Your best In-Laws story

These last two weeks, we've hosted my mother-in-law and young niece as the niece joins a theatre camp run by my lovely wife.

This weekend marks the shows, so now we have a house full of...in-laws.

It's fine. Everything's fine. They could be so much worse.

At the same time, well...








GODDAMMIT.

I'm trying desperately not to say a wrong thing. So, here we are. What's your best in-laws story? The cringier, the better.

 

Hearing your in-laws in your house fucking.

 

My mother-in-law lives with us and is more helpless than my children.

It’s hell on Earth.

 

Gave it a like, but also offer sympathies.

 

Not mine, but all true and witnessed.
1. Insisted if she couldn’t take the “favorite” to Disney world, she wouldn’t take the other ( different family). No sense going.
2. The reason parents were reluctant about Disney was because he was going to be on his last week of leg “braces” that caused sores , created heat and needed extra care. Mother in law created such chaos, parents relented but without sending braces. MIL then bought knee socks in FL thinking it’s the same thing and made child wear them the whole time. In FL, during covid restrictions, and complained the level of service and attention wasn’t what they expected from Disney... looking for a refund.
3. Conjecture here , but I think MIL wanted to try first in line handicap child status. The child was 4 1/2 years old.

So much more, and worse, but trying not to usurp the thread. My personal MIL turns 100 next year and is great.

 

My mother-in-law gave my son his first haircut without asking us because she thinks any hair touching the ear is too long.

I don’t know why but that one infuriated me.

 

It should she had no right to do that.

 

I've got a variety to choose from here, but I'll go with this one...

From the moment my oldest son was born, my mother in law would constantly insist that she had a great connection with him. He liked bananas as a baby? He got that from her -- she sometimes eats fruit! For a while he was a competitive Rubik's Cuber and he apparently got that from her because she likes crossword puzzles. He's tall, and he got that from her because she had some distant uncle who was kind of tall. (Meanwhile, I'm his dad and I'm 6'4".) For years she even dyed her hair trying to match his. It was beyond obnoxious.

Around the time he turned 13 he was at a friend's birthday party at a skating rink. He fell, breaking two bones in his left leg and two in his left wrist. Both needed surgery. He was in a wheelchair for a while in middle school because the broken wrist made it impossible to use crutches. It was not a fun time.

Once he had recovered the MIL came to visit for a few days. One afternoon she was alone in the living room and I suddenly heard her saying "Oh! Oh!" I walked in and she was sitting on the floor in the middle of the room. She claimed she fell, although I certainly didn't hear a fall and I was maybe 20 feet away in another room. She got up and walked away, did the dishes, and everything was fine.

The next day she insisted on going to the doctor because of her "great fall." He found nothing wrong. She had vague complaints that kept changing. She also started telling my son over and over that is was so funny that they now both had a "great fall."

She flew home the next day but soon after went to the doctor again, still with no sign of any injury. When she found out that my son needed physical therapy after getting the casts off, she insisted on also having physical therapy. (She never went back after the first appointment. She was very offended that the therapist asked her to do things that were hard.)

She kept going to the doctor for months complaining about different problems from the "great fall."

One day she called my wife to tell her the "funniest thing" happened. The insurance company had called her to ask for details about the "great fall," since she had required so many doctor's visits. She said she explained to them that our dog had knocked her off-balance and she fell hard onto the tile floor.

Our dog was not in the room with her when she "fell."

She kept describing the call from the insurance company as "so funny." My wife, seething at this point, told her it was not funny at all -- they had clearly called because she had run up thousands of dollars in bills with no actual injury ever diagnosed, and she had just told the insurance company that it was our fault that she "fell." If they wanted to recoup the money they would be coming after us.

Miraculously, she was cured. No more doctor's visits. No more vague complaints. Just the occasional comparison of "great falls" with my son, who somehow never strangled her.

Sadly, the insurance company never called. I very badly wanted to rat her out.

 

I think you win.

 

Yeah, that has "End of thread" written all over it.

 

Jesus. She needed help, but not from that kind of doctor.

 

This isn’t going to top PCLL, but my MIL moved into our house 7 years ago, from a place that was literally falling apart in Pennsyltucky.

Within a few weeks of living with us, she slapped my 3-year-old son in the face hard enough to leave a mark, and smoked a cigarette with my infant daughter on her lap. My wife somehow managed to talk me out of kicking her ass to the curb then.

She also obsesses with who my kids take after, but in a different way. Apparently, every time my kids do something “bad,” she talks shit to my wife about how they get it from me and my lawless, Godless big-city upbringing. And every time they do something good/nice, it’s because of her side of the family.

And, the thing is, my kids aren’t “bad.” They just, like me, have little tolerance for rules that exist only for the sake of having rules. And she, like most old white people, love making and enforcing rules for no good reason.