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?

Not particularly strange. But my family definitely looked strange to my daughters BF.

Both my DM and Step Dad are completely bonkers in their own unique way. DM is in her 70s and DSD in his 80s. They left the UK after retirement several yrs ago and live in a hot country. We visit frequently.

DSD is completely t total and health conscious. Awake at 6am on the dot, showers and puts on his finery and sits with the porridge he marinated for 12hrs overnight, followed by a coffee in the garden for quiet contemplation till 9am, which is when he likes to turn his car round in the drive, and open the doors to air the car out. Every morning.

DM on the other hand loves her cocktails and is an utter live wire. She's 72 and just joined tictok. Will regularly send me photos in the middle of the night if she's at a festival dancing. Spent NYE drinking with her mates and jumped in the pool fully clothed at midnight. Garden full of stone statues of naked people. She's also never smoked, but was thrilled to find out cannabis was legal to sell in shops where she lived, and phoned me saying she was thinking about growing weed plants for her arthritic friends. We talked her out of it😂

My DD23 introduced her boyfriend last Yr when we visited. His family are extremely conservative and religious. He was amazed grandparent's could act like this, especially awestruck by DMs ''fuck it, you only live once attitude '

Surely I can't be the only one that finds washing your hair in the kitchen sink/brushing your teeth in the kitchen sink to be absolutely fucking filthy and minging? Food is prepared in kitchens and to imagine people are brushing their teeth in that same sink or washing their hair in that same sink (and leaving hairs in the sink) makes me sick to my stomach. Fucking disgusting! It's even worse than people brushing their hair at the table where everyone is eating.

When l was a child we had one sink in the house. In the kitchen. It was used for everything, including cleaning teeth and hair washing.
Toilet was outside in the back yard, the bath was a tin one, used in front of the fire, once a week.
I've made it past 65 so far...

And could conversely be written by Eastern European ( or any other heritage) about us….

• they eat everything with a knife and fork….even runny baked beans
• they eat sugary sweet cereal for breakfast with cold milk..

Just different, we are all similar in many ways…and just different in others..

MIL will disappear to the toilet or another room with her phone for ages esp if asked to do something by FIL. Their house is full of old electronics due to FIL interest in computing and kitchen is equally full of gadgets many unused/broken. Having inherited a house which is now owned by my SIL and in laws they are replicating the original house by introducing similar gadgets, piles of food etc. House is in a rural location but they drive from home to the new house, stay there for e.g. a w/end or week but don't go anywhere. Prob more if I thought about it but I choose to not see and limit my contact

First meal with my inlaws they served soup as a starter and then the rest (meat-veg-potatoes) in the same plate. I was and still am used to having a new plate for the main course. Also : for the eveningbread no plates or planks, only coffeecups and knives. They prepared their sandwiches on the plastic tablecloth.

My in laws were born for this thread…. My phone won’t have enough battery to survive everything so I’ll post a snapshot.

They cannot eat macaroni cheese without plain crisps.

MiL doesn’t use herbs, spices etc when cooking. She made a comment when they visited recently (they live 4 hours away) our niece & nephew are fussy eaters & eat very slowly, not good manners etc. I asked what they eat & she said no proper meals, like meat & 2 veg, they eat things like pasta, or burritos….

When they go on holiday they take their own porridge oats. Breakfast is always porridge. Any other way than the way they have it is weird, apparently. They dish it up & then pour on extra milk which just sits on top or puddles at the sides. We’re utterly perplexed I didn’t do the same. When we stayed once when our eldest was little (around 3 or 4) she was excited to get up in the morning to go & see Nan & Grandad. She asked for porridge too & they got arsey because that meant they couldn’t have their usual quota (God forbid they make any for her). The next time they said no & to go & get Daddy who will get yours…

They are terrible communicators. Life a very insular life, just them, little contact with the outside world. MiL didn’t work, FiL was self employed with no interest in working work others so neither have developed social skills. No ability to compromise. Shout very quickly if they don’t like something, any kind of contest or they feel remotely flustered. No actual conversation or communication if they’re annoyed or there’s been a misunderstanding, a lot of yelling & storming off only then 2 mins later it’s like it never happened. I cannot handle that, it’s so frustrating!

This is tip of the iceberg. I could write a book.

My dog would love this and regularly empty said bin on floor...idiots wtaf is that all about !?

Oh Lord I’ve thought of more…

They’re probably borderline diagnosable hoarders. Their pretty big house is full of stuff, so much so they can’t use some rooms, yet they’ll go out & buy more furniture to fill the place with. They buy a whole manner of stuff they don’t use, like a hot tub that’s never been used in the 14 years I’ve known them. They have a boat I’ve been on once, they can’t afford to run or maintain it but they like the kudos of having a boat.

Their house is rearranged differently almost every time we go (we’ve not been for over 2 years as I’ve started to refuse, but that’s another thread) - so one time the arm chairs will be in the little room by the back door. Then the next time they’ll be in the dining room, and they use that space as their main place to eat, sit, relax etc. Then for a couple of years they’ll use the living room, but they’ve got nowhere to put the stuff that fills it they’ll move it all to another room & lock the door.

It's as if us kitchen sink teeth brushers, never clean the sink?
Weird.

Have to ask why you wash your cat at all though. Sorry, need to know.

