PIL won't give us their house...

[JapanNextYear]

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jan/22/my-parents-in-law-have-gone-back-on-a-promise-to-give-us-their-house

TLDR

pIL offered to move out of their lovely house with garden to let family living in pokey flat in London move back to Midlands. How would this have gone on AIBU?

i read it over at The Guardian and was wondering how long would it take to appear here. Rofl. That's one nasty woman there. Sympathy for her husband and in laws. Oh and may be even for her kids because she might teach them they are entitled to things they actually might not be entitled to.

I belong to the generation rent and totally resent the way housing market spiralled and partly it's a fault of the generation buy to let. But it would be arrogant and ignorant of me to put major blame on them at all. And look at this woman. Lol

My parents have a lovely big four bed house with a nice big garden do you think I should ask them if they will swap die my two bed council house?,My parents haven't worked for twenty yrs they were lucky enough to be offered a very good redundancy deal in their early fifties and they were also able to claim their pensions at 55 good for them! Tattoo mums pathetic talking about being bereaved and grieving ffs!

"They had agreed we could move into their three-bed house and that we would rent them somewhere smaller in the area."
Yep, assuming this is real, that reads to me that DIL/Son were the initiators - otherwise, you'd write it as 'they had suggested' rather than 'they had agreed'. Or, since the FIL finds confrontation upsetting, I suspect a truthful account would be 'we informed them we would commandeer their house whilst renting the cheapest bedsit we could find for them to move to, and took their stunned silence as admiration at our solution to our housing desires'.

Loving some of the other statements made by DIL:
"We have provided them with their only grandchildren" because presumably she and her husband wouldn't have had children otherwise?

"Both my in-laws are retired, and neither has worked for at least 10 years." That's what retirement means - you stop working.

"My mum still rents (due to a marriage breakdown when I was 16) and still works and contributes to the wider world." Ooh, as opposed to those non-contributing slacker retirees.

"We struggle in this poky flat while every day these people who haven’t worked a day in the last 10 years swim around in space and a garden they don’t need." Wow. Just, wow.

Presumably DIL feels that once retired it's probably best you just curl up and die, because after all you're not contributing to the wider woeld any more and you should get out of her the way for the people like her who, y'know, matter.

Sad stuff if this is real.

The tattoo mum is amazing. Not in a good way.

I don't really have words for how controlling her article is.

If they were going to rent somewhere smaller for the in laws to live, then can't they just rent somewhere smaller for themselves? Am I missing something here?

The tattoo mum is awful.

I wonder if she ever tried to see her son's point of view.

How on earth must he feel. He waited until he was 21 and living away from home, he paid for the tattoo with his own money, he told his parents about the tattoo rather than hide it from them, but he keeps it covered out of respect when in their house.

He sounds like a decent and reasonable person. And she sounds like a loon.

I can't imagine spending three days not talking to my son and calling myself rational at the end of it. He must have felt awful after three days of her not speaking to him, and crying, and not eating, and telling the neighbours he looks like a dead pig, and writing about it in the national press, and bleating on about feeling like he died.

She's lucky that at the end of those three days of hysteria he was still prepared to speak to her. And he behaved like the adult while she behaved like a child having a tantrum.

And she's still saying that she feels she doesn't know him and he's a different person. And that she'd prefer he got someone pregnant or lost an arm. And that her feelings are unimportant to him when it comes to making decisions about his life.

Which actually is true. He's an adult. He's going to spend years making decisions about his own life that might hurt her feelings but which still have to be made. He has his own life and will build his own relationships.

He sounds like he has a handle on her controlling behaviour, but she sounds like she may be the subject of many a MIL thread on here.

"If they were going to rent somewhere smaller for the in laws to live, then can't they just rent somewhere smaller for themselves? Am I missing something here?"

I think they want somewhere bigger though.

They don't want the small flat in London.

They want the big house in the Midlands.

They feel the PILs don't need the big house to "swim about in" because they are retired and don't socialise.

So they want them to rent somewhere smaller.

If they were to move to the midlands and rent, they'd need to rent somewhere bigger for themselves, rather than somewhere small for PILs.

But according to the letter this isn't possible as they can apparently only afford the rent for PILs on a small place, not the rent for themselves on a bigger place.

I think. That's the impression I got from the letter anyway.

Anyone else wondering if it's Annalisa's SIL?

I got the impression at the time that tattoo mum was Julie Myerson making another appearance. Maybe I'm wrong but it was certainly a similar attitude.

Not only was it not a big deal, but obviously her son was sooooooo fed up of her controlling ways and got a tattoo because it was the one thing she'd always told him not to. She seemed so unable to see that standing up to her crap was important for him, and maybe take that as a sign to rethink her approach. Or even to see that at 21, he can do what he likes.

The PILs house and garden must be pretty amazing if they can swim in it. No wonder grabby DIL wants it - so would I

This is one of two things:

1. It's a genuine letter

1. It was written sincerely by someone at the Gruan in a way to appeal to their weekend readers.

If tattoo mum posted on AIBU, the responses would be epic. I'm not sure which would win, the responses offering her massive grips or the ones calling her a troll.

And we shall call her DilZilla!

