To absolutely HATE HATE staying in my in-laws´ house even though they are kind, decent people?

[savebraveted]

I only do it twice a year for a couple of nights and it turns me into a horrible, huffy, critical meanie. I don't understand what happens to me. Admittedly, it is not a comfortable experience, tiny house, one bathroom for nine people, everyone shouting after bedtime while our 3 kids are trying to sleep, no space to put any of our clothes, no privacy etc.
My MIL is currently snoring in the most repulsive way sitting next to me on a small sofa and I am bored out of my wits while they all discuss their own family matters between themselves.
BUT they tend to our every need, feed us, shower the children with love and affection, the kids enjoy themselves and I don't have to wash up. Obviously part of married life is to share time with families and my DH is lovely with mine.
I turn into this horrible, snobbish person and I just ache to go home. Why the hell can´t I be more accepting and patient? I usually am in other areas of life - I just see this place as total hell....aargh.

Is there any way your kids could go "on holiday" to stay with grandma and grandpa instead of you all staying there as a family? If your kids love it and the grandparents love having them you and DH could drop the kids off, stay for a meal, then go home (if an acceptable distance away) or to a hotel for a "break" while the kids stay a couple of nights with in-laws, then you return mid morning to collect them and spend the day before driving home mid afternoon?

Present it right and give the grandparents a lovely thank you present (flowers/ wine/ chocolate), egging up the fact they are doing you such a big favour giving you a break -(implying it is a break from parenting duties not from staying with the inlaws of course) and the kids love staying with them so much.

That's what we have been doing 3 or 4 times a year since the youngest was weaned from the breast at 13 months, excellent for everyone

I'd hate staying with my family for longer than 2 nights at the most, and we all quite like each other. Really upset when the B&B next to them shut down..

My inlaws live in a tiny bungalow and the only time we stayed over DH's sister and her kids decided to stay as well (they live a 30 minute drive away!). She had the only double bed to herself and we all had to muddle along with sofas and fold up beds.
And yes to the tiny wine glasses and fully laid table for all meals - WTF is that all about?!!
We bought a campervan containing a fridge full of wine and parked it up in their drive. Problem solved!!!

I feel your pain. In my case it is made worse by the fact that my Dad is a PITA and won't let us stay with him or indeed any family visit (despite living in a 3 bed house he is a massive hoarder and has got worse now he is on his own) so if I want to go anywhere near my hometown / visit friends etc I don't really have a choice (no hotels near).

ILs are ok but I hate waiting hours for a shower and then they can never be persuaded to go anywhere or do anything, even for a quick walk. This year they went to Tesco (on their own) without even asking if we wanted to go. I feel that if you have people staying for more than a day you should at least ask if they fancy going out for lunch / a walk / do something that doesn't involve sitting in the living room all day. I don't think they do anything but housework and go to out of town retail parks, it's very depressing! After 2 days I am bored out of my mind and start making plans to go out and meet other people, but I then feel guilty for using them like a B&B. They can't stay with us as we have a tiny flat and they come to our area maybe once a year.

My pil are the same re table setting. They have special implements for every dining activity imaginable (even a pickle stabber). Bil used to wind them up by eating condiments in the wrong context, eg hollandaise sauce with beef, mint sauce with salmon etc. Fil got genuinely cross about it!

They try to infect me with the implement perfection by buying me things like a special chopping board for garlic bread, a lazy susan specifically for cheese and the like.

Some of you need my MIL, who has been saying she hates all the fuss of having visitors for 30 years, and has gradually moved out all but one spare single bed so that everyone barring the odd visiting grandchild has to stay in a hotel. She's very formal and hostess-y, so I can see it's a faff for her (not to mention her guests).

What's a lazy susan???
My ex MIL was a dream to visit. Beautiful room with ensuite and the fluffiest towels ever. She even saved all her Clarins freebies and put them in a basket for me when I stayed.
Shame her son was such a cock.....

That reminds me of a classic moment profyaffle. DPs came for a (non staying over visit) shortly after DS was born.

I was teetering on the edge of insanity caused by no sleep. DH russled up a fairly decent meal of pork chops with veg and potatoes and DF spent the entire meal bemoaning our lack of steak knives, because clearly after 2 weeks of tending for a non sleeping newborn having the correct cutlery hould have been top of our priority list.

Next time we saw them, he was proudly clutching a gift for us of steak knives.

We chuckle every time we use them.

OP, how would it go down if you read a book in the evenings? This is how I get through most tricky family visits. You can look up and comment occasionally, laugh along and be sociable. But you have your book to retreat to. My other tip is to be the one who makes the tea, or fetches things. You look kind and helpful, while giving yourself a break from the noise and activity and squashed togetherness of it all. Plus, going for walks, with or without everyone in tow.

It is hard. In my family we are fairly open about it being natural to need a break from the gathering, especially for those married rather than born into the family. My mother is a good enough MIL to ask her children-in-law if they are going potty yet with an in-law overdose and would they like to escape and if so, do they need a lift. It is a very good goodwill booster.

Yanbu OP. In fact I nearly started a very similar thread.

My inlaws are lovely, kind, generous people who love DS, but 4 days with them at Christmas pretty much wrecked me. All the other partners have been around for decades, so I just feel like an awkward, introverted spare part.

Add in constant digs about me being PFB and the obligation on everyone to "help" (even if it means 6 of us standing around with dishcloths and all attempting to dry up the same glass) and it wears me out!

heavens a lazy susan is basically just a spinning plate/serving dish. It's supposed to go in the middle of the table so everyone can turn it to reach what they want. This one is made of marble, supposed to keep the cheese cool.

rookie that's exactly the sort of thing pil would do. On the very rare occasions they visit us they take note of what we don't have in our house that they think we should have then buy us that for Xmas. They obviously had one visit with us where they were flustered by the lack of garlic bread chopping facilities

Profyaffle - I got a milk frother for Christmas this year. I don't wish to appear ungrateful, it's better than the beautifully wrapped box of clingfilm I got one other year, but a) it's quite big and b) I don't recall having a need for a milk frother.

