Harmless but annoying relatives - get it off your chest here!

[Basketballhoop]

This is definitely a me problem, but I need to vent somewhere. MIL is here for Christmas, and I don't quite know how long after... For various reasons, we have not seen each other for about 3 years. Three days in and I am ready to not see her for another 3 years. 😳

The radio is on, just slightly too loud, on cheesy local radio, all the time. If you are in the same room, she cannot not talk. Every brief silence has to be filled with inane chatter. If I leave the room to get a break, she hunts me down. I have literally heard her going room to room saying, where are you, where are you.

If I go to my kitchen to prepare anything, she is watching every move so she can use it as an opener for the next inanity. She will then offer to help, but as she is quite unsteady on her feet, she just ends up in the way. She has already slipped twice, despite us asking her to let us know if she needs help.

We had some friends over yesterday afternoon. Within 5 minutes of them arriving, she is talking about her bowel problems, and massively over sharing all her health issues. They looked horrified and left as quickly as possible.

We had lunch for my mum's birthday on Sunday. My mum is a few years older than her and very recently widowed. MIL admitted yesterday that she had spent most of the meal giving my mum advice on how to get out more to meet new people. I know my mum will have politely listened but she only buried her husband of 60 years a couple of weeks ago and is barely holding things together, let alone thinking about meeting new people in her 80s! Ironically MIL was widowed 4 years ago, yet won't drive outside her home town.

Plus, she admitted to recently sharing a few other unnecessary things that my husband had specifically asked her not to talk to people about, with the very person (his dad) husband didn't want to know.

We visited some other friends yesterday evening (she came too). I am dreading when she decides she wants to have a debrief on the evening. 🤦‍♀️

None of it is meant badly. She honestly is a kind person, just zero awareness, or thought before she opens her mouth. This is my version of screaming into a pillow!

Hit me with your annoying relative stories. Help me feel like I am not the only one who is smiling through gritted teeth through Christmas.

Oh, that ended up long. I am more irritated than I realised. 😳

My mother is like this 🫣

I’m at my in laws, they are genuinely lovely people and go to huge amounts of effort to make us feel welcome/comfortable etc. But my God the conversation is dull - last night I had the full low down on their next door neighbours from their first house, purchased 60 years ago. I wouldn’t mind so much, but DH doesn’t speak, DC disappear up to their rooms as soon as they politely can, so I’m left carrying the conversation about people I’ve never met. The TV never goes on so it’s just polite chit chat all day/evening.

She sounds lovely but yes highly irritating op 🤦‍♀️
Why don't you know how long she is staying? Surely an exit strategy will make this all a bit more bearable?!

We've got pil coming to stay for New Year. They stay 4-5 times a year for a few nights. I love them to bits but jeeesus my nerves get tested! They are the type who have always been old and old fashioned, even when they were young.

Ours is an uncle - lovely, generous in spirit, kind, all the good stuff, but incredibly loud (you can hear him from every room in the house), has lived on his own for a long time so has some quite fixed ideas on how things should be done, and tells incredibly tall tales that can't possibly be true. If you took everything he said at face value he'd be utterly indispensable to local emergency services because he has been on the scene of every local (and some national) emergency incident for the past 30 years and been instrumental in solving/resolving/rescuing the whole situation. Lovely, but hard work.

Why don't you know how long she is staying? Surely an exit strategy will make this all a bit more bearable?!

This part is a husband/me problem! With my dad dying recently, I have been focussed on my mum and getting her looked after, so I blindly agreed she could come and didn't ask him how long for. She is on the cusp of needing to go into supported living, and I think he feels guilty for having 'neglected' her the last couple of years, while we worked through other things. He collected her a couple of days earlier than I had anticipated and I had forgotten how irritating I find her, so didn't ask how long she was staying. She has also got worse with age.

I will address it, ask her if I have to, at least it is a topic of conversation! 🤣

OP I think we should have more control over our MIL & FIL.
I have just come from working 3 nights.
My OH decided to make a roast and said we would have it.I am so exhausted after the shifts and do appreciate him cooking.But instead of us having a chill evening by ourselves, his mum & dad have to come.Please note we see them every two days.

