houseguest in 1922.

Actually in a traditional English “great house” breakfast is always a highly informal meal; usually a self serve buffet. Servants weren’t even allowed to set foot in the room unless specifically called for to bring more food or remove an empty serving dish. Married women weren’t even required (or expected to) come down for breakfast at all; their breakfasts were sent up on a tray. The Royal family still follows these practices. Missing lunch or a scheduled activity like a hunt is a major faux pas and Diana did get called onto the carpet for that.

Whether to refuse or not and whether to keep offering after a refusal is a major source of friction between cultures (& even withing the same culture sometimes). It’s usually a given that the host must offer something. Sometimes it’s rude for the guest to decline; othertimes it’s rude for the guest not to decline. Sometimes it’s polite for the host to take the guest at their word, othertimes it’s polite for the host to insist. We’ve all heard the story of the foreign visitors/visitors to a foreign land who ended up starving because they declined every offer of food out of politeness expecting to be offered again only to have their hosts immediately dropped the subject, also out of politeness.

Just how old is Freddie anyway? If he’s in his mid-20s or later then this woman was probally never “a mother” to him in any meaningful way; why on Earth would anyone expect his bride to view her as a mother figure if he doesn’t? He’s probally never even lived in her house.

146

One of my old boyfriends had a family who served dinner in this same way. Luckily his mother was a saint and managed to walk me through it the first time without making me feel small or foolish.

She never assumed I should know their way of serving a meal, but instead approached it as -this is how we do it in our family, and we love you and want you to feel comfortable with us so we’re sharing the rules with you.

As far as mother in laws go she would have been a dream.

147

Okay, that article has all sorts of new info in it since yesterday. In any even Freddie is 29 now; he would’ve been 21 when is father remarried. This woman is not his “mother” in any meaningfull sense and will not be Heidi’s mother-in-law except by a polite social fiction.

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Here is the full text of the email.

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Yeah, but 20 minute showers is a pretty long time if you’re a guest in someone’s house. I’m guessing they didn’t imagine someone would take that long.

What I found amusing was the comment that the girl’s parents should have saved up for her wedding over the years. Who does that anymore?
Maybe the reason she had a diabetic reaction is that the MIL got snippy when she said she didn’t have enough food, hmmm?
(I can only imagine what this bitch would say if I had a seizure!)

150

About the wedding…

Both sets of parents are free to offer what they are comfortable with as a gift meant to make their childrens’ weddings memorable. If the parents have some special requests (wanting a big wedding for cultural reasons, inviting their co-workers or very distant relatives, etc.) they should be ready to cover those expenses.

If the parents don’t want to pay for an entire castle wedding, that’s fine. They can give whatever they planned to give, and the couple can plan whatever wedding the resources available to them allow. There is no excuse for snarking on the girl’s family. Contributions to a wedding are a gift given in goodwill for the sake of bringing joy to the people you are giving it to. They do not involve any third parties.

151

It is high time someone explained to you about good manners. Yours are obvious by their absence and I feel sorry for you. Unfortunately for Freddie, he has fallen in love with you and Freddie being Freddie, I gather it is not easy to reason with him or yet encourage him to consider how he might be able to help you. It may just be possible to get through to you though. I do hope so.

She’s not Freddie’s mom - she’s his step-mother of about 8 years. Not her place, really, to write something like this. If she was Freddie’s mother, or a step-mother who had a hand in raising him since young childhood, she’d not be out of place by taking Freddie aside and speaking to him about her issues.

If you want to be accepted by the wider Bourne family I suggest you take some guidance from experts with utmost haste. There are plenty of finishing schools around. Please, for your own good, for Freddie’s sake and for your future involvement with the Bourne family, do something as soon as possible.

Snot bucket, much? Again - something that should only have been said to Freddie under circumstances above.

**Here are a few examples of your lack of manners:
**
When you are a guest in another’s house, you do not declare what you will and will not eat – unless you are positively allergic to something.

There is a difference between quietly saying “I am not overly fond of kohlrabi” and snapping “Christ, I hate cheese souffles - they make me want to vomit”. Unsure of how the fiancee may have put this across, but it was probably more how she said it vs. what she said.

You do not remark that you do not have enough food. You do not start before everyone else. Agreed. If you don’t have enough food, take a second helping when you’re done. And wait until everyone else starts eating.

You do not take additional helpings without being invited to by your host.*** I consider it a compliment when guests take second helpings of my food, but I guess if she wanted to stretch it, a “may I have some more of that delicious liver loaf?” might be asked first.

When a guest in another’s house, you do not lie in bed until late morning in households that rise early – you fall in line with house norms. I kind of agree on this, especially if it’s noted that there will be breakfast at 0500 sharp or something like that.

You should have hand-written a card to me. You have never written to thank me when you have stayed. Absolutely agree - especially for the first visit.

You regularly draw attention to yourself. Perhaps you should ask yourself why. Again - a Freddie issue.

No one gets married in a castle unless they own it. It is brash, celebrity style behaviour. Tend to agree.

***I understand your parents are unable to contribute very much towards the cost of your wedding. (There is nothing wrong with that except that convention is such that one might presume they would have saved over the years for their daughters’ marriages.) If this is the case, it would be most ladylike and gracious to lower your sights and have a modest wedding as befits both your incomes. *** Snarky x1000, but she has a point. If you can’t afford the wedding you want, you have the wedding you can afford.

