For pete’s sake, she’s the child’s grandmother, not some stranger. If this is truly your definition of “things are ugly” then I’d say you are very, very lucky.
Cleaning up dog vomit gives you an automatic pass to be a little cranky, IMO. Instead of having your husband “talk” to his mother, he should have gone in and given her a hug. One, because she was having a bad day. And two because the three of you have been living rent free in her home for over a year.
If my daughter was upset, I would have explained to her that sometimes people get grumpy and say things in the heat of the moment. Then I would have shrugged and gone back to watching Emeril. Making a big deal out of it gives it a significance it doesn’t deserve.
I didn’t say they were acting like children. I said they’re grown-ups now whether they like it or not. And they’re grown-ups because they’re parents. I also didn’t say they’d failed their child. But they may have, or they may in the future. The poster leaves much out of the original post, and that was a choice of the poster. But two adults, who have self-declared that their venture into adulthood has failed, have moved back into a parental house, bringing their own child with them. Having grandma say ‘shut up’ is, again, not really as important as the parents becoming independent adults raising by whatever means possible.
No, it doesn’t excuse her behavior. But if the parents are concerned, they have two choices, at least. One—they can brace grandma and insist that she not use that language again with their child. I foresee problems with this stategies, not the least of which is “my house, my rules.” Two—they can get the hell out of there by whatever means necessary and make their own home, own rules. Grandma can visit.
Personally I think the MIL in this situation is a saint. My parents wouldn’t have allowed me to live there with my wife and kids for over a YEAR.
My parents have always been very supportive of me and helpful in whatever way they could be. But they’d probably tell me I need to find somewhere else to live after a year’s time. And I think a lot of parents would do the same.
I also wonder if the MIL is just cranky at having her kids in her house for over a year, after she thought she’d moved them out. Now she has semi-permanent houseguests, more or less.
How old is the kid, by the way? Maybe the MIL is just tired of having to do it all over again?
And I do agree that “her house, her rules” isn’t necessarily an excuse for a long pattern of rude or hateful behavior. But yeah, having 3 people living in your house for over a year, one of them a kid (even the nicest, best behaved kid in the world can be pretty annoying at times, maybe as parents this is hard to acknowledge but it’s the truth) gives a bit of license for the occasional angry outburst in my opinion.
So while I defend fully the right of the MIL to have her moments of anger (and I can’t even say for sure this was necessarily even a bad “moment” it’s not polite to sit there and ask snotty questions about the way someone is doing an unpleasant task) if she had a serious problem with people living in her house, she should’ve just said up front that it wasn’t going to happen.
Well, there have been some fairly presumptuous posts in this thread. I, for one, wasn’t expecting so many accusations and assumptions. For God’s sake, you people don’t even know me or my circumstances. Harborwolf and I aren’t some lazy freeloaders. We work, I go to college, we pay our own bills, we buy our own groceries, we do our own laundry, and we take responsibilities for our own issues. Just because we moved in with a relative, who actually ASKED us to come back, doesn’t make us losers or immature. When I mentioned a “failed venture into adulthood”, it was more hyperbole than straight-up fact. We haven’t given up and come home to mother, if that’s what you think. There is so much more to this story than I will ever post, that you all should be ashamed of yourselves for assuming anything about me, my parenting, or my life.
I hate to hijack my own thread, but my only issue was a child’s grandmother saying “shut up” to her. I don’t know what kind of households you people grew up in, but in my opinion and upbringing, that is unacceptable talk. It’s terribly rude and disrespectful for a child to say it to a parent, and I think the same goes for the other way around.
My parents told me to shut up all the time when I was a kid. Didn’t faze me. The kid’s going to have people telling her to shut up all her life, and I don’t see what is to be gained from keeping her in a bubble for eighteen years. I think seeing people’s normal responses to frustrating events is a lot more educational than saying “oh, precious, I’m just cleaning up Doggie’s mouth presents.” She ain’t gonna be sheltered forever. Real world, it sucks, et cetera.
Other posters have already summed up my opinion of the living situation, so I don’t need to go there.