My parents have a lazy Susan as well although we mostly used it for playing scrablle where it is actually quite handy.

Lol! The approach I usually take is to store this stuff in a cupboard til I feel a seemly amount of time has passed then I take it to the charity shop (usually around Julyish.)

Love a good IL thread.
DP can't stand them, so we only stay once a year max.
FIL does all the cooking because he's such a control freak he couldn't stand anyone else doing it. Food is always tepid. Never had a hot meal there. He always makes some bullshit excuse but I think that's just how he likes it.
On christmas day we'd been there 3 hours before we were offered an alcoholic drink (if it was my parent's I'd have either helped myself or said "get us a drink then" but we can't do/say that with them).
Previous christmases have been the most terminally dull affairs. FIL always wants to watch 30yo Only Fools & Horses episodes and we all had to sit in silence.

I couldn't cope with 9 people and one bathroom. Is that just the one bog, too?

I sympathise. Can't stand staying with ILs. They're perfectly accommodating, I just feel the need to be smiley and chatty the whole time. The beds have been around since the 80s, so aren't very comfortable, and they are the sort of very posh academic types who don't clean very well. I have to re-wash up a mug for coffee, or a teeny wine glass for my daily glass of wine allowance. I also get the stares if I have a refill!

At least being uncomfortable in someone else's house shows you what NOT to do when you have company! I always make sure the wine is out and up for grabs, and make sure guests have simple things in their room like a lamp. It makes all the difference.

YANBU. I completely empathise.

My mother does the formal table thing, OK for a special meal but not constantly. All condiments in small bowls with special tiny spoons, everything else in nice serving bowls with serving spoons. Couldn't be any old spoon it had to be Serving Spoons. Made so much unnecessary mess and work as we fuss about putting unused mustard back into its jar.

She also constantly comments and questions about mundane stuff. Recently I couldn't sleep because my room was boiling so I watched a movie on my tablet and drunk a small bottle of water. I went to the toilet at 1.30 am and got worried shouts of "are you alright are you alright why arent you asleep why do you keep going to the toilet do you always go to the toilet that much you should be asleep by now???" You can't say I'm going to the shop, or to the park without a big long pointless discussion. I try to avoid any discussion about directions, that would be half an hour of my life gone.

Bless her, she means well but she has a way of infiltrating your mental space and refusing to leave.

I go to my inlaws and they have pleasant conversations and force wine into your hands.

I feel the same as so many of these posts. My IL's are lovely and great hosts it's just seems, as I get older, I can't do sharing a house at all. Totally agree with the comment up thread about DH reverting to teenage boydom and me sitting around feeling slightly redundant and awkward. Glad I'm not alone as I often feel guilty about feeling so ungrateful and having such antisocial thoughts.

I think grown adults just reach a point where they value their own space and don't like living in someone else's house. There's nothing at all wrong with that.

I can easily stay with my ILs for a few days, even a week but say we travelled to them for the summer, I think it that I think it'd be better just to book a cottage nearby. And not because of my ILs, who are great.

We would not even consider staying at my mum and dad even for one overnight..

rookiemere when we first moved nearer the in-laws (as in to the same country, making us visitable for the first time for various reasons) they visited and I served coffee and cake and had... drum roll... no cake forks!

I served cake without implements but had to scuttle back to the kitchen for teaspoons as jaws dropped at the idea of eating a sponge cake with fingers. As I returned I heard MIL asking DH in tones of deep shock and disbelief how a 32 year old married woman could possibly not own cake forks no suggestion her 31 year old married son should own cake forks

Next visit we were indeed presented with a set of 12 cake forks and mysteriously 12 long handled ice-cream Sunday spoons

Now I've been living in Germany 9 years I also automatically expect to eat any and every type of cake with a fork, however... My parents, who have a bizzare pampered chief or Lakeland gadget for every eventuality, and a hot plate to boot, and even have special multi bladed scissors to make chopping fresh herbs much less efficient and more time consuming and generally a huge faff easier do not own cake forks - how can I now eat cake at their house?

Why schwab the answer is simple. You must of course drag your parents out of their squalor and purchase cake forks as a present for them.
I'm interested to know if the same cake fork can be used for say pastries or flans, or would a different one be required?

Op my mil is a cow I wouldnt care if she was lovely and just snored!

Laughing my head off at all of you 'casual' lazy gels getting your come-uppance with proper cutlery and clean tablecloths and cloth napkins....The shock of it!!

Stares with narrowed eyes at Krampus...are you one of my gels??

Frequent use of the lavatory at night could be diabetes or PREGNANCY!!

I believe you use the same cake forks for pastries and flans...however I may be doing it wrong MIL hardly ever visits us any more since I stopped politely listening to her pointed cleaning and housework "tips and tricks" monologues, which involved me being expected to follow her around my own house having my housewifely mistakes pointed out and solutions suggested Now we visit them mainly and leave when we are ready, and get on much better.

The in-laws are actually lovely and helpfu, and I get on with them better/ more easily than my own parents, but MIL does need reigning in - by all accounts her own mother was absolutely horrible to her and treated her like Cinderella, and when MIL, who only has sons, finally acquired a DIL she initially seemed to think that the mother-daughter relationship she grew up with was the correct dynamic, but was fairly quickly set straight and terms re-negotiated. She is now a doting grandparent and appreciated for that.