Tattoo mum is something else. All that self-reflection and she manages to miss the obvious point that she needs to say sorry and accept he is an adult. She analyses her own responses to death but never seems to notice that she is failing to recognise him as a separate human being.

Wow, what a totally grabby woman.

I am sure the PIL came to their senses when they talked to their friends or took stock. For many older people who own their own home it is their remaining asset after a life of hard work. My parents home cost a fortune in its day and they live their together for a very long time, my mum for almost 50 years. When my mum got much older and had been widowed she sold up and moved out, downsizing. But sadly dementia set in and now the money she made from the sale of the house has almost all gone to fund her care in a nursing home.

I would strongly recommend no one considered their parents, parents-in-law or other elderly relatives homes are in any way 'their homes for inheriting' because it just doesn't always happen like that. And the idea parents should move out to make way for their kids is crazy.

They could take whatever they are using to rent in London and buy in the Midlands, changing from a small flat with no garden to a small house with a garden would be a start.

And I do hope they have location changed for that article because if I were her parents-in-law and read this I would be re-thinking all the 'regularly spoil with things I would rather they didn’t bother buying' and making sure the parents could not get access to any of that 'regular trust-fund contributions' (I am sure they can't, only saying!).

Neither my parents nor my PILs have given us their houses, despite being retired for aeons and us contributing (a) my parents' only grandchild and (b) my PILs cutest grandchild. I'm outraged. Outraged, I tell you.

This is tattoo mum, and for those of you who don't want to read it, I'm just gonna summarise the 'best' bits because I am AGOG that somebody actually published this:

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/aug/11/devastated-by-my-sons-tattoo

She keeps whining on about how unreasonable she knows she's being. I know this word is completely killed by MN but I think this sounds like proper batshit narcissistic ranting that shows how utterly and completely reasonable she thinks she's being.

The golden parts:
Her first reaction upon hearing about his tattoo: His lovely shoulder

• You'd think he lost his fucking arm.

*"It's just a tattoo," he says, when the silence goes on so long that we have nearly fallen over the edge of it into a pit of black nothingness. "It's not as if I came home and said I'd got someone pregnant."

It seems to me, unhinged by shock, that this might have been the better option.

His father asks, "Does it hurt?"

"Yes," I say, cutting across this male bonding. "It does. Very much."*

Yes, presumably it seems like a better option because she could've persuaded her precious son to abort that baby, get rid of the girl, cut her off, and come home and live with her as her precious baby forever. Because that's the level of possessiveness she's showing over his body. Plus there was something scary/creepy and psychopathic about her literally talking over her husband and son's normal reactions!!

you're not. You're different. I will never look at you in the same way again. It's a visceral feeling. Maybe because I'm your mother. All those years of looking after your body – taking you to the dentist and making you drink milk and worrying about green leafy vegetables and sunscreen and cancer from mobile phones. And then you let some stranger inject ink under your skin. To me, it seems like self-mutilation. If you'd lost your arm in a car accident, I would have understood. I would have done everything to make you feel better. But this – this is desecration. And I hate it."

I mean, yes, it's like you thought you'd earned eternal right to his body, and has misunderstood the whole fundamental role of parenting as taking care of somebody else's body until they are old enough to have complete autonomy over it themselves. She also describes his body as "pig carcass," and telling everybody she's no longer sure she knows him. You'd think he'd been the victim of some terrible attack the way she's talking...basically attacking her son's right to make a choice.

I think people who are saying this is fake are being overly optimistic. Doesn't anyone else remember the stepmother who essentially told her stepdaughter - who's mother died when she was about 16 - to fuck off for crying to her dad in the middle of the night? Once?

I have seen similar goings on around me. Some folk are all demand and no give. Selfish people.
I will have a house without mortgage given to me along with some money and I live in fear of that day because it will mean that I don't have any family older than me!

I will also have to deal with the "entitled" ones who have done nothing, been totally absent for years, and their demands for this and that on my own because that is their level, they would not have dared when people were fit and well.

Ach, kitsnicket, I saw your first few words "This is tattoo mum..." on my watched thread list and thought, "Ooh my, this may kick off!" nosey emoticon

Still, saves me scrolling back up to the earlier link!

*His father asks, "Does it hurt?"

"Yes," I say, cutting across this male bonding. "It does. Very much."*

I remember that bit from when I first read it! I thought just ugh ugh ugh who can BE that much of a drama queen and not just die of shame on the spot!? Why didn't both the dad and the son say "Oh just get over yourself" and go into another room to continue their conversation?

However that bit sums it up so perfectly. Dad thinks, hmm son has a new tattoo, I wonder if his shoulder feels OK. But she thinks "The pain! The pain! The pain for MEEEEEEEEE!" All her son is to her is something that affects her feelings, does or doesn't let her control him, does or doesn't go along with her idea of what he should be – and matters only according to those tests.

It's like all those on here about things narcissistic mothers have said to MNers. And I think by getting a tattoo, he was probably (at whatever level) trying to make a statement to her that he is his own person, not hers. If she can't see him the same way ever again and has to disown him, he's probably thinking "result".

Tattoo Mum should be grateful he didn't ink his eyeballs

There was a thread about tattoo mum when it was published.
Asshole that she is.