Mother-in-law!

The BBQ Pit
1

I’ve ranted about mother-in-law in a handful of separate threads… I’m designated a whole thread as the mother-in-law rant thread.

I’m fretting about Christmas day. I’m getting to the point where I just about can’t stand to be around my mother-in-law. Whenever I’m forced to spend time with her, I end up very unhappy and bitchy–to her face, even. I just can’t hide it anymore. She’s a miserable person and she makes me miserable, too.

She’s already fucking up Christmas. My husband’s cousin is having a party Christmas Eve for their whole side of the family. I’m hosting Christmas dinner the next day for my side of the family. In a brief moment of weakness, I felt bad for mother-in-law because she lives in a woman’s shelter now and doesn’t have any immediate family (no spouse, no other children) to spend Christmas Day with, so I invited her over for Christmas dinner, too. This was what we did last year, and I figured it’s going to be a tradition.

Then we get a phone call from Grandma wanting to know when Christmas dinner is, what she should bring, yadda yadda yadda. Huh?? “Jeanie said Christmas Dinner is at your house this year.” Double huh??? Turns out she invited her whole famn damily.

Joel called his mom and told her she shouldn’t have, it’s just a small gathering for my family and her if she doesn’t have any place else to go. So not only did she make Joel call everyone and uninvite them himself, now she’s thinking she’d rather spend Christmas with her sister. Go, I say. Good riddance to bad rubbish. So this means she’ll probably screw around until the last second and show up unannounced halfway through Christmas dinner or something. Gah!

Please move back to Alaska. I got along with her so much better when she lived umpteen thousand miles away. She said she was only going to stay in Oregon a couple months; that was a year and a half ago. Please go away.

Go on, if you want to pitch a bitch about your own in-laws, feel free. I know I haven’t got it as bad as some. Make me feel better with your own tales of misery :slight_smile:

“I hope life isn’t a big joke, because I don’t get it,” Jack Handy

The Kat House
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2

My suggestion: learn Japanese. There are message boards dedicated to the evil mother in law.

My wife could give you lots of examples, but being the son, I don’t have the same memory for them as she does.

One I can remember: we were looking through the wedding pictures for ones we wanted to get reprinted/enlarged. My mom said she really liked the one where my wife was signing the certificate. Of course her head was down and you couldn’t see her face…

Rav

3

Hey, at least your mom was there at the wedding!

My in-laws were not happy that I was marrying their son, the about-to-be-ex-Jesuit priest. So they didn’t come.

-Melin

4

My mother in law will be with us on Christmas Eve for the first time in many years. I invited her, much to my surprise.

As soon as my husband and his siblings were able to flee the control of their self-centered and bullyish mother, they did. They each spent many years trying to outright avoid contact with her. She’d just show up, unannounced, whenever, expecting us to drop whatever we were doing and receive her. The only reason I continued to have any relationship with her at all is because she is my daughter’s beloved Grandma.

She was mostly always an excellent Grandma.

On New Year’s Eve (day) 1995 she suffered a catastrophic head injury when her car hit black ice on I-70 west and jumped the median. Her car, still air-bound, hit a 2 ton truck head on. Given the level of her injury her recovery has been amazing.

I used to pretend to like her. I don’t pretend with her anymore. I am totally honest with her, because hardly anyone else is particularly her therapist. Her children are mostly still estranged from her and only one of them (not my husband) makes any effort to have a relationship with her.

What I have learned while being (sometimes very brutally) honest, is that our relationship is hundreds of times better now than it ever was before her accident. With that honesty, and with time, we now have an actual friendship. I try very hard not to be ‘mean’ but I have said to her some things that were very hard to hear.

It was very hard for her to be ‘reminded’ that her children were NOT close to her before the accident - she remembers one big happy family unit - not so! It was hard for her to hear that yes, her son and daughter avoid her like the plague because she won’t stop trying to put guilt on them for not waiting on her hand and foot since she was prematurely and unwillingly discharged from inpatient rehab after the accident. (She wouldn’t cooperate with the PT’s and insisted she was fine and that recovery was now finished - typical of her only give the functional level of a six year old.) She is now capable and functional because they would not do basic things for her - fetch me this, bring me that. Make no mistake - her basic needs (food, clothing, and shelter) WERE met. She lived in our home for several months before she began living on her own again. (I have all but blocked out the full horror of this.)