Personally, I think this is never going to end well no matter what anyone does from this point on. Freddie has been forewarned.
UT

152

There is also a world of difference between “I am not overly fond of kohlrabi” and “I’m sorry, kohlrabi doesn’t agree with me,” or “I’m sorry, I’m diabetic and can’t eat muffins.” Given the later bitching about the dil making a production about being diabetic and there being some sort of diabetes-related incident on a walk, I’d guess it’s closer to the last option.

And if that’s the case, it’s far more damning of the hostess than the guest. Part of being an adequate host is making reasonable accommodation of your guests’ special needs–a bowl of water for their Seeing Eye dog in your pet-free home, a ground-floor sleeping space for the mobility-impaired when the guest room is upstairs, a pet-hair-free sleeping space for the allergic even when you have pets, a meat-free or low-carb meal for the vegetarian or diabetic. If you can’t or won’t do that, you have no business inviting people to your home.

153

I’m sorry - I didn’t see the part about the diabetes. Absolute the hostess should make all accommodations for that - no question.

154

How offensive is it to not take any of a particular dish that you happen to have a problem with? No specifics, just “no thanks, I’ll take a pass on [that one]”, but you’re sampling the rest. I’m thinking of something like Dad’s problem with mushrooms: if he had button mushrooms or anything which had been in contact with them, and drank any wine (never saw him have more than one glass of red with lunch and a smidgen of cognac that lasted the whole afternoon, and the problem only happened in combination with mushrooms), he got “drunk”; dizzy, couldn’t focus, the world swayed. Not an allergy, but enough of a problem to be something he needed to avoid (specially since Mom couldn’t drive).

In my family, when there’s a guest who hasn’t been around before, we apply the principle we call “this is how we play parcheesi here”: we explain anything that we know changes from household to household. Dishes placed in the center are “serve yourself”, those (like a roast) which require someone to serve them are “if you want seconds, please do ask”, stuff like that. It’s not so bloody difficult to explain it in a way that’s not offensive and, our choices being mostly a matter of “which way makes logistics easier”, it’s easily explainable when someone finds it strange (“oh, I can take seconds myself if I want them, you don’t need to bother!” “the way we’re tucked in, I’m the only one who can stand without making other people move, it’s fine” “oh, I see”). Oh, and this thread was only the second time I heard of “tilting the soup dish away from you”, that I remember - I do recall an American coworker doing it. On both sides of my family, the rule was “you don’t serve soup to non-family guests and you make sure that children learn to tilt the dish just enough”.
We also ask about meal restrictions in advance and, if possible, check menus with guests who’ll eat in (this means we won’t be serving pasta bolognese to someone who had it the previous day).

155

As for the points in the email, the only one I’d have a problem with is “starting before everybody else”, but if I knew my guest was a diabetic I’d make sure we weren’t getting her low. Some of the other things sound like they would make Abuelita (the grandma who was “from a good family”) declare anybody expecting them “absolutely uncouth” - and Xavier Castle has been a popular wedding spot since cars first appeared on our roads (heck, back then, any groom who could afford a car had probably attended High School at the Castle, as it was one of the three HSs in the province).

156

I just noticed this. Another rule I’ve never heard of - I had to google it to even figure out what it meant. Definitely not very intuitive.

157

Incredibly crass and rude. One or two of the individual items might be held understandably as privately-reserved judgments (depending on the actual details) but because the e-mail taken as a whole makes it abundantly clear that is author is a gigantic asshole I am inclined to give the young lady the benefit of the doubt and assume that these complaints are blown up out of behaviour that would not be of particular concern to reasonable people.

For example, if I had a house-guest who stayed in bed until 11:45 and just grunted and rolled over when they were gently informed at 10:00 that we would be having Eggs Benedict for breakfast if they would like breakfast, I would not be terribly impressed. Not “Firing off a flame-mail to the new member of the family” unimpressed, but probably “Rolling my eyes in the direction of the others who waited a couple of hours before being served breakfast before we gave up and tucked in” unimpressed.

However, because the e-mail tells us so much more about the author than it does about the recipient, my expectation is that she probably just lazed in bed until 7:00am or so and Mrs. Bourne was offended that she didnèt rise at six.

If I were the son, I would probably be changing my name to Mr. Withers and never speaking to dear mum again. What a bitch.

158

No dog in the fight, other than I find bitch mum totally offbase.

I was actually raised with very formal manners [or if you want to put it I didn’t have different at home manners and out to fancy places manners] and one thing I was taught to do was hang back and watch to see how someone else did something if I wasn’t sure about what to do [like some people treat asparagus as a finger food, and others is knife and fork all the way.]

Though we did the fork in the left knife in the right eating, don’t shovel the food obviously [sneakily use the knife to convince the food onto the fork if needed] no sticking of fingers in the mouth, if the gristle went in on a fork, sneak it out of your mouth on the fork or sneak it into the napkin.

Hm, wait until everybody has had a fair shot at the food before going for more, typically ask for seconds.

Politely refuse a food, if it comes already plated simply don’t make a fuss and don’t eat something.

If you have an allergy, make it known before accepting/when accepting an invitation, or if you know you are a later invite, ask if dinner will include something you are allergic to and if it is see if it is in a form that the host can omit [not dressing the dish with a sauce, pulling a serving of salad out before adding mushrooms or whatever ingredient.]

If the food is totally unsuitable you can either bow out politely or find a way to skip the meal or bring something you can eat without being rude about it. [I have had several friends bring over their prepackaged diet plan foods, which are easy enough to heat and plate for them.]

159

The sitcom’s been done. In fact, Mrs Bourne reminded me a lot of Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced as boo-KAY). She’s a pretentious, social-climbing snob.

160

Exactly. Making a federal case of a guest’s minor etiquette lapses is a HUGE violation of the rules of etiquette.