Give me a break! Expecting basic courtesy is keeping my child in a bubble? I think not. Seriously. Real world sucks, huh? Maybe I should start shoving her down the stairs, calling her an idiot, and laughing at her when she makes mistakes. Gotta prepare her, right?
Yeah I know. I guess since you get to selectively include parts of your life in the story, we just have to agree with you or anyone else in ANY situation they tell us about their own life, simply because we don’t have THE ENTIRE STORY about your ENTIRE life.
If that’s the caveat to any story someone posts about an event that happens in their own life, then I think it’d be best if people on this forum just stopped posting stories about their life period. There’s no point in doing it if the standard operating procedure is just going to be OP = right always in threads of that nature.
Anyways, your daughter should have “shut up” it’s annoying to the extreme to have someone questioning you about how you’re going about a household task. How much do you like it when you’re doing something, and someone leans behind you and starts make snarky comments about the way you are doing it? My response to those situations has always been “unless you want to do it, just shut up.” Although I may say “be quiet” to a kid, if I got annoyed enough I wouldn’t. And I wouldn’t “apologize for it either” because it’s really not a big deal.
Also I notice you mentioned the “battle for power.” Well, there shouldn’t be battles for power. You should be very happy about the fact you can live there, and accept you don’t get or deserve power in a house that is not yours.
Of course the thing that’s problematic with any thread like this is we only get one side of the story, and you’re sure as hell not going to give us a fair and impartial account of your own actions, you’re only going to give us an account that is biased towards you being right.
And all the chores/etc you do is really meaningless. Your MIL lived without you before you moved in, and she’ll live without you when you move out. You don’t provide any service in that house that she couldn’t live without, because she’s lived without it before.
Dude, she didn’t call your daughter a retarded shithead who has no excuse to live. She didn’t physically harm your daughter. Telling someone to shut up is a pretty weak statement, and it makes sense considering the circumstances. If I’ve had a hard day at work and have to come home to an overstuffed house and my dog vomits all over the floor and some punk kid asks me what I’m doing, sure I might tell them to shut up. I’m a human being, as liable to lash out as anyone else, and as entitled. Respect be damned; from what I’m reading you’re the one who’s not respecting your overworked, stressed-out MIL, who loves you so much that she puts a roof over your head and keeps your floors vomit-free. She’s the one who needs support right now, not a kid who’s going to let this comment roll right off her back as long as she doesn’t have people telling her what a big deal “shut up” is, which she unfortunately does.
If you just want to rant and don’t want constructive responses, get a Livejournal and screen your comments.
When I was a kid, even a stranger could berate a child. These days, they’d get sued, of course.
Yep. Her house, her rules. I’d have no problem with my 70 year-old mother telling my 7 year-old stepson to shut up. Ten times his age - she’s got the right. If she did it all the time, or when the poor kid had done something very minor, then maybe that’s a diffrent story, but I don’t think she’d take kindly to having a child question her like that.
Yep, I’ve always felt that if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen. Anytime you put a personal story or situation from your life out on the internet, you need to realize some people may not take your side. And the cop out that “you don’t know us, you can’t criticise this situation” really isn’t acceptable. You get to decide how much you put out there, we can only be expected to base our responses off of the information at hand. If you want to add something more to clarify things, that’s up to you.
This sort of reminds me of that BBQ pit thread awhile back when a poster pitted her neighbors because several of her cats died. The thread basically became a train-wreck for her because everyone who posted felt that the OP had basically mistreated her cats repeatedly, and that’s why they were put into situations where they would be killed by their neighbor’s dog. The OP got highly upset and had some sort of melt down in the thread.
Basically it’s just a lesson, if you put a personal situation out there, don’t expect everyone on the forum to just say “yes, you are completely right in this situation and whatever you do in response is okay.” Because you’re inviting the opinions of others when you post on a forum like this, and people have different opinions on different situations.
I grew up in a house where telling someone to shut up was rude and not done (the only time I had my mouth washed out with soap was for telling my sister to shut up), and I don’t use it to this day. I would be quite offended at someone telling me to shut up. Some of you may not realize that there are people in the world who conduct themselves differently than you.