By now, she’s a completely different person than before. I’m hoping my husband will be able to see that and get to know this new person.

What I’m getting at - to make a long story even longer- is that if the relationship sucks so badly - why not just let the all the worms out the can and tell them how you feel and what bothers you about the relationship you have with them. Worst case scenario - they call auntie so-and-so tsk and tut about how rude you are/were… but maybe, just maybe - things will get better.
Just let it all out - but you’d probably want to wait until after Xmas…

5

I can’t believe a mother-in-law thread is so short. It’s been a couple of days, what gives?

I don’t have a mother-in-law problem – but MY mother is pissing everyone off cuz she can’t shut up about my son’s wife.

Anne (my daughter-in-law) is way overweight – she knows it, and she’ll do something when she’s damn good and ready. She’s a sweetheart and loves my son and he loves her and they get along great.

But my mom – she hides snack food when she knows they’re going to be visiting – now this isn’t too terrible but she makes a point of telling everyone she does this.

A year ago she gave Anne a trial membership in Weight Watchers – Anne didn’t ask for it, in fact has never discussed her weight with her.

At the wedding two summers ago, the kids had made a display of their school pictures, and mom couldn’t help but point out to everyone how pretty Anne was when she was thin.

Whenever Anne visits her, mom asks how the weight loss is going. When Anne leaves, mom insists to everyone “I think she’s getting fatter!”

She can’t mention Anne to anyone without saying something about fat she is. So even people who have never met Anne (like mom’s hairdresser) don’t know anything about her except that she’s heavy.

I’ve told her to get off it, that her nagging comments aren’t going to help, but she won’t stop.

I guess I’m posting in this thread for Anne – who would probably like to rant about her grandmother-in-law.

Anne has held her tongue so far, probably for my son’s sake, but this behavior must really hurt her feelings.

6

I pity my father when it comes to mother-in-laws. My grandmother (mother’s mother) was a harpy she-bitch from hell. I thought for a while that Gramma was just a misandyrist, but eventually realized that she was just a complete misanthrope.

It was years before my father learned that when Grandma would babysit his kids, she would tell them all sorts of nasty stories about his life (he was a salesman, and according to Gramma, you can never trust salesmen because they’ll lie to you any chance they get… my father had been through a nasty first marriage (the woman he had been head over heels in love with walked out on him on the third day of the marriage and got an annulment)- guess who told us all the terrible (and terribly false) details of that marriage?) and say nasty things about him in general. Eventually, she degenerated to the point of making fun of us to our faces, at which point my father explained to her that she was no longer welcome in our house.

She still calls my mother every once in a while to berate and guilt-trip her for not over-ruling my father and letting gramma “back into our lives.” She seems to think that my father has ‘poisoned’ us towards her. Sigh.

Thankfully, my family only had one mother-in-law problem; my father’s mother was angelic towards my mother. To wit: shortly before they were married, my Nunny took my mother aside and said, “Charleen, you’re a wonderful girl. And if my son ever causes you any trouble, you just leave him and come live with us. We’d be happy to have you.” My father’s reaction to this was a combination of bemused and stunned… ‘They’d take you in over me, no matter what? Good Lord…’

JMCJ

“John C., it looks like you have blended in very nicely.”
-UncleBeer

7

Since I’m too lazy to write it again, here is my story:
http://www.straightdope.com/ubb/Forum4/HTML/002270.html

Things haven’t gotten any better since then, I’m sorry to report. She called the other morning to bitch at us because we haven’t sent her any new pictures of our son. Well, we don’t have any new pictures, and since she complains about the ones we do send, I no longer send her candid shots. Film and developing cost good money, ya know.

And not to be snippy, but it’s Christmas Eve and so far her son and grandson haven’t received so much as a card from her. Yeah, I know, Christmas isn’t about the presents, but nothing?

I hope you have a great Christmas dinner despite your MIL, Gr8kat. If all else fails, you could always move to a foreign country like we did. :slight_smile:

(Now I gotta learn how to post a fancy-type link…)

8

Christmas with my MIL wasn’t too bad. She had made some snotty remarks on the phone about how I wanted everyone there by 10:00 AM or so, but she didn’t think anyone would show up before noon. But, in actuality, everyone did show up between 10:00 and 11:00 and she was the one who held up the festivities by showing up at noon.

