Mother-in-law coming to town-rant

[oregonjen]

My Mother-in-law is coming to town for the first time since we moved and that has been 9 years. We travel to see her and my Father-in-law and they barely make time for us. It is a long distance we have to travel with kids. They don't have enough room for us to stay with them, for which I'm grateful, so we stay in a hotel. Well, my MIL decides and basically pleads with my dh to let her and her sister stay in our house. We tell her a hotel will do just fine and we will pay for it, so don't worry. Well, she calls back a few minutes later and begs for us to let her stay with us. We don't have guestrooms, we have children just starting the school year again and really don't want to shuffle their sleeping arrangements around. A hotel is fine and we will pay for it, he says again. Well, now my husband is upset at me and doesn't understand why I want them in a hotel, he is supporting how I feel, but is disappointed. Well, for 12 years, his parents make no effort in seeing us while we lived close to them and even when we come visit after we've moved. They barely even know their grandchildren and now, her begging and pleading is getting in the middle of my relationship with my husband. Arghhh! All of this is caused by not wanting to stay in a comfortable, yet close by hotel, which we will pay for. Unbelievable!

Sorry for the long rant!

[Kerrytravelers]

1. Do what I do when my in-laws drive 100 miles to see us...

... completly ignore them.

I can't stand them. It's all I can do to stomache them for a short 2 hour period. They are totally 8-loving fascists fundamentalists fruitcakes who constantly insult us. So, I refuse to carry on a conversation with them. I answer yes and no and that's about it. They get the point and have made their visits fewer and fewer and farther and farther between.

God, I hate them.

My dear husband is dragging me down there (kicking and screaming all the way) to spend Saturday with them. He knows that when we get home, he's going to owe me big-time.

God, I hate them.

So please, feel free to rant. This is the perfect place for it. If someone doesn't want to read your rant, they can just not open the thread!

[oregonjen]

3. Thanks.

My point of the rant being, all of a sudden, after ignoring us for years, turning around and wanting to jump in the middle of my family and making me feel guilty for not wanting them to! I like my home without in-law invasions. During the day for a few days, fine, but not at night. They can sleep elsewhere!

Sorry about your in-laws.

[ronnykmarshall]

6. I swear I thought of you when I first read this.

Before I saw the poster's name I thought it was from you!!

Why is it I can picture a cat trying to be placed in a cat carrier when I think about you going to see in the laws from hell??

[Child_Of_Isis]

2. I tend to agree

with the "unbelievable" part! Free board at a cushy hotel not good enough for the MIL?

[nini]

4. Just say No

seriously, your husband needs to put his balls back on and tell her you simply do not have the room.

His kids and you need to come first.

His mother is 'testing' him.

Good luck.. thankfully she's far away and you don't have to deal with her on a weekly basis.

:hug:

[Heddi]

7. I agree. It took me years to train my husband to stand up to his mother

in that way.

When we both lived within driving distance of each other, the deal was that WE would ALWAYS have to drive from Charleston to Charlotte for holidays.

One year, I got tired of fucking driving around all holiday weekend long (especially since our jobs didn't give us the day after Thanksgiving, or the day after Christmas off, so trips were limited and worthless, honestly) and told him "You fucking tell your mother that if she wants to spend this Thanksgiving with us, then SHE needs to get in the fucking car and DRIVE DOWN HERE---the road runs both fucking ways. If we can drive 5 hours every fucking holiday, she can drive 5 fucking hours for one!!"

He got up the nerve and finally told her what I said (in much nicer terms) and amazingly, she wasn't willing to drive to OUR house for Holidays. So he got the "fuck it" attitude and since then, he has felt NO obligation towards family if they show NO obligation to us.

Roads, for the most part, run both ways. If it's acceptable for us to drive 5 hours, it's perfectly acceptable for THEM to drive 5 hours. I think it's only fair, and finally (FINALLY!) hubby finds it fair as well :)

[Heddi]

5. I feel your pain

in 2001, my husband and i moved from SC to WA---3000 miles.

We were originally going to drive a moving truck with all of our stuff AND two cats across country.

MIL and her husband live in Kansas. MIDDLE of Kansas.

Our original route was going to be up across the Canadian Border (so we didn't have to deal with so many mountains) and then down into Seattle.

Oh no! Mother in Law can't understand why we didn't want to increase our drive by 1500 miles to drive through the middle of the country to Kansas, STAY FOR A WEEK< then drive from Kansas to Seattle.

We told her that if (IF) we did that, we'd only be able to stay for a day or two b/c we have the cats with us, it was July, and we wanted to get to Seattle and not be fucking driving.

