Sorry to the folks who already got this rant by e-mail.
Long story short, I had the misfortune of talking to my evil MIL on the phone just now. She asks the usual stupid questions, makes the usual thinly veiled suggestions that I am raising TinyTot to be an ax-murderer, and then comes the kicker. She asks
“Now what town do you live in, again?”
I can see how she could be confused as we moved here just two short years ago, and she’s got a whooping two children to keep up with.
Let this be my advice to you, young people…before you get attached to anybody, ask to meet their parents. If only I’d known 8 years ago…I would have ran like hell!
That IS bizarre! But you know what, you might be able to use it to your advantage. If she asks you once, she’ll ask you again, and you can just tell her a different town! Hell, you could tell her a different town EVERY TIME! Wouldn’t that be a hoot? She’ll never know where you really are - and even better, maybe she’ll show up at once of those other towns! And if you’re really lucky, you’ll have told her a place that’s, say, 500 miles away and she’ll have to fly, and then she’ll have wasted a plane ticket, then she’ll search that town 'till she finds you… You might never see her again!
[cackle] Muahahahaha [/cackle]
Umm… on second thought, your wife probably likes her a little (something to do with that birth-giving thingy). Mayhap you don’t wanna rankle her, eh?
Actually, that is not the most bizarre thing about her. For example:
[list]
[li]She used to stake out our apartment wearing a wig. Very effective, you know, because there was no way we’d be able to remember what her car looks like.[/li]
[li]Once, she burned all my husband’s underwear as punishment when he was a teenager. Don’t ask…I still don’t get the story either.[/li]
[li]When I was rushed back into the hospital after TinyTot came home, she bought him one bottle, then called me up at the hospital to tell me how much it cost and to tell me to remind my husband to pay her back as soon as he got back from visiting me.[/li]
[li]She attacked her 87 year old MIL with a cane for walking on her grass.[/li]
Ackkk! Somebody stop me! I promised I wouldn’t start on this rant today…
Lucky us, we live in a whole separate country from her. I don’t think she’d be able to figure out the complicated procedure for buying an airline ticket and getting a passport…
S’pose I shouldn’t have assumed you were male, huh tatertot? :o I’m so sorry! Mea culpa, ad infinitum, et cetera.
I think it’s because it’s only (!) 9:30ish here this morning, and I’m only on my second cappuccino. Oh, and I’m male, so that’s another reason why I’m a doofus. In fact, I think I’ll start a rant thread entitled, “Why am I a doofus?”
looks for a place to skulk off to
FWIW, I’m also not married. And I ain’t gonna be!
Don’t know what to tell ya about your MIL, though. Irrational behavior can only be analyzed under the auspices of illogical thought, IMHO.
(If you desire my services further, I’ll be in full-force Lurk Mode…)
And don’t look back, I’m gaining on you. Only about 1,880 posts to go!
[hijack] And you can call me Dan - when I was choosing a username, I decided against having a more-creative name because a) I’ve been online in one form or another for 15 years, usually with a handle or nick and b) darnit, I gotta be me. [/hijack]
exits before he can lower the thread to even sillier levels
tater, is your MIL mentally ill? She sounds a lot like my friend’s MIL, who is diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic (unmedicated). This woman accused my friend and her husband of not really living where they live, and pretending to live there only when MIL visited. She also declared that they had children (they didn’t) and were hiding them from her. The list of craziness goes on.
Is there any possiblity of getting your MIL medical help?
Seriously, she’s been in and out of therapy since I’ve known her, but although she has some sort of serious personality disorder, she does have a grip on reality. Frankly, she is the most self-obsessed person I know (and that’s a lot, considering I know myself) and if something isn’t about her, she won’t remember it. I’m not sure if medication could help her, but she is organized enough to keep a job, ect. so if she doesn’t chose to get help we can’t do anything about it.
So in other words, she needs help, but she isn’t deluded or paranoid (forgive me if those aren’t the proper terms).
[hijack]Glad to see you decided not to be a PermaLurk, Dan![/hijack]
I can empathize, Tot. My outlaws…ummm, in-laws still can’t spell our last name correctly. June will be our 12th anniversary. When we moved to SC for my Ph.D. program, my FIL told my wife to move in with them (without our daughter) because, “you’ll end up living under a bridge.” He was once warned that if we heard him use the N word one more time in front of the 3-year old, he’d not see her until she was smart enough to know not to repeat it. He said that it was a perfectly good word and she ought to use it.
