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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

Original poster

to refuse to follow my MIL's ridiculous standards of etiquette?

173 replies

daisythedog · 08/08/2007 13:03

I'm not talking please and thank you here. She expects us (meaning husband, me and 2 young children) to follow conventions that would be appropriate for a Jane Austen novel. Do I stand on ceremony purely to stay on her good side, or do I act as I usually do and risk her thinking that i'm an uncivilized yob? By the way, by all reasonable standards I'm a very polite person, and am extremely respectful of other people's feelings.

OP posts:
muppetgirl · 08/08/2007 18:00

ooo and my dad's friend calls breakfast

break fast ( break -as in break a leg)

Caroline1852 · 08/08/2007 18:05

Very big lol at the Volvo joke!
Egg and chips and linen napkins sounds wonderfully eccentric.... was the brown sauce decanted to a condiment jar or blobbed straight from the bottle? This thread is very enjoyable.

maveta · 08/08/2007 18:08

Ugh - writing notes, I HATE writing notes when you´re obligated to

If staying with someone I do try to remember to leave them a thank you card either in the room or mail it to them afterwards. Not 100% success rate but I try. My Aunt however sounds like your MIL and doesn´t ´believe´ in email so she sends little letters i.e. welcome to your new home etc. All really lovely but if I haven´t replied in writing to thank her for her letter within a week (bearing in mind we live in different countries) I hear from my Mum ´Aunt ... says did you GET her letter?´

Then when I do reply she writes to thank me for my letter..and it all starts again. Ugh.

You have my sympathies. But this is my Aunt and I can ignore her and it has no effect on my life.. not sure what I would do if it was my MIL. Um.. no, I do, I´d ignore her too

maveta · 08/08/2007 18:10

My mum called someone ´common´ the other day. My little sister and I nearly died.

We are soooo not posh but my mum´s side of the family seem to have picked up the idea somewhere along the line that they are. Cringe.

fiddlemama · 08/08/2007 18:12

Muppetgirl my dad called breakfast break fast too and he was from a very rough area but the biggest social climber I ever met!!!!
Themoon66. Please what does LMAO mean? I am very new on mn and don't always understand

muppetgirl · 08/08/2007 18:15

The same lady (who was lovely btw) left a card on dh's and mine pillows when we satyed over at her house saying 'I hope you enjoy your stay'.

themoon66 · 08/08/2007 18:19

LMAO = Laughed My Arse Off

pagwatch · 08/08/2007 18:21

Well...my house has a butlers pantry.
Seriously - it was on the details and everything when we bought it. Hubby and I thought it was really funny ( especially as we were buying a big old beautiful house when we have spent most of our marriage with diddly squat) and we actually started to call it that and it stuck. (is an odd sort of room with odd stuff in it including the big pantry cupboards so not sure what you would call it)
Anyway I keep ctaching myself looking at my daughter as her life is now so different from mine and I see how her life looks to people from the outside looking in ( IYKWIM) and then we're at the shops and she says "...do you think I left it in the butlers pantry mama" and I wonder why we both don't get hit more.

...and it is interesting to me how incredibly defensive I always get about having any money even though we both worked bloody hard for it. Why do I do that?

pagwatch · 08/08/2007 18:25

post script.
My mum was always pretty cool but has become more of a competetive snob as she has got older and now it makes me really embaressed. And yet if she ever mixes with really posh people she insists they are stuck up and rude and shallow. What is that all about?

Shoshable · 08/08/2007 18:43

Beetroot, My father had a grandmother like yours, on doing our family tree, I found out that all her children were illegitimate, she had 3 husbands, was in and out of the workhouse, and was a lady of the night!!!!

