No, this isn’t a MIL-bashing thread as such, I’d be annoyed if anyone did what I’m about to describe, but I do have to say that my MIL’s ways do test my patience at times.
She’s due to visit at the weekend, and as always, I am somewhat dreading it. She demands a ‘tour’ of the house EVERY time she visits, regardless of whether we have changed anything since her last visit or not. The house is a big old Victorian pile which we love and which people are always quite excited to see, but with four cats, me working from home, suffering from chronic fatigue and caring for my parents part-time, a pathologically messy DH and my parents renting part of the house from us, the fact is that I don’t want people to see every single room, as I’m pretty much the only person in the house who does much in the way of cleaning or tidying (my parents can’t due to various disabilities, and DH barely lifts a finger, because cleaning and tidying are for ‘uptight’ people in his opinion. Oh, and ‘no one notices either way’, apparently. Except that his own mother VERY MUCH notices.)
It’s really MIL's attitude that's the problem, as the 'tours' are actually thinly-disguised inspections during which it always appears she is actively looking for things to criticise. Her own standards of cleanliness and tidiness are extremely high, and she frequently refers to people who don’t subscribe to her own high standards as lazy. We do show people around the house a little, and show them some of the rooms, but not all. I consider bedrooms, for example, to be private (on her last visit MIL demanded to be shown my parents’ bedroom!!!) and I won’t show people rooms which are cluttered or messy, and there are always a couple of those in our house, because with so much on my plate it’s just not possible for me to keep everything pristine, even with a cleaner coming in every couple of weeks.
I think I could see MIL wanting to see the whole house if we'd changed anything in it since her last visit, lol - but she had the full tour the first time (Highlights: 'You'll have to get rid of that awful carpet', 'You need to do x, y, z to the garden ', 'You'll be redecorating the whole house, of course ') and the second after we’d had a LOT of work done ('I see you've still got that awful carpet', 'I'd have thought you'd have ripped those wardrobes out', 'You need to get the exterior repainted') so she’s seen everything now and I really couldn't work out what the deal was with wanting to see Every Single Room again last time and acting like a spoilt child when she couldn't.
Highlights of her last visit: starting to pull branches off one of our trees because 'they need to come off', opening every cupboard and looking into it, sniffily remarking 'Oh, well, the garden's looking a bit better now' in front of my mum and dad who put a LOT of time and effort into making this garden look great when they were more able-bodied, opening cupboards and looking into them, and - the piece de resistance - pulling the classic 'trailing finger along dusty surface, then looking at finger' move. Basically, the more stuff she sees, the more she finds to criticise, so it's easier for my blood pressure if I can limit the amount of criticisms of my home that she's able to find. When did it become socially acceptable to demand a ‘tour’ the second one arrives in someone else’s home? And then whine when said ‘tour’ doesn’t extend to every single room in the house? frowny face
AIBU to be dreading her visit? And, more importantly, AIBU not to let her roam around our home at will, especially given how critical she is?