Yesterday I asked my OH whether he would consider living anywhere else in the world and he confidently said to me- No.I would only live where my parents and twin are.
Don't know about this statement but I ended wondering about me his OH?
What if I moved jobs?

Anyway, that said, I feel we ought to set boundaries between ILs and family.
If one something doesn't make my OH comfortable, I would not expose them to it e.g having my parents over whenever.

Have a great Christmas though.

Oh god, now she wants me to inspect a recent surgical site for her to make sure it is healing properly. I declined as we were about to eat. I am appropriately qualified, but I don't want to, it isn't my place.

Thankfully, husband appears to be similarly talked at and out! She started on about her bowels again as we were sitting down to eat, and he told her sharply to stop, that it isn't table talk, while teenage sons looked on awkwardly, ate and retreated back to their rooms.

Back ground: I'm remarried. 17 years with DH now. XH is a dick who we all hate, including his grown up kids. He is less than nothing to us now.

Now - my mother.
Last year i told her that if she manages to work my xh into convo at the xmas table again, as if he is some long lost fucking hero, like she does every fucking year, then this time DH will physically remove her from the room.

It worked. She didn't mention him.

Now - this year - if we could just get her to shut up about her bowels and the bloody 'guess who's dead' game while we're trying to have a happy time at dinner we'll be on a winner 🙄

I hear all of this. My mum who has an opinion on everything is here.
I'm trying to move presents from my bedroom where my youngest child is in my bed after a sickness bug...
And I'm being asked to sign in blood to commit to be at hers for the whole day next year.
Patiently asked for 2024 Xmas to happen pre organising 2025 to her being mardy,

I am hosting all my in laws
It is torture
2 extra dogs, 2 shouty small children who are upsetting the many dogs, 1 monosyllabic brother in law and my MIL

I have been at work all day but when I get home everyone is sat round expecting me to start dinner despite them having done naff all the whole day. I expressed some mild irritation with DH about this forgetting that in fact the sun shines out of DH arse as far as MIL is concerned.

Very irritating

My MIL is a massive misogynist.
She has alluded to the fact that women that wear revealing clothes are asking to be sexually assaulted. I currently despise her. She has always been a bit sexist but that’s it out in the open. DH was very embarrassed.

She also likes to be very ‘ladylike’ we just watched Motherland Christmas episode. We all laughed out loud. When I asked her is she liked it she said not really. She was laughing like a drain.

Then the cheese board, every fucking time it comes out which is every day. She does her performative I can’t have cheese it gives me spots. I have a Granny bingo in my head for her stock phases.

Then long rambling chats about her cousins in great details. She is in her eighties but she was in her fifties when I met her and she was like it then.

She missed her era she should have been a woman with a delicate constitution who laid on a chaise lounge whilst receiving calling cards and having attacks of the vapours.

My dad. I absolutely love him to bits.

He seems to always need to clean his hearing aid tubes when he visits. But he never has the cleaning equipment with him.

So conversations are interesting with him answering what he think he has heard not what I have said.

My inlaws - I do actually like them but we’re 3 days into a 5 day visit atm, and it’s difficult to keep the conversation going, I’m currently hiding in the kitchen ‘on charge’.

also MIL quite easily takes offence so wish me luck as one of her presents is those eye masks which help products sink in which I now think will offend her….never mind Ive also bought them for my 20yr old daughter…

Small excited children got up pre 6am and started running uo and down the hall plus one of them seems to have got a toy harmonica from Santa. Oh joy

This has set the yappy dog off barking

I guess Christmas is starting bright and early for us and probably the neighbours too.

May as well get up and start cooking...
Bah humbug.

I was having a conversation with my SIL last night as I've just started and she has been through the menopause. My hypercondriac FIL decides to join in and tell us about how he can't sleep either, has anxiety and hormone issues, he was trying to compare every symptom to how bad his health is......you do not have a flipping uterus mate!
He does have a history of dramatising health, any little thing is blown up, anything you've got he's had it and 10 times worse but c'mon you can't compete on this one

Me and my brothers had a very shitty childhood due to my mother and her anger issues. However she thinks it was great and looks back on it fondly. It’s difficult when everyone is trying to be cheerful around the dinner table and she will bring up some funny memory of something one of us did or said as kids. It’s not that the memories aren’t real, but we get depressed thinking about our childhoods while she gets happy.