She also only thanked my husband for her Christmas presents even though I picked most of them out.

And she kept feeding my dog food off her plate even though I tried to communicate that we don’t feed him people food and also that he’s fat enough and doesn’t need her making him fatter. But everytime I looked over her way, she was giving him more of her food.

But I spent most of the afternoon hiding out in the computer room with the new toys and she had the decency to leave when everyone else left instead of hanging around all night like she did last year. So it was an OK Christmas.

“I hope life isn’t a big joke, because I don’t get it,” Jack Handy

The Kat House
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9

First off, I want to say, my MIL is not a catty she bitch self serving hellion. She is a very kind, very sweet, practical and common sense woman who would do anything for me and loves me for godknowswhatreason. I have never completely ever been comfortable with her in my life (Or my FIL for that matter.)

She’s been a housewife her entire life and has never experienced the outside world. Sure, she is an outstanding ( and I mean outstanding) seamstress, cook,gardener ( you should see her gardens!) repair person and mechanic. Truly, she is the master/mistress of her domain. ( AND she has a sizeable weight on her shoulder with my Father in Law who is paralyzed from the nipples down and all the thrills involved with him and his weekly bowel programs, pill regiments, etc. (He’s actually very & exptremely independant, but they will never have a normal ‘golden’ years together because of the worry and work involved because of him.) Any woman who’s husband is forced into premature retirement and now has him around the house 24 hours a day should be canonized as a saint.

She also is extremely gullible and wears her heart on her sleeve. ( I don’t mesh well with this.)-which is one of the reasons I think my husband married me, at least I hope, because I have a tough outer shell and don’t need constant hand holding like the other women in his life.

She tries so damn hard to please me and will go out of her way to buy me the gift that I really want, BUT, its wrong. ( One year for Xmas all I asked for were three turtlenecks - black,white,red in large ( allowing for shinkage). I received five holiday print turtlenecks (that I would never ever wear in my life) in the size of 1x. You get my drift. Close, but no cigar.)

She is also not overly intelligent. Yes, she speaks two languages and is a domestic goddess and a nice person and well liked and received. But she believes, truly believes in Old Wives Tales and crap like that. THIS is nearly unbearable for me to deal with.People who perpetuate these things, IMHO, should be pushed off a cliff.

I always wait until I show before announcing my pregnancies because 1) it makes the pregnancies go much faster for everyone involved, and 2) being innundated by OWT’s for 40 weeks is pure punishment for me.

When we announced this time around I was pregnant, it was after we’d had the ultrasound and knew we were having a girl.
( I was 20 weeks along.) I was already a little depressed about having a girl* and to hear my MIL scream (Scream? c’mon,it’s not like its your first grandchild.) with delight that we were having a girl and then say,
“You need a girl in your life. There are too many boys …(then in her next breath and it was not said with malice at all.) Now your hips will get wide and your nose fat.” Just about made me cry on the spot.

To give you another example of the lack of gray matter in her: My SIL went in for IVF on Labor Day weekend last year. Her baby was due Mid May. She delivered May 30th.( Two more days and they would have induced.) Basically, because they know the exact date of conception, she carried forty two weeks. My MIL thinks she became pregnant after the IVF naturally. She doesn’t grasp the concept that her son in laws sperm couldn’t penetrate his wifes egg and had to be injected into it in order for her daughter to even conceive. I’ve explained this to her several times, and well, it just isn’t sinking in.

  • I was depressed because the women in my life ( mom, MIL and sister in law and a couple of neighbors) that I see on a very regular basis can be lumped into three catagories: martyr, pushover and Martha Stewart wanna-be materialistic dipwad. (The neighbors are all dipwads of the highest order.)
10

My in-laws (particularly my m-i-l) didn’t really give me a hard time directly, but while we were engaged, they inflicted all their shit on my husband, including trying to talk my husband out of marrying me ON OUR WEDDING DAY! Nothing personal, apparently. His mother just didn’t want any of her sons getting married! I decided I needed to get him away from them. (Any call to them ended with a knot in my husband’s stomach. He only got a call from them for things like, “Congratulations, you forgot your father’s birthday” and “Granpa is dead.”) So little by little I helped him realize just what they were doing to him emotionally. It’s true that you can’t see the forest for the trees. The reason she never gave me shit? My husband once told me she was afraid of me. She told him, “She has a mouth and she knows how to use it.” YEAH!!! My husband agrees.

