I went to a baby shower this weekend, and while the people who went were nice and the food was good, I wanted to gauge my eyeballs out. I’m being ambushed by a bridal shower myself, and my friends (rightfully so) hate me for it. Who came up with this crap, and why is it so bitchy to say you don’t like these inane traditions? :smack:
Why are they both ambushing you and hating you? I mean, can’t you tell them you don’t want one, or that it can be low-key? My friends from work threw me one, where we had margaritas and pizza in the park. They all chipped in to get me a gift cert for VS, and to get my hair done for the wedding. Very cool, not corny at all.
I think, if they’re your friends, you can influence how it goes, no? You can avoid those corny shower games and all that. Now, if your MIL was throwing it, then you’d be screwed. 
You don’t have to participate, really. I can’t tell you how many gifts I’ve sent off to cousins’ or other relatives’ wedding or baby showers with regrets. (I regret that I don’t have the slightest desire whatsoever to go to another wedding or baby shower.)
My friends knew me well, and knew that I didn’t care for all the wedding shower games and silliness. We just had a party and hung out. It was cool.
DINGDINGDING!!!
Yep. I promised I wouldn’t have one, then this. Now we’re doing a formal-tea thing.
Plus my fiancé has to come. My MIL swears this is de rigeur, but I’d never heard of it until I moved to IL.
Imagine my surprise when my wife told me, “yes, you’re suppose to come to the wedding shower.” So I went, and I didn’t have a very good time, but I did my best to be cheerful and happy because these people were going out of the way to give us gifts and feed us. When her family threw us a shower I repeated my performance for the same reasons.
Don’t interpret my post as coming from a position stating that you should just suck it up and get over it. Well, maybe it is, but it’s a sympathetic suck it up and get over it post.
Marc
If you don’t want a shower, and your friends don’t want to attend your shower, just call them and tell them to RSVP no. You won’t be hurt by it, since you didn’t want it in the first place.
I’m being gracious because apparently it means a lot to her that her son get gifts, and because my mother warned me to be gracious.
I just don’t know what to do with myself, mostly. I’m kind of objective-driven, and these types of get togethers leave me antsy and anxious. Bleh.
Oh the ones that don’t want to come won’t, they just enjoy mocking me now that I, the great Shower-Hater, is having a shower. I think maybe I’ll get drunk.
Get a jump on them, mock yourself.
Or better yet, extend your graciousness to your friends by apologizing for not recognizing that sometimes a bride has zero choice in these things and is being gracious. And perhaps the thing to do then was to be understanding instead of mocking and support your friends through the horror that is “the shower given by a mother-in-law to be.”
(Technically, she shouldn’t be giving you a shower. It should be someone like your fiance godmother.)
[channeling Miss Manners]
It is not in fact de rigeur to have bridegrooms-to-be attend their fiancees’ wedding showers. Indeed, until a couple of decades ago it would have been unheard-of.
Many people like the fact that the lines between the traditionally gender-segregated shower and bachelor party are now getting somewhat blurred. And certainly there’s no intrinsic reasons that showers can’t be co-ed if that’s the way the hosts like it.
But it’s not de rigeur. What is de rigeur, unfortunately, is for the guest of honor at a shower to refrain from criticizing the hostess’s decisions about how to throw the party or whom to invite. (When the hostess is the guest of honor’s future mother-in-law, this is not only de rigeur but also de intelligence, if not absolutely de survie.)
Only in real life, I hasten to add; here on an anonymous message board you can complain all you want about how ghastly the event is going to be and how much your fiance is going to hate it (and I’m willing to believe that you’re right on both counts). But yes, if anybody (except your trustworthy confidential friends) catches you in real life kvetching about how much you hate the party that your mother-in-law is going out of her way to give in your honor, you will have earned the “bitchy” label.
[/channeling Miss Manners]
Virginia Slims? 
Well, smoke 'em if ya got 'em. 
But then why did you give their names to your MIL in the first place, couldn’t you have made it a family-only party?
Victoria’s Secret.
As a man I loathe this breakdown in gender roles. At least before I would have had a much better excuse as why this is not happening.
Oh, and if you want to make the party more bearable, Flea, have all of your friends get your really perverse gifts. Bridal showers, I hear, can be a bit risqué with the gifts, but this one should include foot-long throbbing vibrators, anal intruders, and midget porn. If everyone gives you something like this then no one will be singled out as giving something inappropriate. Your MIL should turn some interesting colors while you can plead ignorance.
Oh, and it would be great if the first one was only slightly blue, like warming massage oil, and things got progressively more bawdy until the last one was a membership in a local swingers’ club.
This is my current attitude towards baby and wedding showers at this point word for word. Except the regret part. I have no regret about being dead tired of them at all. I think I’m well on my way to curmudgeon. 
(“I’m sorry, I have unbreakable plans for that day. I plan to not be at your lame shower.”)
My condolences. Sounds deadly.
I hope things go better after this. Will your MIL be giving wedding directions also?
I know. I have now had to buy like a dozen gifts, and have never got one back and don’t expect to. Meh, at least the cake was good in a couple of them and I went back for seconds without a qualm.
As an aside, what is it with women holding showers for either a 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc child or (my own personal pet peeve) a bridal shower for the 2nd, 3rd, 4th wedding.
I look like a shit for refusing to participate in such things here in the office. I contribute for the first baby shower, but never for the bridal one. It took 3 years before they stopped asking about 2nd+ baby showers.
My friends aren’t as bad, but the Sheckstress and I eloped, so there was no bridal shower, no wedding party. We have no kids, so there’s no baby showers. We have an agreement that if they want us to come, we get a month notice and it’s not held when we’re working.
Done and done. I happily rant here. The fiancé and I both have our objections, but have realized that to some extent, we are now Barbie and Ken and are just supposed to look pretty. I’ll live.
Oh, I don’t care what label I earn, since apparently my judgement isn’t up to snuff in these kinds of manners, so I’m through worrying about meeting up to standards I have neither set nor have a use for. I stated several times I was all right without one and frankly did not enjoy them, so her insistence on throwing one (and her subsequent complaints about the expenses) is actually quite rude of her. This is being endured because it’s one day out of my life that I can get over, and it makes his life easier if I’m gracious.
She has to meet a certain spending minimum, apparently, and I told them they didn’t have to buy gifts. Now they feel obligated to, I suppose, same as I would in their position.
Awesome on the gift ideas. I’ll email them today. Yeah, the fiancé hates it, too. Where I come from, it’s considered actually quite tasteless to involve the man in the shower, but I’ve never voiced that to her.
What I get tired of the most about showers is that as a single woman, I am doomed to ponying up for gifts all the damn time. My brother doesn’t have to buy gifts for anyone (well, now I suspect maybe he does since he has a wife who’d be invited to family showers). My male cousins don’t have to buy gifts for anyone. My dad doesn’t have to buy gifts for anyone.
I have to schlep to the store and buy my gift and wrap it and show up and sit around with all of the married women and the mommies talking about married stuff and mommy stuff and waste a whole Saturday on the shebang.
Yes, part of it is jealousy in that I have given so many gifts and gone to so many showers and I sit here not married and not with child and I have no prospect of getting any of that stuff myself…but growing up in a family full of boys, I am mostly resentful that I get singled out to have to pay for all of this.