Mention both something you like and something you dislike about them. I don’t want a dedicated in-law-bashing thread.
I’m thinking in-laws as the whole family (or side of the family), not one particular individual.
As for me:
Most dislike: my mother-in-law’s family are self-proclaimed wacky southern women in the Ya-Ya Sisterhood vein. They interrupt in conversations all the time, they live ramshackle lives but complain about the chaos, and generally get nutty. They’re all fine one on one, actually, but get 'em in a group and watch the fireworks! Then take an aspirin.
Most like: they’re great cheerleaders. My family is much more reserved about praise, which generally suits my temperment. But sometimes it’s really cool to have people tell you that they support whatever you’re doing, that you’re great, that the latest project you were working on is great, and that you’re a wonderful human being. My parents believe most of that stuff, but they don’t articulate it often. Both my mother- and father-in-law do it a lot.
What I like best about my in-laws is they have a pretty ordered life. My husband’s parents are still together, unlike mine. Although they recently moved into a senior condo, they raised my husband and his brother in one home - a nice, attractive, clean home. They are also very, very generous and remain that way even though we’ve ignored any strings that may have been attached to that generosity.
What I dislike is that my mother-in-law will get some stupid idea and be like a dog with a bone about it. I also dislike that my father-in-law will get upset about some minor slight and try to blame my mother-in-law. He also has a fantasy about family closeness that is not too realistic and is a little funny about holidays. But, my husband and I live in a different state and, at most, it’s a minor annoyance.
I think what I like about them is more important than what I don’t. They’re good people.
Dislike: No matter how hard I try, my mother-in-law does not like me. Ignores my existence whenever possible. Has asked DeHusband to not bring me to see her.
Like: That she lives 1400 miles away. And she raised a damn fine son.
Like: They’re very supportive about the decisions the SO and I make and they are very loving and accepting of me. They’re very considerate people and are always willing to help people out.
Dislike: I wish they were more (financially) supportive of their son’s education. I think it’s just the differences between our cultures, but I’m used to parents taking care of their children, but the children also help out where they can. The SO’s parents think that once you reach 18, you should be totally independent.
Even though I disagree with them, they’re the best in-laws you could ever have!
Least: They’re poorly-educated, ultra-conservative Polish Catholic rural Wisconsin dairy farmers who would rather have a convicted child molestor as a son-in-law than an unwed daughter trying to raise two kids without a father around.
Most: I don’t think they know where we live, exactly. We moved three times in two years and didn’t tell them about any of them and I think we gave them the slip.
Like: they are very willing to make themselves available for sitting. And when the kids were much smaller, they would run to the pharmacy with the prescriptions so I wouldn’t have to wait for an Rx with a vomitting baby etc. Invaluable and most appreciated.
Dislikes: many and varied. It took them over 10 years to see us as a separate entity that did not answer to them. Also, my MIL flies into rages that are really ridiculous–it’s her way or the highway. FIL is a dedicated rabid Nixon Republican who fears for the grandkids because liberal ole me is in charge… :rolleyes:
Most: Difficult to think of anything. They leave us alone, mostly. That’s good.
Least: They’re racist and they shout. I know that the former should be much more important than the latter, but the shouting thing, man, it gets to me. All of them are very hard of hearing but refuse to get hearing aids. The house vibrates from the noise of their TVs.
Least: they help out everyone, including the two kids of theirs that swim only in the shallow end of the gene pool (I think they blew all the good genetics on my husband, personally).
Like: I am very lucky in my in-laws, I think. They love me and always have, and are thrilled that I married their son. They are supportive of our decisions–at least, we have not yet been given Barbies even though my MIL thinks my Barbie ban is weird, and they think homeschooling, which we’ve decided to do, is a good idea. They are pretty cheery people and they don’t undermine our kids or play weird psycho games or anything.
Dislike: They also drive me a little crazy. My FIL–a good man on the whole–is hard to live with, for many reasons. He has a knack for being tactless or talking forever about a subject you really don’t want to hear about (like, he cornered my vegetarian SIL on the other side and talked at her about hunting, of all things, for an hour). The way I put it is that he takes up a lot of psychic space–when he’s in the room you feel like the room is too small. My MIL wants so much to give us gifts, because she never could when her kids were little, but this means that we’re inundated with stuff we don’t want and she can’t afford anyway. They aren’t too good with money. The house is so cluttered we can’t go there any more–we go to my BILs place and they come there. I would love to help clean it up but so far no progress there. But, oh well, it could be so much worse that I’m grateful.
Like: After the initial shock of an older man from another country wanting to marry their daughter, they’ve been very good to me. They’ve driven several hundred miles to help us move, twice. FIL gave me a bunch of lawn and garden tools when we got our house. They send us money on birthdays and anniversaries, and Christmas. I make their little girl happy, and they like and respect me for it, and treat me like family.
Dislike: If I come up with one, I’ll let you know.
Like: They give great, thoughtful gifts and are very generous with their love (they adopt retired racing greyhounds). They are funny and smart and invite me to all their family functions. They’ve accepted me from day one.
