Your best In-Laws story

"Pan treasure." I'm seriously laughing out loud over this one. Not an in-law story, but I had a college friend I had to do the "pretend to like what I'm eating" with. I can still taste the mushy peas two decades later.

 

Are people really freaked out that other people have sex?

That seems like such an antiquated notion. I’m going to wash the sheets wither way. I’m 39, I have sex with my wife at my in-laws house. We’re not loud or anything, but if we’re there for a week, it’s happening.

My in-laws would be here for three weeks at a time to help with the baby. People have needs.

 

who among us …

 

My wife and mother have always had a tenuous relationship at best.

We had our second child about two months before my 2010 deployment to Afghanistan, which was my first as an aviator. With a 2-year old an infant, it’s pretty safe to say Mrs. tbf was under some pretty significant stress.

In September I was in a pretty remote place without the ability communicate very well when a helicopter crashed somewhere. Not thinking about how it would make my wife feel, my mother calls her and asks, “A helicopter crashed in Afghanistan. Have you heard from tbf?”

With a toddler on one hip and a baby in a car seat inside a grocery cart, Mrs. tbf began cursing out my mom on the coffee isle at Kroger.

It’s been downhill ever since.

 

If there’s one thing all of my wives and girlfriends have had in common, it’s that they ALL hate my mom.

 

I'm sure I can come up with some funny ones for my mother-in-law, but nothing really bad. I got very lucky in the in-laws department, though my father-in-law died nearly 20 years ago. Many years later, I do remember my wife telling me about her mother's sex rules with her boyfriend. It mostly involved what he was allowed to do and what she was willing to do. He was a nice enough guy, but profoundly ugly. I did not want those mental images. Trust me. Y'all don't want them, either.

My wife was very close with my mother. I'm sure she would have some great stuff for this thread regarding my father. He died less than a year after my wife and I were married. She has told me more than once she was not sure our marriage could have survived otherwise. I am unsure if she is kidding or not and I choose not to ask.

 

I hope it never goes this far for anyone here.

Woman under investigation after poisonous mushroom meal killed her three former in-laws

 

Only one getting any "treasure" out of this is the cardiologist.

 

No, man. From my seat, you are not ignored and I encourage you to keep being you. That post was hilarious.

 

My in-laws were pretty much always nice to me, but they were both Depression kids who grew up poor in rural Alabama. My MiL would come home and absolutely crow over finding canned beans on sale for just twenty-seven cents, stuff like that. When we first moved from Houston to Birmingham we stayed with my wife's folks until we could find a place and get settled. My MiL was old school, she got up and fixed breakfast every morning before people went off to work. She served orange juice in little bitty juice glasses, and nearly every day I'd wind up getting up and refilling my thimble sized glass. One morning as I went to the table I simply took out a regular glass and poured it full of OJ to save the trip.

You would have thought that I was caught stealing money from her purse. I caught hell about how much orange juice cost, yadda yadda. My wife finally got her calmed down and she gave up a half-hearted apology. I knew that I had stepped on an involuntary sore spot, but I also wasn't willing to eat dirt over it, so on the way home that day I bought a gallon of orange juice and put it in the 'fridge. I caught a dirty look but that was the end of it. I teased my wife for years behind that one.


Then there was the day that we were visiting at their house, and eventually excused ourselves saying that we were going to make a trip to the Galleria. "You're going way over there? Why, that's all the way across town!"

"Yes, it is. And it will take maybe twenty minutes to get there from here. I've seen mornings in Houston where it took longer than that just to get on the freeway."

My mom was pretty neurotic, and drove all her daughter-in-laws nuts in various ways. She was worse than my in-laws ever were.

 

A couple of holiday memories from early in the marriage.

• Christmas for seven people was over in less than 10 minutes, not because they were cheap (they were, but it was the one time of year they splurged) but because the family custom was for everyone to open everything all at once like a swarm of locusts descending on crop land. I come from humble roots, but we open presents once at a time because we are interested in what everyone got, not just piling up our lucre like a bunch of damn savages.
  
• They served Thanksgiving dinner cold. Cold turkey, cold ham, maybe lukewarm sides if you were lucky. My MIL couldn’t understand why I was making a break for the microwave. A year or two later I went to a Christmas party hosted by extended family and the same deal. I didn’t make it out the door that time without muttering under my breath to my ex that it wasn’t a fit way to live.

 

I am fortunate to have in-laws who have gotten along well with me (and vice versa) from the start, when I began dating their daughter. And yes, like PC noted in his post, that involved "taking one for the team" when invited over for dinner.

Anyway, my favorite story about my mother-in-law happened at our wedding reception. She is a very mild-mannered, nice lady who I've almost never heard utter a mild curse word, let alone swear. Except when the wrong food was served at our wedding reception. We were at a hotel in the Chicago suburbs that had two large rooms for receptions, and apparently the food (everyone got a plate brought to them) was switched with the other wedding.

I wouldn't have noticed, but I happened to walk near my MIL while she was verbally ripping the head waiter to shreds. F-bombs and all. I had to keep walking past so she couldn't see me bust a gut laughing.

I've joked about it with her in the 29 years since then and she'll say, "Oh, I just was a little upset." Sure!