Heard this being talked about
Just wondering if anyone has any bad experiences in this area.
The first time I took my soon-to-be-hubby home to meet my mother, she asked him if he could look at a leaky faucet in her bathroom. My intended was a scientist and good at many things, but plumbing wasn’t one of them. Because he wanted to impress his prospective MIL, he gave it a go, promptly making a complete disaster of a leak from what had been a drippy faucet. We wound up having to call in a plumber to fix the mess, at weekend rates. My mother thought it was all quite funny, but future hubby was terribly embarrassed.
If you don’t mind, I’ll come at this from the parents’ perspective…
Monday night my daughter brought her boyfriend home to meet us. After dinner we were all sitting around talking when the dog got involved with a skunk. And it was a reasonable temperature evening after WEEKS of hot and sticky so the whole house was open. Skunk + dog + open window in a side-split (window right a ground level) = stink! The whole time we’re rounding up the dog and dealing with the situation I’m thinking, “Well, aren’t WE making a great impression…” 
House still has a residual eau de Pepe le Pew… Blergh…
When cwPartner’s parents came to visit for the first time (also the first time I met them), my cat hopped on my MIL’s lap - and bit her.
My college girlfriend moved back home for summer, a six hour drive away. We next planned to meet when I would travel to her hometown to accompany her to her friends’ wedding.
After getting a morning start I arrived in mid afternoon and drove to my girlfriend’s house. Her mother answered the door, my first opportunity to meet her, and had me wait on the porch until my girlfriend could come down.
I should have recognized it as an omen. Not once the entire weekend I was in their city was I allowed to set foot in their home.
The first time I met my future MIL, the three of us had dinner at a nice restaurant and she paid. Afterwards, I sent her an email to say thank you. Her name is Mary Jo. But instead of typing “Dear Mary Jo” I accidentally typed “Dear Mary Ho” and didn’t catch the typo before I sent it.
Luckily she thought it was funny, and still gives me shit about it to this day.
Back in my early 30s, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I met my date’s parents in the ER while he vomited behind a curtain from the morphine he was given after breaking both his tibia and his fibula as he twisted his ankle against a rollerblade boot in his attempt to keep from falling. It was our first date and his 32nd birthday, I was in pigtails and a leather jacket, somewhat tarted up an unaware he’d lied to his parents to get our of a birthday dinner w/ them to see me.
His mother never forgave me for putting her son in such a position.
When I met my wife’s-to-be parents at first, it was at their house for the weekend. She was 21 at the time, so the ten-question quiz they gave me (yes, on paper) with questions about my intentions toward their daughter, my driving speed, my employment, etc., was just the eensiest bit weird. It was one of those, “Ha, ha, aren’t we funny! now fill it out” things. I figured it wasn’t the time to raise a stink and answered every question the way they wanted.
Indeed I was a great guest, and just before we left I was washing dishes at the kitchen sink. I scrubbed the inside of one glass a little too hard, and it snapped, and the jagged edge cut into my thumb like a knife blade. Blood everywhere.
I’m…not good with blood.
The visit took a detour to the floor, where I lay on pillows trying not to faint while they bandaged me up enough that I could get home. I still have the scar.
Note, Ivylad and I have been married twenty six years, been together for nearly thirty.
His sisters STILL bring this up.
I’m meeting his parents for the first time. His father mentions he’s a huge Ohio State football fan. Goes on and on.
Me, trying to be cute, retorts, “Oh yeah? If they’re so good how come they’ve never been to the Super Bowl?”
:smack::o
I was dating this young woman and she decided she wanted to spend the night with me. I went to her house; her mother was there. She introduced me and I said “hi” and we left.
The next morning, I got a phone call from my boss. Her mother had called my place of business and demanded to know what I had done with her daughter. He told me to call. I handed the phone to the daughter and said “Call your mother. Now.”
Turns out she hadn’t told her mother she was staying (or, evidently, anything about me but where I worked).
It did not get things off on the right foot. :rolleyes: I also was pretty aloof for awhile, too embarrassed about the incident to face her, though she got over it pretty quickly and things were fine from then on.