Dislike: They can be quite harsh, especially if they feel they’ve been slighted in any way. The vitriol is amazing sometimes.
Like:
They have pretty much accepted me and NEVER bring up the fact that I am a foreigner, or criticize the kids for speaking English with me.
MIL in times past has helped out for long stints at her expense - a month when my first kid was born, three months or more when I was in hospital pregnant with the second kid, a month while I had eye surgery on both eyes and couldn’t lift the kids, and a couple weeks when I had appendicitis.
Now we live in the same small town, FIL will drop by several times a week for a chat, a quick play with the kids and then goes off again. I like that. They also gave us enough money when buying our house that we could double the size of plot that we were planning to buy. I am VERY grateful for that.
Dislikes:
MIL in particular fills the kids full of sugar and never disciplines them.
Can NOT understand my older boy’s allergies and thinks “just a little bit, so you can learn to get used to it.”
Buys very expensive snake oil type medicines to cure said kid’s asthma, eczema and allergies, and is miffed when I won’t let him take them (God knows what’s in them!)
But the worst thing of all is that she likes the older boy (The Heir) much better than the younger one, and the kids are now old enough to realise that… FIL I have few problems with - he just sees us or doesn’t and rarely comments on what we do.
On the whole, I like them more than I dislike them, and we get on fairly well.
This is like therapy for me (or maybe that should be :o ) because I am having a lot of hassles with them right now.
The thing that drives me the most crazy is that they are very into group activities – when we are on vacation, we have to do EVERYTHING as a group. We’re talking about 30 people on a family reunion vacation. They get very offended if I attempt to do something a little bit different, say for example reading a book by the pool while they are in the casino. Please note I do not gamble myself, so being “with them” in the casino means standing around in their approximate line of sight for upwards of six hours. Maddening. Also, they are the most unorganized people ever – EVERYONE must eat dinner TOGETHER, yet they mess up the reservations, and the meeting location, and the meeting time. On several occasions, the restaurant has closed while they were trying to get their act together, leaving me hiding in the parking lot, searching my purse for linty tic-tacs that might be lurking around on the bottom. At least we will starve TOGETHER, I guess.
Deep breath.
Despite all that, they are very kind, sweet loving people who accepted me as part of the family, practically sight unseen (and continue to lavish attention on me even after seeing me . As an extended family, they are affectionate and easy to get along with. One thing that is not really related to me, but impressed me very much is the way they treat my BIL’s stepdaughter. They have made her a complete part of the family, brag about her, have her artwork hanging up all over the place, never refer to her as a “step” anything. She is just like all the other grandchildren in their eyes. And for all that the unorganized “togetherness” gets on my nerves, it really does speak to how highly they value their family ties.
Dislike: They’re fundies of the ‘we’ve never read the Bible, but we sure love to beat it, and if you’re not just like we are, we hope you go straight to Hell’ variety. Extremely judgmental, especially MIL. She’d be right at home among Fred Phelps’ merry band of psychos. FIL thinks he knows everything about everything, and if he doesn’t know something, he’ll make it up, and won’t accept the correct information.
Like: They live halfway across the country and refuse to fly, so it’s up to us to go to them. This means I’ve only had to see them twice in the last 10 years. Their example of how not to live made DH who he is, so I guess I have to give them credit for that.
Dislike: My brother’s wife–not very bright, quite the scatterbrain, flaky, changes her plans every five seconds and throws everyone else’s schedule into chaos, expects me to proofread her research papers for free (and in a hurry and late at night, via email), has a bit of a mean streak, spends money like crazy, treated her kids like adults when they were little and now treats them like babies though they’re teenagers, picks on my brother a lot despite all that he does for her and all of the crap he puts up with from her. My dad never liked her and my mom is increasingly disgusted.
Like: she lives over an hour away and it’s not an easy drive, so the folks and I don’t have to see her that much. (Of course, that means we don’t get to see bro and kids that much either, which isn’t so good.)
My cousin’s in-laws (I mention them only because I spent a lot of time in her home helping to take care of my aunt and uncle before they passed, and sometimes her husband’s family would show up):
Dislike: They are uppity, hoity toity and just plain snobbish. At family gatherings they either ignore us or speak to us briefly only because they feel obligated to do so. They pay attention to their grandchildren when they are born and then seem to forget them as the kids get older.
OK, not all of them, but his parents and the one sister he says I would have liked. The three of them all died of cancer within a span of five years. Not a fun time in Mr. S’s life, and it was just before I met him. I missed his dad by about three months, and apparently I didn’t miss much – he was a bitter, raging alcoholic and apparently to say that he was unpleasant to be around would be an understatement.
Mr. S is the youngest of seven siblings. Most of them have their own families and grandkids by now, so we don’t interact with them much. One brother lives “next door” (as much as that applies in the country), one lives across the country, and one he can’t stand and talks to about once every ten years, if he bumps into him. The two surviving sisters pretty much keep to themselves; one married VERY badly, twice, so we don’t mind steering clear of her; the other is mousy quiet but Mr. S actually keeps in touch with her now and then.