Bitch by Birth

11

Ha ha! Now I know why Shirley has never responded to my complimentary (albeit emotional) posts and e-mail.

Your post just depressed the HELL out of me.

What a sad and stereotypical view you have of women! We are not perfect and have each fallen into all of your categories at one time or another. Personally, I try to just be me.

Bottom line? You have the control here, Shirley. Your girl will grow up to be amazing, intelligent and fun. You will love her just as much as you love your son.

Happy Fuckin’ New Year

12

Canthearya, ummm, I’ve never received any emails from you. But, that is neither here nor there. Hey, didn’t some chipper therapist once say that Shared Pain in lessened? or some kind of crap like that?

I didn’t realize that my sole job here was to blow sunshine up your ass. This is the BBQ Pit and we were discussing the happy subject of In Laws. You can chose your mate, but not your inlaws, it’s one of the most brutal lessons you learn in life after the fact. This place is for venting. And that is what I did. Pardon me for what you call generalizing. You haven’t walked in my shoes or seen things I have ( and vice versa)etc and ad nauseum, to know how I feel about this.

It is my opinion and this being the land of Free Speech and Prozac, you are allowed to not like it as long as you assemble peaceable with a lock on your registered semi-automatic weapon.

13

Canthearya, I know I will love my daughter as much as my son. I never thought I would love my son as much as I love chocolate… :slight_smile:

I know my daughter will be amazing. That’s if she does not inherit the dipwad gene from my mother in law and sister in law. (When you marry your spouse, you marry into their gene pool. It’s one of the risks you take when you say “I do”.)

If she cries when any dares challenge her ideas rather than stand up for what she beleives in, she is a dipwad. Part genetics and part my fault for slacking off. If she stands there and stares her opponent down without blinking and systematically crushes their argument, then I know she takes after her mama and is ready for kindergarten :slight_smile:

14

Hate to do the double post thing, so please check out “The Anti-Woman” thread for my response to Shirley’s response to my response.

What?

15

Hey, Shirley, I invite you to push my mom over a cliff.

A stronger, more courageous woman I have never met. But educated, very much not.

She grew up in Korea, in poverty, in the middle of a freakin’ war with no hope of any education, no hope of anything but precious life.

Is she superstitious, yes. Does she believe in Old Wive’s Tales, of course. I sometimes correct her. She once told me if I don’t eat enough rice, I would become physically weak. I replied with, “So, that’s why the USA soccer team can kick South Korea’s ass, cause everyone knows Americans eat far more rice than Koreans do.” She got a good laugh out of that. Most of the stuff she tells me, I just take it with a nod, because I know the hardships she has gone through just to raise me as a middle class prep school boy.

Okay, :::with tears in his eyes, restrains himself from entering into another drunken mommathon:::

So, Shirley, all uneducated women are of no use in society and should die, is that it?

There’s always another beer.

16

Okay, Shirley, call me a dipwad if you want, but:

I have absolutely no idea what your mother-in-law meant by your nose getting fat!

17

[disclaimer]
This is a rant. It has only tangential association to the previous posts on this thread. Deal with it. My whiskey bottle is empty and this is the result.
[/disclaimer]
I despise my mother-in-law. I posess inexhaustable amounts of bile and vitriol that I long to spew in her astonished face as I sytematically and joyously dismember every shred of delusional self-respect that she retains.

I will never do this.

I cannot in good conscience (even now, damnit – how much alcohol does it take?) disclose the reasons for my vehemence. My wife was abused, in ways I cannot begin to describe properly. Her sister suffered similarly. The initial perpetrator(s) are now dead. My mother-in-law added a decade more of emotional abuse, guilt and degredation onto the inhuman burden that these girls already bore.

I have spent years in which th ewoman I love more than myself will wake screaming at my touch. I have held and let go and cried with and been strong for and stood helplessly while a woman with more strength, intelligence and integrity than anyone else I know was reduced to incoherent, inconsolable hysteria.