“Check out my new scope on my .30-'06! Why last fall I killt the biggest buck I ever seen, over six foot, 'bout 200lbs!”
“Jeez, that’s as big as I am!”
:glare:
The night the former Mr Kitty met my parents, we picked up Chinese food and brought it back to the house. Mom is one of those “I’m just going to have a bite of what’s on your plate” people, and FMK was one of those “do NOT touch my plate” people. She reached for his plate, he gave one warning, she kept reaching, he stabbed her in the hand hard enough to draw blood.
Worked out OK for him; she always liked him better than she liked me.
My former brother-in-law brought home his third wife to meet his parents. When they arrived she stayed back until her soon-to-be mother-in-law told her come in. And when she finally stepped forward, new MIL said, “Oh my, you’re much prettier than the first two.”
I’d thought of myself as a confirmed old bachelor but when I asked to meet my girlfriend’s father, she said visiting her village was contingent on immediate marriage. I said “Why not?” so we raced to buy wedding clothes, etc. and I met my FIL the day before the wedding. I’m sure the village was shocked to find their best eligible maiden suddenly marrying a foreigner!
My father referred to me as มัน \man, the pronoun for “it.” Bernard Trink, self-appointed Herb Caen of Bangkok, had written columns warning to watch out for this disrespectful pronoun. That would have been a deal-breaker … except that I had enough experience to know rural Thai diction is not the same as middle-class Bangkok diction. And indeed my FIL also referred to all his children and his other son-in-law as มัน.
My late FIL and I ended up loving each other very much. As for his lovely-in-many-ways daughter and I, with a child soon to graduate from University, “till death do us part” is a pretty safe bet.
I plugged my mother-in-law’s toilet the first time we went to visit her.
Going to the junior prom with a girl from school. I picked up my date wearing a powder blue tux. Had my longish hair stuffed into the jacket just to be safe. Spent 10 minutes listening to her parents tell me the evils of pre marital sex. They knew what they were talking about, my date was conceived in the back of a '48 Chevy station wagon. As we got ready to leave, we walked outside only to find parked in their driveway, my '66 Chevy station wagon. We went to the prom in her father’s new Volvo sedan.
When we met her mother, my wife had not told her that she was bringing me to Taiwan specifically to meet her before we got married,
Things went as you can image. Actually, the funniest thing was that the first question my MIL had was what were we going to do with my wife’s refrigerator. I seems that my wife had also not told her that she had broken up with her previous live-in boyfriend of seven years. My MIL couldn’t process all of this new information at once, and thought we were immediately leaving for America.
I’ve since learned the reason my wife doesn’t share much with her mother, and that the universe is a lot more peaceful if divided in two between MIL and I. We just don’t attempt to be in the same part of the world at the same time.
My boyfriend brought me home to meet his parents over a long weekend. They took me to church (which I never attend), and I spent most of the service clenching my back teeth because I was feeling nauseated for some reason. Then they took me out to brunch (with mimosas!), and his father insisted on me tasting his crab cake. I took one bite, then stood up and ran for the bathroom, which was upstairs. I didn’t make it - throwing up on the landing - and then again in the sink before I could get to the stall.
I spent the rest of the weekend in bed being nursed through stomach flu. Not the way to make the best impression.
Golf Clap
My worst? I was inside the living room for less than 3 minutes before being handed a .44 Magnum by her brother to admire.
I said it was nice, handed it back, an made a note to mention to her father when I saw him that his son had his gun cabinet keys & was an Idiot.
Her father came in later, I shook his hand, and when he and I had a moment, I mentioned to him the whole .44 Magnum thing.
He opened the cabinet, put the revolver back, and then while the drawer was open, handed me a 1911 .45 to admire. :smack:
To my credit, I opened cylinder on the revolver to make sure it was empty & handed it back the same way… and I dropped the clip from the 1911 before racking the slide to make sure it was empty and handed it back with the breach clearly open & empty.
“When you meet my dad, say ‘Assalam Aleikum’. It’s our traditional greeting.”
Me: “Assalam Aleikum”
Her Dad, stone-faced: “I’m an atheist.”
He ended up liking me later, though.