What’s a weird thing your In-Laws do?

[FirstFallopians]

I was thinking there about how my BIL maintains that all families are a little bit weird to someone else.

Thought he was being flippant but then I remembered that my in-laws keep their family toothbrushes and toothpaste in a drawer in their bathroom. If you need a bit of floss after Sunday lunch you need to stick your hand into a sticky, damp mass of plastic and bristles.

What slightly weird things do your in-laws do?

This is to do with the belief that hanging around cold and wet makes you vulnerable to colds isn't it? There's some truth in that. Plus potentially having to put the immersion on in advance and having to warn family members that the bathroom will be unavailable for a while.

Well you reach a certain age where funerals are your days out. My parents remember people gatecrashing funerals for the food out of poverty.

Really? I thought most people enjoyed the break of making their own tea. You're too busy if you can't pop to the kettle for a few minutes.

@istoodonlegoagain, 😆 I've heard it all now! MIL was not an HE teacher. She just has very set ways of doing things and anything that is not her way is likely to send her spiralling!

Another thing is that she appears to have a fear of dust. They live in a brand new, super modern home which is always ridiculous hot. The heat always seems to be on, even in the height of summer. They go around moaning about how hot the house is but will never ever open windows because MIL says it "lets dust in". When we go and stay, my DH, who really suffers with being too hot and sweating, will beg them to open some windows and reluctantly they will open them by the tiniest crack and at the earliest convenience we will notice they've been closed again. I always get headaches when I go there - I swear they think I'm some kind of hypochondriac but I firmly believe it's because of the temperature of their house. I rarely go and stay there anymore because I can't bare how I feel when I'm there.

By contrast, at my own Mum always starts the day - no matter what time of year - by opening every window in the house to let the fresh air in!

Most things 🤣

I do think that this thread is is very thought provoking and interesting. There are so many examples here of people saying "Look what these people do-isn't it weird!" only for lots of others to say "But that's what I do- doesn't everyone?" I wonder how many issues within families actually come down to, for example, the suppressed incredulous look Jane gave Mary when she served cabbage with stew, or when Jane discovered that Mary keeps a kite in the boot of her car. With a few-largely repulsive - examples there doesn't seem to be any uniquely weird behaviour going on. It took me ages to work out that my in laws habit of asking each other on meeting how their cars were was just their way of showing concern and interest.....

Oh so many!

PIL have one coffee a day at 10am. All other drinks must be tea. Water is never offered. They mutter and look at me like I'm crazy if I make a coffee for breakfast or give the DC water with dinner.

Dinner is 5pm. If we are there they can stretch to 5.30pm. MIL thinks eating at 7pm is insanity.

They try to buy alcoholic drinks we like but never serve them cold. Wine is kept in a warm cupboard. A warm G&T anyone? If we suggest putting the tonic or wine bottle in the fridge we are told there is no room. It's clear they are trying but just don't get it. No ice available either.

Nothing is allowed on the kitchen worktop. The toaster sits on a tray in a cupboard and is brought out to toast bread then immediately put away.

The fire goes on at 4pm between Oct and April. There is a 'fire going on day' and even if it is cold they don't light it until that specific day.

No bin. We have to give them everything to put into the bin for us.

Endless complaining about how there is nothing you can do watch on TV. Endless complaining about mixed race families in adverts.

An appt at 4pm means nothing else can be done that day. They need to be at home waiting for the appt time to come.

They are good people and great grandparents. Lots of foibles that get more pronounced every year.

Anna, Duchess of Bedford, started the afternoon version in 1840 https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/Afternoon-Tea/

Amd a morning and afternoon break was standard in offices and factories for most of the 19th and 20th centuries https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/02/23/467861988/when-britain-fought-against-the-tyranny-of-tea-breaks

We would be staying at their house and we’d all prepare to head out as planned; as the rest of us were getting shoes on he would say, “Hold on while I change my trousers”

My dh does this! Will sit and wait until every is ready to go out at the door with their coat and shoes on then decides to go and change into his “going out” trousers 😡

My IL’s are pretty crackers but the main thing is their messiness. The house is always messy, sometimes with straw on the floor (they have chickens tbf but they live outside!)
There is always talcum powder all over the bathroom as they sprinkle it liberally over themselves after bathing. Pots are left sitting in greasy water all day and one thing that turns my stomach is a jug next to the sink in which they put tea bags, coffee grinds, eggshells etc - it will stay there for days. This is possibly to go into a compost heap but it just turns my stomach along with the grubby sink with bits of food floating everywhere 🤢

I am very fond of them though.

I clean my teeth in the kitchen sink.
To make a very long story short.
I had the chest infection from hell and broke a bone in my foot, I kept forgetting to clean my teeth while I was upstairs, had to virtually crawl back up just to clean teeth. I decided to just bring toothbrush downstairs. So now I have a sonic toothbrush with a cover and just keep them under the kitchen sink. Done this for years.
Likely now I have in laws I'll be on this thread with the weird habits. Infamous.