MaryAnnSingleton · 08/08/2007 18:58

hate the word lounge - not posh at all - sitting room is better - I do have friends that have a drawing room though

Cammelia · 08/08/2007 19:02

lounge? Only at airports or in hotels

MaryAnnSingleton · 08/08/2007 19:02

can I add suite,as in 3 piece and cruet and if I'm being really picky, it's writing paper and not notepaper.

hatwoman · 08/08/2007 19:08

back to the op. your mil has obviously made it clear that she is disappointed by the lack of thank you letter. isn;t that ruder than not writing one?

muppetgirl · 08/08/2007 20:15

My friends mum (who is like a mum to me) has a 'parlour' and a room called 'the dairy'

The dairy because it was where they used to milk the cows -it's a farmhouse

And the parlour -it's the best room

fiddlemama · 08/08/2007 20:40

Sobernow, like Caroline I find the idea of egg and chips with linen napkins charmingly eccentric but not in napkin rings, not even silver ones, Oh dear me no!!! Terribly middle class! What?! no servants to launder them? Have to use 'em again?! Must have been the kind of people who had to buy their own silver and called it cutlery (Tee Hee )
Seriously, my weired sense of humour which made me lol at my dad's ridiculous airs and graces and his tendency to almost say the wrong word and then correct himself at the last moment means that when tha cooms fer egg an chips at our 'ouse chuck, tha'll be gi'en a "s'napkin"

CristinaTheAstonishing · 08/08/2007 20:42

When DH was growing up his Dad would present a written Christmas menu for each person at the table. In French. (PILs were and still are v poor.)

motheroftwoboys · 09/08/2007 14:37

We recently "downsized" from a big old Victorian house which did have an upstairs drawing room. We had the dining room and the "family room" downstairs. In the new house we have two rooms downstairs - the dining room and a.n.other - we still don't know what to call it! BTW I think thank you letters are still a lovely thing. We don't have friends round so often now but two out of three would always send a thank you note after coming round for a meal, or even send flowers! My (late) mum always used to write a letter/card when they stayed for a couple of nights. I am afraid I still "heavily encourage" my DSs - 16 and 15 - to write thank you letters for Christmas and birthday present. Hardly anyone does now - even for wedding presents and I do find that rude! Maybe I am just old fashioned!

TheQueenOfQuotes · 09/08/2007 14:43

ok so what do we call our living room and dining room which are actually 2 rooms joined together then without being "common"???

We call it a lounge-diner.........

MadamePlatypus · 09/08/2007 14:59

My mum was slightly surprised when DS said toilet not loo. We have a front room, although my natural inclination would be to call a room with a sofa a sitting room. However, we live in a two up two down, and there is not getting away from the fact that the people who built the house built a front room, not a sitting room.

I was brought up eating supper, but DS says tea and thinks of supper as a meal you have before you go to bed. On the other hand, I think of tea as a cup of tea and some cake. I am compromising at the moment - the children eat at around 5pm, so they have tea, which in my mind is 'nursery tea', and I don't usually call our evening meal anything. However, I don't think a meal eaten after about 7pm is tea, so I may subtly start to use 'supper' again.

I think thank you notes are nice, but I get annoyed about all that kind of thing being the woman's responsibility. Presumably if she did her job properly your husband should be doing all this kind of thing?

Quattrocento · 09/08/2007 15:22

Oh manners. How absurd to insist on them from grown-ups.

Different with children of course. I do insist on thank you letters for every present. Thankless chore. Also ban use of toilet, serviette, lounge and settee. The midday meal is lunch. Also ban wearing trainers unless doing sport. Finally, and most bizarrely I insist they pass things to one another at mealtimes WITHOUT being asked.

All this makes my children scream with laughter and treat me like something out of the ark. They pass the water and salt and pepper to one another exaggeratedly.
They get their trainers out of their kitbags and swap into them when they think I am not looking.

pagwatch · 09/08/2007 15:29

When DS was born he was first grandchild in Dh's family. Whilst MIL and FIL opted for grandpa and granny FIL's parents opted for "Bill" and ....." bessame mucho" ( def not correct spelling). Apparently it is many kisses in Italian or something.
Yeah - that was going to work.

Actually when we asked FIL he said " He must choose" ( meaning DS must choose). I had to explain that DS would not be speaking for some time and that we needed a name unless he wanted me saying " here we are - he is granny and wankers house ". He chose grandpa

meandmyflyingmachine · 09/08/2007 15:31

Thank you letters are manners.

Vocab is snobbery...

Quattrocento · 09/08/2007 15:43

Yes I think you are right M&M.

What about passing things at mealtimes?

ladymac · 09/08/2007 15:44

I think I was swapped at birth. Grew up in a council house but squirm at the use of the word lounge and tell the children to say loo rather than toilet.