:: siff :: Excuse me, there is a little somethin’ in my eye. 
Awwwww!
I nominate my Mom.
I preface with the fact that I love her very much.
Every Christmas for the past 5+ years all my siblings go to their in-laws to avoid my nut job parents so that leaves me, and only me, to endure them these days. Every year she spends much time praising me for keeping my figure and watching my weight. I have battled eating disorders most of my life. My Mom calls them diets and pretty much encourages them. She scrupulously watches me eat and makes comments if she thinks my plate is too full. A single fat girl has no purpose to live in her esteemed opinion.
Which brings us to the second jewel of a holiday tradition. The little Dr. Phil routine she pulls annually to repair all of the reasons that a man has not yet married me. I am perfectly content as a single and have no desire to hunt and trap a man, as suggested.
As an added bonus they (Mom and Dad) liberally sprinkle most conversation with racial slurs.
Next Christmas I am gonna pay an obese black friend to pose as my new husband.
I have not had to deal with my mother at holidays for a long time. But I got plenty of guilt trips from her. She’s not the worst relative I have; the worst would be my birth mother, who discarded me, but I hardly deal with her at all.
In milder things, my SO’s aunt has been annoying everyone. You see, the SO’s SIL just had a baby and nwo this aunt has been criticizing every action of the new mother. There is resentment because she’s not Chinese, and thus of course a white girl couldnt’ possibly raise a child right. :rolleyes: So lots of little comments her way. This despite the fact that the AUNT’S two children are spoiled rotten.
Me three. Practically everyone on my LiveJournal flist was dreading seeing their family, or talking about how they would endure the browbeating they’d get. I was looking forward to seeing mine (I just got back).
Heaven knows I had some problems with my dad, but I would have stopped speaking with him entirely over some of the things that other people regard as par for the course.
I didn’t think I was going to have an entry for this thread. Then I remembered about my cousin’s wife, whom I have never met. She had been married to my cousin for at least a decade without incident. When my aunt became ill, cousin’s wife began stealing her possessions, and later her bank account, and after my aunt died, she racked up another five figures of debt on my aunt’s credit cards, wiping out everything she and my uncle had saved for a lifetime of marriage. She’s currently in jail and will be there for about another decade, while my uncle is on welfare now, and last I heard, my cousin has taken up drinking in addition to single parenting. Well, so might I, if my wife had done that to my parents and me. You think you know someone, and then they do something like this, that just rips apart the whole family.
That’s why I don’t hang out with any of those people. Too much drama.
How about my fucking batshit insane MIL?
She asked me if any of the twins’ toys were a bust, and I replied that the Dinosaurs movie (Disney/Pixar release from a couple of years ago) was too intense for them.
Now, I’d bought it because they so love the dinosaur segment in Fantasia.
However, Fantasia is 60-yr-old animation and nothing like the newer, fast-paced, hyper-real, 3d stuff they do these days. The twins refused to watch it after about, oh, 90 seconds.
MIL proceeds to lecture me on how my children were just reacting to MY anxiety, not experiencing their own (which is amazing, since she wasn’t even in the room when the aborted viewing took place). Then she decreed that parents these days protect their kids too much and children “didn’t used to be frightened of such things”, and that we, specifically, are guilty of over-protecting our children.
Furthermore, she argued that we should be showing them real nature movies, where animals maul and consume each other. “What are you going to do if they find a dead animal in the yard? They need to learn to deal with death.”
Graceful person that I am, I managed to refrain from suggesting that it would be a treat to us all should she elect to provide the example herself, personally.
What really irks me about it is that MIL feels qualified to tell everybody how they should live when her own life is a complete disaster. Would you take advice from a woman who’s spent the past 10 years mooching off of people, living in her truck at times, unable to hold a job, with no friends or relationships? A woman who’s still carrying on with a litany of complaints about the ex-husband she divorced 30 years ago? A person who complains about how human beings are wrecking the planet, yet can’t be bothered to recycle, write letters, protest, or “buy green” and has always owned big trucks?
I wouldn’t have had her in the house at Christmas except that my dh and his brother wanted to see her; I didn’t see the point in making a scene.
So for 3 days she sat on her enormously fat ass, never once lifting a finger to help out - not even by taking her own plate to the sink. The only part of her that moves is her mouth. She is the World’s Foremost Expert on everything.
Oh, and this is cute - she gave us a copy of Dr. Phil’s Family First for Christmas.
No, I did not help her carry anything out to her car. Bitch had to do it all on her own, I was too busy with the kids.
May I suggest bringing an obese black female friend and telling your family that this is your Canadian wife and that you now only celebrate Kwanzaa?
It’s a tossup.
In this corner we have my heroin-relapsing first cousin once removed, whose cousin has already OD’ed on heroin and who was out getting arrested with her baby-daddy on Christmas while her extended family looked after her two out-of-wedlock kids, thinking that she was at a support group meeting. She and the baby-daddy had decided to pick up discarded receipts outside 7-11 and try to get “refunds” on merchandise they never bought, and because he has made a habit of collect-calling her family from jail, they blocked the number. She spent Christmas and the following 48 hours in jail while her mother and aunts looked after the babies, terrified because none of them knew where she was.