Oh. She was SO pissed. How DARE we not stay there for 7 days and nights? How DARE we not go out of our way (by several days drive both ways) to stop in Kansas and hang out?

Eventually, we decided to fly and everything was fine.

FAST FORWARD to 2002.

MIL and hubby drive to Seattle to visit us. Not bad.

BUT--they had the AUDACITY to cut their visit with us to 3 days intstead of 5 because they wanted to drive to Portland and then to Nevada.

OH...so it's just FINE for them to cut their visit short and do things that THEY want to do, but it's high fucking treason for US to want to do the same thing when we're carrying around a fucking van full of shit and 2 cats...

yeah.

fuck that.

I love my MIL, but she can be very myopic and selfish sometimes (especially when it comes to us visting them (5 times in 5 years) and them visiting us (1 time in 5 years))

argh.

[oregonjen]

8. Our situations sound similar.

I really don't have a feeling one way or the other for my MIL because I don't know her very well. I've been with my husband for twelve years and still don't know his side of the family.

In fact, I had to instigate us visiting them when we still lived near them. I had to ask my hubby to call them and see if they were available for a visit. They never once came to see us in our apartment.

[Heddi]

10. My husband's eldest sister

fancies herself as Matriarch of the family. She's got the only kid (grandkid) in the family and that puts her above the ranks of us mere (child-free) mortals :eyes:

When we lived in Charleston, we must have gone to SIL's house at LEAST 10 times in 3 years.

In those same 3 years, she came to our house exactly ONCE and only because she needed a place to stay for a festival she and her husband were going to.

Hubby's other sister lives in DC, and the ONLY time she's visited us in EIGHT YEARS was about 7 years ago when she came to Chas. and needed a place to stay because she was going to a friend's wedding.

When we would go to older sister's house, we were relgated to SLEEPING ON THE FUCKING FLOOR while everyone else (including the single middle sister) got beds. Some hospitality!

But, in their eyes, WE are "anti-family" because we had the AUDACITY to try to better our lives and increase our happiness by moving from SC to WA. We obviously DO NOT LOVE HER AND HER CHILD because we're not willing to live in SC and never make more than $60k combined income so that we can drive to her fucking house three times a year, every year, for the rest of my life.

---

My inlaws make me very happy that I'm an only child of a single parent. Me, I just gotta worry about the drama from my mom & grandmother---relatively small drama compared to hubby's family:

Mother
mother's husband
Father
father's wife
Sister
Sister's husband
sister's child
other sister.

yeah. fuck that.

[Midlodemocrat]

9. My inlaws used to do that.

MIL, FIL and evil SIL would stay with us for an event like a baptism or something and MY family would stay in a hotel. They took up 2 of the four bedrooms.

Selfish, selfish people. MIL and SIL were/are just plain evil. FIL now lives with us, but he is pretty benign.

[Heddi]

11. Are you related to my family :) ?

In June 06, I will graduate from nursing school.

We're expecting to have my mom, my grandmother, hubby's mom & her husband, hubby's dad & his wife.

We only have a 1 br house and a futon. So techincally TWO couples could stay here and we sleep on the floor.

well, we were talking about it and thought about having my mom & grandma stay here and hubby's family stay in a hotel (My family is poor and so are we so we can't spring for a hotel and neither can they. Hubby's family is well off and can easily afford hotel rooms)

It's not even SET in stone, just something we talked about. Happened to bring it up to hubby's mom and she was OUTRAGED. how DARE we send HER to a hotel while my poor mother & grandmother got to sleep in OUR LUMPY BED!!!

And it's not like we have ROOM for 6 people plus us to hang out. We don't even have chairs--just the futon/couch in the living room and alot of floor.

---
So then we brought up the idea that 2 sets could come the wk before graduation and stay through the ceremony then leave, the other group could come the day before the ceremony and stay the week after so that we didn't have too many people.

THAT isn't a viable option, either. For some reason, my MIL has a HANKERING to get together with my mom & grandmother (who she's only met ONCE) and MUST MUST MUST be there when they're there.

---

As an adult child, you just CAN NOT WIN sometimes, I swear.

[Midlodemocrat]

13. You can't imagine.

My MIL and SIL thought that they should share in the largesse of my husband's success. They thought THEY were entitled to stuff that I WASN'T entitled to.

When we bought a new van after our third child was born, my SIL went off about how I had everything just given to me by him, blah, blah, blah. She recently sent me an email stating how she contributed to her family's home (she didn't), and what did I do to contribute to my home? Um, have three kids with him?

Sick, sick shit.

I swear if my husband had called them and told them I had died and he was returning to live near them with the three kids, they would have thought they had died and gone to heaven.

