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Mother-in-law is here, please let me die of sepsis.
I am a stay-at-home dad recovering from a minor surgery. Because of lifting and mobility restrictions, I've had family in town helping out for the past week and a half. The first week, my wife's mother came, and she actually knows her way around our house. She folds clothes weird, and puts thing away in the wrong spots, but at least she just does stuff. My wife's step mom...bless her. She means well. But I am about ready to wring her neck. This woman must have grown up in some kind of Victorian-era fairy tale, I swear. She is so fussy about furniture and dishes and household crap like that, you'd think it's some kind of disease. People show less care and attention to human children than this woman shows to furniture that doesn't even belong to her. So when they arrived this time, they brought us a new kitchen table. A used one, mind you. They're giving it to us as a sort of Christmas gift. Hooray, right? We have been wanting a table just like this one for as long as I can remember, and I'm delighted to have it. But I cannot afford the tuition for the four-semester certification program I'm going to have to complete to be qualified to take care of this goddamn table. Not two minutes had passed after they got it in before she started fussing about how the finish on the wood will "be ruined" if we don't "invest in some quality placemats". And before we were allowed to eat dinner on this thing, she spread a fucking beach towel over it because we don't have a proper tablecloth. She's almost certainly going to buy us one before she leaves. We have two kids under age 3. And it's a used table. It's pretty, sure. But it WILL get damaged. It will. And guess what? I DON'T CARE. Neither does my wife! But GOD FORBID we ever let her lay eyes on this table without both a properly sized tablecloth AND the right kind of placemats (these fuck-ugly particleboard ones that she likes). And every goddamn time we see her, it's something like that. Last time they came up, she gave us an Advent calendar that she literally spent six months making. It's something "mother used to do for us when we were little, and we always really enjoyed". Okay. Great. We like Christmas. I'm even religious, although the wife isn't. Cool, that's fine. She asked me in, like, February if I wanted this thing, and I casually said yes because I had no idea what I was agreeing to. This Advent calendar is literally bigger than I am. It's like six feet tall and four feet wide. You have to hang a fucking curtain rod on the wall to suspend it from. It's made of felt, so "the mice will get to it", so to store it you need to carefully cover every inch of it in dry-cleaning plastic, then roll it around a cardboard tube, cover the rolled up thing in more plastic, then shove it into a cardboard box. Then send out for a team of horses led by Charles Dickens to carry it off to Buckingham palace, where angels are waiting to bear it up into heaven on chariots of fire. AND I HAVEN'T EVEN MENTIONED THE ORNAMENTS! Keep in mind, this Advent calendar is a gift for a two-year-old, who is only beginning to understand what Christmas is. My Father-in-law literally had to MAKE a fucking special box to keep these ornaments in. Not joking, she had him make a box, with a special kind of latch that's more difficult to open than a normal goddamn latch. And inside are 25 ornaments, all wrapped in individual snack-sized bubble wrap baggies. And each one is something "mother collected in her travels". Like, one is from China, one is from France, one was made by fucking Gepetto and won't shut up about how it wants to be a real boy one day. And taken together, they are the top 25 most fragile objects I have ever beheld in my 36 years of life. Each one probably deserves an entire wing in a museum dedicated to its history and sanctity. And she's like this with EVERYTHING. Sigh. I could handle all of this with a smile if it weren't for all the goddamn comments about absolutely everything. No object or occurrence passes without comment. I can't stand for very long, so she has emptied and refilled the dishwasher a few times. And almost every dish, we have to have some fucking discussion about. Our Tupperware is a little old and corroded (you know, the white scratchy marks that gradually accumulate when you microwave things in plastic containers?) Well "that's really unsanitary, bacteria can build up in those little holes". Know what else is covered in bacteria? Everything. Every item and every surface in every place you've ever been. And yet here we are. I have had three, three prolonged conversations with this woman about how the knives which came with our cutlery set are not butter knives. You buy a set of silverware from some place like Bed Bath and Beyond. What comes in it? Big spoons, little spoons, big forks, little forks, and butter knives. Right? Smooth-edged knives that are good for nothing except spreading soft things like butter or condiments like mustard. Sure, some of them have a slight serrated edge. But many of them do not. Serrated or not, those knives are colloquially know by every person I've ever met...as butter knives. But in the past year, I have had three 15-minute or longer discussions about how these knives of ours, which are not serrated, are NOT butter knives, even though it's perfectly acceptable to use these knives to spread butter "if that's what you have". A butter knife, however, is a specialized tool that is shorter, and shaped differently. And when we sit down to eat, this woman will stubbornly try to CUT MEAT with these blunt knives because she insists that they are "dinner knives" and therefore suitable for cutting dinner items. When we offer her a steak knife, she insists that "no, this is fine" even though it's quite plain to everyone that these "dinner knives" are ill-adapted to the task of cutting meat. This woman insisted that they bring their own bath towels while they stay with us. "So we wouldn't have to think about it". She plays with my daughters, and instead of saying "coochie coochie coo" like a goddamn normal person, she says "orgly orgly zip" like a 1950s B-movie Martian. And don't get me started on on cooking. Her cooking is actually good about 80% of the time, but her strict adherance to recipes is just beyond reason. She's the kind of person that would delay dinner for an hour because she had to run to the store because the recipe calls for margarine and all we have is butter. One time we were talking about what to have for dinner, and I suggested we get a salad kit at the store. "I don't know what a salad kit is." "It's a salad in a bag. It's got, like all the ingredients, and the dressing." "I've never seen anything like that." "Really? They're in every grocery store... everywhere. It says 'salad kit' on the bag." "I don't know, I'll have to look". So she looks. And lo! Go tell it on the mountain! She finds a salad kit in her local grocery store, a Mediterranean salad with balsamic vinaigrette. Later that night, she pulls it out of the fridge. "So what do I do with this?" "You put it in a bowl, and mix everything together." She grabs a mixing bowl, cuts the bag open with scissors, and dumps it in. Then she fishes out the little ingredient bag. "What's this?" "It's the ingredients. For the salad." "What do I do with it?" "You open the ingredients, and put them in the salad". She opens the main bag, and pulls out the pita chip croutons. "What is this?" "It's croutons. It goes in the salad." Every step, we do this. The feta cheese. "What is this for?" "It goes. In the salad." A little packet of spices. "Well now, what am I supposed to do with this?" Me, trying desperately not to commit murder: "It. Goes. In. The. Salad." The dressing. "Do I put this on now?" Me, begging God to let me die: "Now, or right before we serve, if you prefer." Shrugging, as if she's had to deliberate extensively about this issue: "I guess I'll just put it on." I have never seen an adult so utterly defeated as this woman was by something as simple as a salad kit. I'm done. Please send pipe bombs, so I can feel the blessed relief of dying of shrapnel wounds. Edit: I wrote this rant while she was out at the store. When she returned, can you guess what she had? That's right. Ugly-ass placemats, and the fuck-ugliest vinyl tablecloth I've ever laid eyes on. This beautiful, dark wood, counter-height table will now be forever buried under Walmart picnic table kitsch. I'm off to clamp myself to my car battery. Edit 2: Thank you all for laughing with me about this. It made my day. One last thing I forgot to mention about my MIL: I love her. She and my wife's dad have done my family a long list of favors, and I could not have gotten through this surgery without them. submitted by /u/petertmcqueeny to r/rant [link] [comments]
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petertmcqueeny |
Nov 19, 2019 |