Like: I dunno, that they pretty much leave us alone?
Dislike: Well, since we don’t really interact, there’s not much here. I do have a regret, though: my mother-in-law (gee, seems weird to say that, since I never knew her) had a very hard life, and I’m sorry that she didn’t survive long enough for us to be able to treat her (to dinner, concerts, etc.) the way she deserved. (Mr. S wasn’t really in a position to do so while she was alive.) She died first, and her husband was the source of much of her sorrow. She should have had at least a few years of peace. And I would have loved to send her flowers on Mr. S’s birthday to thank her for raising a fine man to be my husband. sniff
Likes: They can be generous with their money, i.e. making us a loan to pay for a new roof, donating to us two old family cars, and most importantly, giving us $5000 to defray the considerable expenses of our second daughter’s birth and subsequent hospitalization. They give some money each year to charity, including once to the public library where I work. They genuinely love their kids and grandkids.
Dislikes: Despite the fact that I married their son and have been a constant presence in their lives for 13 1/2 years, they have never loved me nor treated me like family. They do stupid things when taking care of my children, like occasionally omitting to use their carseats/boosters and making poor medically-oriented decisions about them. They can be surprisingly selfish and nasty about small things, like refusing to allow my husband to keep a Monopoly game of his deceased grandparents’ “because the estate man said it might be worth some money.” (The game sold for $4.00). My mother-in-law says amazingly nasty and inappropriate things when she’s nervous, like deriding one of my bridesmaids as a “dog” to all the groomsmen/ushers, loudly and with said bridesmaid nearby, at the rehearsal dinner. They are rabid atheists and make rude and nasty comments in my presence about people who believe in God; I am one of those people, myself. My in-laws also spend far less time with the grandkids than they used to, seeing them perhaps once every three to four months and choosing to spend at least one weekend per month at the Tunica casinos instead. They are far more impressed by wealth than virtue. They practice denial whenever they’ve behaved badly and would never, ever admit it or say they were sorry.
In the final balance, neither of my in-laws is the Antichrist (probably) but they’re not the kind of people I can trust, love, or respect, either.
MIL: has a silly streak a mile wide, is very generous and big-hearted, is practical about emotional decisions, is generally non-interfering.
FIL: has a wonderful sense of history, tells great stories, is very generous and quietly gregarious.
Dislikes:
MIL: can be extremely passive-aggressive, bullies my father-in-law, hoards JUNK until she decides to unload it on me.
FIL: is quite bigoted in theory (although every one of “them” he personally knows is “not like the rest of them”), and has a lot of “learned helplessness” that drives me batty.
Brother- and sister-in-law likes:
BIL: is one of the smartest people I know, can be very funny, is affectionate.
SIL: likewise very smart, has a quirky sense of humor and is amazingly creative.
Dislikes:
Both tend to be rather snobbishly intellectual. It took them years to realize that being a waitress/bartender/then-stay-at-home mom could be a CHOICE rather than a default for stupid people.
Likes: My in-laws have treated me like part of the family from day one. My mother and father-in-law treat me like a daughter. My father-in-law is the absolute best. When I was on the outs with my dad, he was there for me. All he had to do was take one look at me and know that I needed a hug. It was comforting to know that even if I never reconciled with my own dad, I still had a dad in him. I also love the fact that I can ask my father-in-law anything and he’ll give me a thoughtful response. He’s a pastor and I’ve asked him all sorts of difficult questions that I wouldn’t dare ask anyone else. I’ve said more about my father-in-law than my mother-in-law here, but she’s really great, too.
Dislikes: On holidays, the whole family sits around all day and does nothing. I can’t stand it sometimes. It’s just the difference in their family and mine, who are more likely to play a board game, cards, or throw in a movie when we’re all together. They just sit there and stare at the walls with classical music playing in the background.
Sometimes I feel like my in-laws favor my husband’s one sister and her husband and kids over everyone else. It doesn’t bother me for our sake, but rather the sake of the other grandchildren (we don’t have kids).
The above-mentioned “favored” sister and family are ultra-conservative. 'Nuff said.
Then there’s the hated brother-in-law (married to another sister). He’s mentally and physically abusive to my sister-in-law, and we’d all like for him to be gone. We’ve tried.
The other sister-in-law … well, she can drive me nuts sometimes, but I love her anyway. I wish she’d make more of an effort to get out there and make friends (she’s recently divorced) and spend less time with her parents. I fear that someday when they’re gone, she’s going to be all alone.
Like: They are some of the most caring, giving, and thoughtful people I know.
Dislike: They’re fundies. Not crazy fundies, but Mom is a young-earth creationist.
(or maybe that should be :o ) because I am having a lot of hassles with them right now.
. As an extended family, they are affectionate and easy to get along with. One thing that is not really related to me, but impressed me very much is the way they treat my BIL’s stepdaughter. They have made her a complete part of the family, brag about her, have her artwork hanging up all over the place, never refer to her as a “step” anything. She is just like all the other grandchildren in their eyes. And for all that the unorganized “togetherness” gets on my nerves, it really does speak to how highly they value their family ties.