In this corner we have my passive-aggressive grandmother and her husband, who decided that the gas required to cook breakfast was simply not worth the hassle (her husband was a CFO of a Fortune 500 company and raised prize-winning show dogs – she does not have money problems) and so the family would eat cold cereal. Dad’s stomach can’t hack cold milk in the mornings, so he drove around the corner and got some eggs for breakfast at a diner. Upon his return, grandmother fired up all four burners to create a feast of all of his favorite foods, and then harangued him for almost a half hour when he said that he had just eaten a large breakfast and wasn’t really hungry. Later she brought a bowl of Chex Mix (his favorite again) to the couch where he and grandma’s husband were watching the game. Actually, she brought it to her husband, and when dad reached for it, she snatched it away from both of them and said “I’ve got a big dinner coming and I’ll be damned if you’re going to waste it!” Her husband managed to find fault with everything my parents did that weekend, and then as they were leaving, made lots of semi-polite excuses about how far it is to drive, and how he didn’t think they’d be coming down to see us anymore. Dad mentioned that he knew exactly how far it was (having just driven the distance himself) and would be happy to pick them up at any of the three nearby airports. Grandma’s husband replied “We won’t be coming! Good-bye.” And closed the door on my parents.
This year, it was my mother
She felt the need to mock me at Christmas lunch for joining a gym in August and attending for only a single week. “And what happened after that, Carol?” she demanded in front of the whole family. “Err… I came down with whooping cough” I said, embarrassed and frankly shocked that she’d even bring it up. “Oh, riiiight… and since then?” she said.
I didn’t know what to say. Since August, I’ve had two and a half months of whooping cough, my husband had an affair with my friend and broke the news to me during what was already the most stressful two weeks of my working life, I’ve had to move house, look for a permanent job, work whenever the opportunity came up, change my name, deal with my husband’s girlfriend’s pregnancy scare (after we suffered through four years of infertility, that stung) not to mention the stress Mum herself piled on when everything I told her about the breakdown of my marriage in strictest confidence was broadcast to every. last. person. she spoke to, from my mother in law (whom she doesn’t even like, yet called to blab to!) to the refrigerator delivery man and the checkout guy at KMart (not an exaggeration). I’ve had a buttload of crap to deal with this year, and excuse me for being such a quitter but the fucking gym is the least of my concerns right now.
You could also take a page from David Sedaris’s sister Amy (yes, as in Strangers with Candy) and wear a fat suit the next time they visit.
Robin
My Mom does this too. It’s best to simply not tell her anything important, or only the scraggliest synopsis if necessary. For example: “Mom, I’m getting a divorce. He cheated on me.” followed swiftly by “I’ve got a lot of stuff to do with this, so I’ll call you later.”
Of course, here’s wishing you don’t have the occasion to use that particular senario. <<hugs>>
I’m fourthing the thank God I don’t have anyone do add to this thread.
The best I can do is my brother, who is (a) a single parent, very busy, with few female influences, and (b) a man, and therefore never buys a damn thing until the day before Christmas Eve when he can get either me or my sister to babysit his kids for five or six hours while he shops for gifts that my mother will then spend four hours wrapping for him. The lack of planning is excusable for reasons (a) and (b), but the assumption of our help every year, without so much as a by-your-leave, is starting to irk me.
This in no way makes him an asshole, however. I wouldn’t trade him for a dozen of you guys’ whacked-out kin. 
There was no particular asshole this year, but, sheesh, the “why aren’t you married yet” commentary was coming fast and furious. This year I tallied up:
- Aren’t you worried about dying alone?
- Who will care for you when you start to wear diapers?
- Any chance we’ll hear wedding bells in Baltimore before we die?
- You’re 40 now. Isn’t it time you grew up? Your looks won’t last forever, you know.
- You do realize you’re the last one of your cousins to remain single. You’re not nearly the ugliest one. You really ought to get out there and try to find someone.
And the best came from my grandfather…
"You know, at my age, you realize just how important family is. None of my accomplishments in life mean anything compared to my relationship with my family. Family is the only thing that matters in the end. {Insert 20 minutes of the same sort of statements.}
Now, as I near the end of my life, I find you are my remaining disappointment. You don’t know how much it would mean to me to see you happy and settled down. I fear I’ll go to my grave without seeing you live up to your potential and finding a nice man to make a home with. I worry about you and pray for you every night. Why can’t you see how important that is to me and all those who love you?" {Etc. etc. etc. on and on with more of the same.}
Yes, there are a million replies I could and have given him. But he doesn’t want to hear them and, and this point, he’s probably too deaf to hear them anyway.
I’m glad you posted your mild story, Jodi, so I feel free to post mine, too. My family is nowhere in league with the heavy-hitters in this thread (I’d cut most of them out of my life the way I cut my own father out when he refused to act like a human being), but they did a few less-than-stellar things this Christmas (the worst being opening all the gifts without us, because we were visiting with Jim’s family). No big deal, I know, but they don’t seem to grasp that we have two families to visit, not just them.
I also remember one Christmas when my sister was quite put out that we didn’t get up early Christmas morning and race over to her house first thing - Jim and I got up at a decent hour, and had our own family Christmas with us and our cats first. Since we don’t have kids, we aren’t a family, you see, and nothing we do can possibly be as important as stuff involving kids.
cazzle, I’m so very sorry. I wish you strength and a happy 2007.
You and Robin are my new best friends.
Doh! Should read MsRobyn!
It’s all good.
You can find the story of Amy Sedaris and the fat suit in David’s book Me Talk Pretty One Day. I heard him read it on NPR and had no clue who he is and who this “Amy” person was until I heard his name. It’s hysterically funny.
Let me just say that with the demise of my asshole aunt, I have no major asshole relatives, just those who annoy me. The one who’s closest is my sister-in-law, and thank God she’s in the Air Force and doesn’t live here; otherwise, I’d be forced to kill her. And it’s not even that she’s an asshole (although she is), she’s just got a big mouth and loves to start arguments.
Robin
I’d suggest marrying some prisoner who isn’t up for parole until 2047 and see if that gets everyone to STFU but there is the chance that the sentence gets commuted and they you’d actually have to deal with the guy. So, just lie and say you married some guy who is in prison until 2047.
Disappointed? Not livng up to your potential? God’s cock! If I had to listen to that I’d flip. You have the patience of a monk.