Reading all these posts has got me thinking. I think so much of this weird behaviour ultimately boils down to fear. Fear of Life. And all these peculiarities and rigid routines are a way of coping with that fear by trying to control their life as much as possible?

Or is it that only a generation ago barely anyone was officially diagnosed with autism or similar, and were instead just considered a bit odd? For them much of the world and life must have seemed genuinely frightening and inexplicable and they had to create their own 'weird' strategies to cope?

Looking back with wiser vision it's now clear to me that my MIL was on the spectrum, it explains so much. I wish I'd realized that a long time ago.

MIL also had coffee at 11 (I was terrible for not drinking coffee with her, I hate the stuff).
She also brushed her teeth in the kitchen for a while, but only after she’d seen the thing about toilets and toothbrushes. Her toilet and sink were in separate rooms, i imagine is dawned on her at some point as she went back to the bathroom.

If PIL said ‘I’m off to bed’ it could mean actually several hours later and would involve cups of tea and messing about. If you said goodnight (even several times) they didn’t believe you. I got woken up after an hour once as MIL was confused I had ‘disappeared’.

My MIL fries baked beans to heat them.

Mmm…fried baked beans…
Sounds quite appealing!

@Bookist rigid routines can be a way to manage neurodiversity, or anxiety. But lots of people as they get older do seem to be more routine bound. My mum would as children take us away for the weekend on a bus and just find somewhere cheap to stay when she got there. By the time she was in her seventies I had a pretty good idea what she would be doing at any point in the day as her routine was so set.

My PIL also had two TVs in their lounge. They couldn’t master a video recorder (the old days)!
They simply watched their favourite programmes at the same time.
On entering their house there was a cacophony of sound. Both TVs turned up extremely loudly. Most odd.

my parents too - to the point that if the “morning coffee “ is not consumed at the correct time the whole day goes to hell
in a handcart and they will be sure to ring and tell me that the day was all out of sync and they not been able to get back on track due to the tardiness of the mornings beverage break !

My mil refused to use my husband staff discount for a 100 pound saving at tesco because he would get the club card points .

My parents have a massively convoluted process for re-filling their pillboxes. It involves popping out a week's worth of pills (of which their are many) and segregating them into a variety of dishes/remekins/cups etc. Then meticulously filling each hole on the pillbox individually. So 'Monday morning': 1 of pill A, 2 of pill B, 1 of pill X. 'Monday Lunchtime': 1 of pill G, 2 of pill K etc. etc.

The entire process takes up to two hours however it regularly falls apart if someone has forgotten to take pills on a particular day - so if the Wednesday Evening hole still has pills in it this is a disaster that can take upwards of an hour to resolve, involving emptying everything out again, re-counting everything etc.

I've pointed out that the way they do it is not efficient, and even downright dangerous (as some of the pills look similar and they get them muddled when they do the emptying everything out routine) and even gone through quicker methods, but they simply won't have it.

So you strip the bed of its bedding, put your own on, and then strip and make it again with the original bedding when you leave?

Did she go to boarding school by any chance??

Oh - thought of another one: they've somehow managed to extend the lifespan of CFL bulbs (the twirly ones) by about 20 years beyond their design lifespan. The whole house is 'illuminated' with 25 year old CFLs that I swear actually make the room darker when you switch one on. They were all for them when they first came out and replaced all their incandescent bulbs with them, but now these refuse to burn out, just get dimmer and dimmer, so they've seen no need to buy LEDs.

One actually didn't switch on last time I was round there so I offered to replace it only to be met with "oh no, give it a minute and it will light up" and the bastard did, emitting about as many lumens as a depressed glow worm.

My OH when we started going out together would never carry a shopping bag. He said men don't carry 'the messages'! Messages being a NI term for shopping. But he used to do housework and cook, so it wasn't as if he was old fashioned about women/men's work!

The whole house is 'illuminated' with 25 year old CFLs that I swear actually make the room darker when you switch one on.

😂 @puncheur

My ILs house has been neglected for so many decades it’s like a time warp. Several rooms still have circular fluorescent tube lights on the ceiling and I’m amazed they still work. They don’t suck the light out of the room though, they make me feel like my retinas are burning 🔥

I do know they can’t buy replacements now, because one of them died in an upstairs bedroom and FIL rigged up some ugly workaround (a bare bulb hangs off a wire, next to the dead light fitting) instead of paying an electrician to install a new fitting and take away the old one.

@ilovepixie

My MIL does that in our house. I'm not clear why but I suspect it is either:

She feels more comfortable with her own bed linen

Or

She tries to make herself 'small' 'no bother'

DD2 did an activity for Rainbows that involved asking friends and family what they were most proud of. MIL is most proud of how tidy she is. I find it so sad. She's degree educated, she travelled in Europe, she's fluent in French and German, she was a secondary teacher... She is determined, helpful, organised... Lots to be proud of.