Does your mother-in-law share your opinions of telling people to shut up, alias? I do realize that most people don’t find it as offensive as I do, given my upbringing.
Maybe you should ask to have this thread closed, if you’re having second thoughts about airing your dirty laundry in public and you’re not liking the criticism it’s getting.
I also agree with everyone who said that being told to “shut up”, regardless of your personal feelings toward the phrase, is really not such a big deal. Perhaps, like you say, there really is more to the story. Maybe your MIL is a raging, psychotic bitch. Maybe she beats your daughter. Maybe she invites hookers with blow into her home every Sunday, and your daughter witnesses copious amounts of drug use and sex and, really, “shut up” was just the straw that broke the camel’s back, so that’s the thing you posted about.
But we’ll never know that, will we? And so, with the information you’ve provided, I will say that I think it’s mighty shitty of you to get so bent out of shape over a very minor incident that your daughter probably will never remember.
What color is the sky in your world?
Wouldn’t it be nice if life were actually that simple? The OP stated the couple was trying to save up enough money to move out. Should they have to choose between putting up with crap like that and living in a homeless shelter? Just because it is someone else’s house doesn’t mean they can treat your kids how THEY want.
I was practically raised by my grandparents up until 13 or so, and I’ve always felt slightly “wrong” for saying shut up in any situation because of it. They were very anti-shut up, and saying it was a big no-no in their house. So yeah, I do know what it’s like to sort of be institutionalized against using the phrase.
But I grew out of it, using any type of profanity was also verboten when I was growing up. But if the situation calls for it I don’t shirk away from throwing around a few four letter words.
As it is, I think if someone doesn’t want to use the phrase shut up, that’s fine. And I also think if that’s how you want to raise you kids, fine. But accept that in society, you do need to play by society’s rules to some degree. And at large society doesn’t hold shut up to really be that inappropriate. So while you can tell yours to refrain from using it, you have no right to get bent out of shape if someone else uses it towards them if it’s a situation that warrants some type of remark. I do think it’s rude and pretty snotty to ask someone “hey why are you using that spatula” when they’re sitting there cleaning up vomit. DO realize this isn’t exactly a good time for the person in question and they aren’t in the mood to be quizzed on why they’re doing something the way they’re doing it. Sure, grandmother could have said, “Listen, I’m in no mood to answer questions right now, just leave me alone and let me clean this up.” But to some people that would be just as rude as saying “shut up.” I think it’s a fairly minor issue either way, and the OP basically seems to ignore the fact that grandmother was probably in a pretty bad mood about having to clean up dog vomit, give her a break is what I’m saying.
Yeah, but if I have people LIVING in my house, if their kid does something I don’t like I’m going to tell them I quit. To some people that’d be “crossing a line” but not to me. I won’t presume to “raise your child for you” just because you’re living under my roof, but it IS my house, my belongings, and I WON’T have some kid doing something in my hosue I don’t want them to be doing. And if the parents don’t like it, then pack the bags and head out to the Holiday Inn.
Just because it’s a “kid” doesn’t mean they get to do WHATEVER they want unless their parents tell them different. This is the kind of attitude that creates bad children in school, the kids that tell the teacher to sod off because THEY’RE not mom or dad so they shouldn’t be telling me what to do.
When I grew up kids were expected to respect adult direction whether it came from mom and dad, a teacher, or anyone else who might be in position to give said direction.
This reminds me of a Super Bowl a few year’s back. I typically have a small gathering at my place with 4-5 people. One year one of the guy’s asks if it’s okay for his wife kids to come. I was a little wary of having kids over, but I said “alright, but seriously you need to make she he’s not running around breaking stuff, this house isn’t really a good place for kids that age.” And it really isn’t, this house is by no means a “kid safe” home. I have very expensive and breakable items displayed throughout my home, and one rampaging kid could destroy all of it in pretty short order.
Anyways long story short, kids come over, get out of hand and I yell at them to cut it out. The kids look scared and taken aback, the wife looks offended, and the dad looks a little embarassed. Basically I didn’t care, I let the youngsters get a little out of hand and waited for the parents to say anything, but I wasn’t going to wait for something to get broken before I stepped in.