When we stayed once when our eldest was little (around 3 or 4) she was excited to get up in the morning to go & see Nan & Grandad. She asked for porridge too & they got arsey because that meant they couldn’t have their usual quota (God forbid they make any for her). The next time they said no & to go & get Daddy who will get yours…

This is my parents.

We were having dinner, and my mum finds out a distant relation is possibly visiting in a few weeks' time. She takes a bottle of unopened soft drink off the table to use when they visit - because of course, she couldn't spend a couple of quid on the next visitors.

Then one Christmas, my husband and I are up with them. My sister and nephews with her in-laws. I spot the box of crackers, and thinking I'd help lay the table, start to put them out. No no no... They're for when nephews visit. Not enough to do twice. Buy a bigger box FFS and let your actual Christmas Day guests enjoy a cracker!

Oh gosh. I didn't mean that these things were bad or worse, just unusual to me. I thought that was obvious. Where in my comment did I say these habits were wrong/bad/inferior?

In fact many of the things I mentioned I love. Stew for breakfast, endless cups of herbal tea, not bothering with knives.

Omg my late mother had a doll cover thing that had the vacuum cleaner handle up her bum whilst her long skirt disguised the hoover!! Omg I thought we were the only family in the world to have one!!! She looked scary 😨

And I feel very upset that you linked my comment with Brexit. Brexit has nothing to do with it - they don't even live in the UK, although I would love it if they did. I really love my in-laws , and I respect their ways, they just have some habits that are very unusual to me, understandably, as we're from different cultures. That's why I added at the end that, all that being said, they're from a different country where such habits are likely not unusual at all.

Iam.literally crying laughing also at this one,"entering the toilet" ffs 😳🤣🤣🤣

My mum does this to me but with my dad, she doesn’t think I should call him dad anymore but should use his name, even though she called her own father daddy (not dad, daddy), until he died when she was 47 (I’m 36).

I’ve been laughing so hard at all these examples but mostly because I’ve realised I do a lot of these things and I’m very weird 🤣 my curtains don’t shut and I warm the plates and set the table for a takeaway

I think all families that aren’t yours are a bit strange. I remember as a kid being babysat overnight by a friends mum who, when it was time for bed made us brush our teeth, wash our face and go to the loo, but also wash our feet 🤷🏻‍♀️ my friend didn’t bat an eye, totally normal for her, never been asked to do that in preparation for bed either before or since

When DH and I were first going out and I stayed at his house, his parents used to go up for a joint bath every evening at around 9pm. They're both on the larger side and I found the thought of them wallowing in the tub together absolutely mortifying. DH didn't see the problem with it (nor with the fact that, when I wasn't visiting, they'd usually leave the bath water for him to use afterwards!)

Not in laws, but an old mate of mine. If we ever had pizza from a takeaway, she would sit for ages, cutting the pizza boxes into really small pieces!!! I once asked why she did it and her answer was "oh, I always have done"!!! There was only her, her hubby who worked away Mon to Fri and her 4 year old son, so it wasn't as if bin space was ever an issue!!! Used to drive me mad! I flatten the box and slide it down the side of the bin!!! Simple!

Jeeze, that is seriously odd.
I would definitely never feel able to eat there, I’d be wondering if they’d served me up bin food!

I actually still remember the day that my mum, usually a very traditional cook, served a chocolate pie kind of thing with sour cream, and it was such an eye-opening taste sensation to me I would ask about it for years to come (although I didn't know what it was called, and she had no idea what I was talking about, so I never had it again!)

Every time PIL make the 200 mile trip to visit us, MIL brings a packet of her local butcher's sausages so that DH can have "a taste of home".

Is this a mildly passive-aggressive dig at him moving 200 miles away, by any chance?

This one isn't something they do but rather something they don't do, i.e. own a toilet brush. I once searched high and low for one in the early days of going out with DH. Eventually emerged from the bathroom shame-faced and asked my then BF in hushed tones where I could find one. He told me they didn't have one as his mum thinks they're dirty. Wonder what her views are on skid marks?

Haha almost certainly - one of many 😂

After speaking to DH have more.

MIL tried to use as much water as possible because she paid her water rates. Vegetables would be left in the sink with water running over them for hours and hours ‘to clean them’.

She didn’t believe you could freeze things yourself, you could only buy pre frozen So she got v upset with me once for freezing some bacon. In fact my freezer is stuffed with batch cooking and leftovers.
Once when I was coming out of my veggie phase and I was eating chicken, she was making beef for dinner. She could only get a 6 pack of chicken breasts, so she cooked one for me, threw the rest as she couldn’t use them. She apparently did that all the time.

Her and FIL did not really speak and never passed on any information given on the phone, everything had to be repeated otherwise they would never know. Even important things.

They also would not tell us when they were coming to visit. One Friday BIL rang to say he had dropped something off at theirs to bring down to us. Except we had no idea and we were leaving to catch a plane. DH had even spoken to his parents that week and they kept saying ‘we didn’t think you meant this weekend because we were coming and we told you we were coming at some point this year.’ It was a 4 hour journey that took them 7 so they would have been totally stuck.
It actually caused a big fallout as we didn’t cancel and they refused to come for years in case we cancelled on them again!

MIL would often refuse to serve cream with dessert’s because she would declare we all needed fewer calories. She would then spend 2 days trying to put cream into tea/coffee and even tried to get you to put it on cereal as it ‘needed using up’.