I have watched while her mother undermined each step my wife made towards pride and independence and healing.

It has been a long time since my wife woke screaming, though I sometimes find her curled on the couch because the nightmares drove her from our bed. I do not remember the last time she shrank from my touch. For several years now, she has been trying to rebuild her relationship with her mother, to salvage some connection to the only parent she has left. And I support her in this, as much as I am able. I understand that she needs this, though I fear I will never understand why.

So I swallow my bile. I choke down the rage. I have never, and I hope will never, been anything other than polite to my mother-in-law, truly polite–not just the thin facade that everyone knows masks contempt. I shield my feelings from my wife, to whatever extent I can. She has far more right to this decision than I. I hide my feelings from the one person with whom I can share anything, and I hate my mother-in-law for this, too, even though it is my choice.

Fuck!

The best lack all conviction
The worst are full of passionate intensity.
*

18

Beeruser, I don’t think my mother in law should die. I never said those words. In fact re-reading my posting, I didn’t think I gave that impression and I still don’t. She is brilliant with my son and a genuinely kind lady, but having a conversation with her is hard. I admire this woman greatly in many many many catagories ( my father in law too) but conversational skills are not one of them.I cannot be the only person in the universe that has a difficult time conversing with my inlaws.

She’s also suffered a head injury that if she does not take her prozac on a regular basis, makes for one weepy or melancholic person. Regretfully, she is patient non-compliant and sometimes it is very hard to handle.She is adamant about my FIL and his pill regime, but not herself.

Allow me to give you a quote that not so long ago I had to deal with when she wasn’t on her Prozac, " I dunno. Sometimes I just cry and cry and cry. I think it’s the rain that causes it." Instead of me saying, " Hello, it’s a head injury and your brains inability to produce seratonin ( or melatonin, I forget) you have to take your drugs daily to regulate them. Not just take them until you feel better and STOP. ( as she does) ) " No, what I say is, " When was the last time you took your pills?" and the usual answer is,
“I’ve felt fine,but stopped three days ago.” etc…

If it weren’t for me telling and insisting to hubby and his sister that something was seriously wrong with their mom other than the usual depression after such a catastrophic accident, she would still be a continual weepy mess instead of once in a great while.
She doesn’t get the correlation between being happy=on drugs and being weepy=off drugs.There you have a big chunk of the crux right there.

BUT in happy news, my FIL called his insurance company to advise them that it is time for them to buy him a new handicapped equipped van. His has something like 150k on it and he keeps his cars meticulously maintained.I don’t think there is any rust on the body, but the engine and transmission are starting to go because of the extra weight of his lift. The only visual flaw of note is someone bent and subsequently broke off his antenee, and rather than pay X amount for the goons down at the dealership to do the repair work on it, he replaced it his antenne with an old baseball trophy. It is an absolute scream to see. It’s actually hardly noticable until you walk by the van, then go " What the?" See, Germans do have a sense of humor.

The insurance lady who took the call was like, " What? Did we buy it for you in the first place?" Oh yes, you guys did and he explained briefly the situation. It’s been since 1992 or maybe 93 since they relented and gave him the van, so his file is probably buried in the archives. Although his file is about three inches thick, so it can’t be that dormant.

The rest of the family was grinning ear to ear from this exchange.You will never win an argument with my FIL where something like this is involved. He might not remember day to day stuff (never did.), but when it comes to construction or who-owes-him-something, he has a mind like a zip drive. And by god, he will collect and drive the collectee NUTS in the process. He remembers every minute detail.

We all foresee a long winded battle of who can be more stubborn and who will remember what and after months of headbanging, my FIL will win. GOD. that is the best part, when he makes them eat crow, the goddamn vultures.
I’ve learned a great deal about negotiating, staring down your opponent and never letting go of the facts that you keep bringing up, bringing up, bringing up that the other guy wants to avoid. He’s like a dog with a frisbee, he won’t let go. It’s the greatest thing I’ve witnessed in real life. It should be an Olympic event, as far as I’m concerned.

Everyone else who has witnessed a Gold Metal Event btw my FIL and his opponent, almost, but not quite, feels sorry for the schmuck going against him.