I despised MIL and despise SIL. When they were here visiting, all they did was criticize.

[Heddi]

15. I do think you're related to my inlaws :)

But they're not THAT bad.

I've been asked by MIL and both sisters when hubby and I are going to start a family, how we can live out in WA alone with no family, do we get sad on the holidays because we don't spend it with family..

family family family

My *HUSBAND* is my family. *I* am HIS family. One need not 43 yung-un's and a shitload of inlaws to make a family.

I guess the Mother, father, and sisters are SO far up each other's asses they can't see unless the other opens their eyes. They stroke each other's ego's, value monetary worth over personality and such, and generally treat my husband and I like we're two mentally challenged children who just learned to tie their shoes for the first time.

I'm 29, he's 32. He already has a BA but is getting ready to go back to school to be a nurse. I graduate from nursing school in the spring. Those are HARD pre-req's you have to take for nursing, but to his family it's like we're in pre-kindergarden learning to read and write. They don't understand how HARD these classes are, and how demanding the actual nursing program is. They think that we're just being silly little children who can't commit to REAL life and buy a house we're not ready to buy, have children we don't want to have and just MEET THE FUCKING STATUS QUO and get it over with.

They diminish everything we've ever done in our life. When we got married, we'd lived together for 3 years, but only were engaged for 6 months.

THey thought I was pregnant.

When we moved to Washington, they said we'd be back, we'd never make it in the big city, we couldn't handle being away from family---well, it's been almost 5 years and I have no regrets and NO plans to move back to the South.

When I started school, they said I'd never finish, never do well.

I'm about to graduate

when Mark started taking pre-req's, they said he'd never finish, never pass his classes, never be a nurse, didn't have the temperment to be a nurse, didn't have the skills.....

He's about to enter nursing school in the fall.

----

I told my husband that we could both be brain surgeons and make $20M a year, and his family would STILL have issues with us beause we weren't making $25 million a year, or didn't have our own practice, or some other petty bullshit to tear us down.

[lavenderdiva]

12. look at it this way...

you could be like me, and have your in-laws live in the same city, not 20 minutes away. My husband is over at their house EVERY single day, without exception. While I love my in-laws dearly, I would LOVE to live in another city from them, and create some distance. You don't know how lovely I think it would be to only see in-laws once a year! As it is, we go out to dinner with them at least 2x's/week, and they call almost every day. My husband thinks its just wonderful that we have this 'opportunity' to be close to his parents. Not for me! Its just too much as it is now.

[oregonjen]

14. The opposite end of the spectrum

That sounds positively awful! You don't have a chance to really know your husband without the "family" around.

[lavenderdiva]

16. ding, ding, ding, we have a winner here...

yep, hubbie calls them with news and for advice, before I hear about it. Even though we have abundant computer resources in our home, he will go over there and work on a project, and use their printers, etc, to get it done. Just like he was still living at home! Guess he still is in a way. Believe me, if I had known it would be like this, I never would have agreed to move here, when we first got married. He already lived here-- I moved. His parents are in their late 70's, and while still very active and on-top-of-things, the day is approaching where hubbie and I will be the ones taking care of them and their needs. However, we've only been married 3 years, and I am very resentful that EVERY holiday is celebrated with them, at their house. I am having a VERY difficult time cutting the cord that exists, and I guess will always exist, between hubbie and his parents.

So, you see, as bad as your situation is (and I don't envy you that either!), it could always be worse! Positive note for you: even though the in-laws are coming, you will at least be able to look forward to a departure date, when you will have your life back. What if there were NO departure date? (like me!)

[oregonjen]

17. Yes, there is a departure date

However, with all that being said, my children deserve to know their grandparents and they have barely been there. My parents and other family members have been wonderful support and love for them. My in-laws send a card every once in a while. I'm sad for the kids, not for me.

[lavenderdiva]

19. that is very sad indeed...

it sounds like you are trying everything you can to encourage your in-laws to participate in your children's lives. From my own family experience, some people just have different ideas of involvement. Some like more, some like less. One day soon, as your children grow up (it happens fast!), they will see the situation for what it is. Unfortunately, by then, their grandparents may have lost a golden opportunity to create a strong, loving bond with them.

[hobo_baggins]

18. Just get over it and let em stay at your place

its really kinda petty, just let it go.

[tjdee]

20. My own mom has threatened to come this weekend.

:scared:

I *know* she will insult me, complain, call the house messy, etc.... I can't take it this weekend. I've asked her not to come *this* weekend, she said she's not sure if she's coming or not. I think she wants to keep me in limbo until the last possible minute.

Bad for me, I don't know how much power cleaning I need to do before tomorrow.

I know how you feel.