And yet I’m still going to have to shell out several hundred bucks to get the girls to OK after the holidays.
Yeah, the package deal that comes w/ marraige can be quite the bitch, huh? My MIL was a pain in the ass when she was a drunk. Now that she’s sober, she’s stupid, but tolerable. And my FIL (the bigamist!) - you can deal with him once you realize he is a pathological liar.
Is “mommy dearest” back in the states? That kind of serious distance can definitely do wonders for relations with in-laws. Mrs D’s insane sister left the midwest for Seattle, and then moved on to Alaska! Yippee! I now wish her nothing but the best, (because if things go wrong, she might move back to the area!)
And ya gotta admit it - you love the big spud despite his having been spawned by that shebitch from hell!
BTW, what’s the deal with that danman chick? Why is she such a doofus?!
Presuming that your MIL knows right from wrong and does have at least a tenuous grip on reality, my opinion would be that there’s unfortunately not much you could do unless she were violent in some way. I mean, it’s one thing to be obsessive and egotistic, but if it’s a victimless situation, then therapy probably wouldn’t be the solution (and, of course, it seems like you’ve been through this for a while, so nothing I could type here would be new to you).
Maybe, then, what it comes down to is whether you can put up with her problems. Are her idiosyncracies a real issue, or merely annoyances that can be dealt with? You imply that she only seems to remember things that directly concern her. Well, the location of her grown-up child might not concern her directly - but the welfare of her son and her grandsibling does. My guess would be that it’s more important to her to know what’s going on in your lives than where you actually live. Since it’s more important to her, she makes it concern her. Since it concerns her, she obsesses over it. There’s a fine line between what is important to a person and what can be discarded, and she’s selectively (IMHO) chosen to obsess over the little things and ignore the larger things, like your town (does she at least know the country??).
[I’m still trying to wrap my brain around that whole underwear-burning thing…was there logic involved?]
Fortunately, I get along well with my in-laws. But I had some fears at first.
My mother-in-law offered to pay for the reception, and took out a $3000 loan to do so about a year before the wedding. But as the months went by, the amount we could spend went down and down. She claimed that she was either taking out wedding expenses that she was paying for, or that my wife misheard her. She also cajoled us into switching locations, saying that so-and-so worked at the Holliday Inn. It sounded to us that this so-and-so would give us some sort of discount. No, it was just that MIL knew here.
The reception was actually pretty nice, at only $1600 for about 80 people. We (actually, me and some friends) did the decorating, we had a cash bar (that very few partook of), and we had friends and relatives doing the DJ and photo work, so we got good rates from them.
There are other favoritism problems that my wife feels slighted about, but I don’t get into.
Where to start . . . I think it was my father’s parents who gave my father and mother $700 for the wedding and told them they could keep the rest as a wedding present. I don’t know how much weddings cost in 1979, but they said it as though it was not a lot.
Both sets of parents disapproved of the marriage for reasons I quite frankly don’t remember and don’t care to.
Some of you have heard about what interesting characters my grandparents were when raising their children.
It took my mother’s parents several years to be able to spell their son-in-law’s first name. I don’t know how long it took before they figured out our last name (my parents hyphenated).
Mother’s parents have, several times, told her they did not want her. I’m going to let that statement stand on its own.
Mother’s parents also do not really have any sense of age beyond theirs. Anyone younger than them is a kid. For a present when I was twelve (not a birthday . . . they’d gone somewhere and felt obligated to get us knick-knacks) I got a wind-up duck. When I was 15 I got a pair of nail-clippers. I am serious. I also got a savings bond, IIRC, and a pencil and paper set from West Point, IIRC.
Thankfully that’s all I can think of for now. I feel sure phantomdiver would be able to tell you LOADS more.
Just seems an awfully odd way to punish a child, if that’s what it was. I know we’re off the OP here, but I’m just wondering what the MIL hoped to accomplish by that feat.
“You won’t eat your peas, eh? FINE! I’m burning your underwear! How’s that make you feel, having no underwear?”
'Course, we haven’t yet ruled out a Satanic ritual…
