To ask you to share CF in law stories from your weddings?

[Sconesandgravy]

Please share your CF in law stories from your weddings. I need to know it's not just me that has one.

I got married on Saturday. We had a micro wedding for multiple reasons. Our daughter, our closest friend each and their partner, and our parents or in my case parental. No siblings or other family.

My Mother in Law is weirdly emeshed with DH's two older siblings and can't cope if they aren't included in everything.

As we were cutting the cake, and having our moment, She shouts out "Make sure you save a piece for BIL, SIL and grandad!" After we'd served everyone she hacked off a huge messy chunk for them, rather than take the finger slices we'd been cutting rendering the rest of the top tier unusable.

It sounds childish but out of all the "petty" moments of the day this one stuck out the most. I think it's because she "stole" my moment.

I'm sure I'll laugh about it in years to come, but it's been four days and amongst the nastier things she did I am beyond angry. So I'm using MN as a form of catharsis, in the hopes that other people have nightmare in laws 😁

At the party itself I just looked at the cake and her and raised my eyebrows. At home it all kicked off. Firstly she denied it but when I mentioned specific details she caved but apparently “our Liz (not real name) deserved something nice” because I’d had a wedding paid for and she hadn’t. I was also told I was a spoilt brat because my dad had bought me an iPod for Christmas. 5 years earlier.

My dear mum thought it would be nice to ask husband's three year old niece to be my third bridesmaid. Trouble is they lived in another country and would be arriving the week of the wedding. I bought extra dress material and a pattern and sent it to future SIL asking her to find a good dressmaker and I would pay for the dress to be made.

My SIL duly arrived the week of the wedding and I asked to see the dress. She refused. On the big day I had two bridesmaids in beautiful dresses and the little one in a badly fitted dress which was hanging off her shoulders it was so big. It turns out my SIL had asked her 16 year old daughter to make the dress! If she had let me see the dress earlier in the week my dressmaker could have fixed it. Indeed she had offered to do that. My dressmaker was annoyed that anyone would think she'd made the awful dress. 😖

In real life, I’ve seen more painful (in a huge range of ways) best man speeches than okay ones. Avoiding speeches which make the entire room cringe is a big positive of having a wedding like the OP had, in my opinion.

The groom was stood up thanking everyone for all their help and presenting them with flowers. There was nothing for his mum because she'd not done anything to help. I don't think he meant to hurt her, he just didn't think because there wasn't anything specific to thank her for as such.

His mum stormed out and left shortly after.

Oh if we are moving onto speeches, I went to one of DH’s cousin’s weddings, where the father of the bride speech was basically “my daughter is a total nightmare, she has caused us endless trouble and embarrassed us in the following ways, I am amazing she has found anyone to take her on, but we are so glad she is no longer our problem”.

It was not a joke. She has EUPD. The “embarrassing things” were literally things like her assaulting people and shoplifting, not “funny in retrospect” anecdotes. There was silence afterwards.

And then a groom’s speech where he called the bride’s parents “his new mum and dad”, and his original mum, who had actually paid for the whole wedding, got up and stormed out.

Nothing like this happened at my wedding, thank god, I would have gone over the edge. Oh, apart from my grandmother making a point of telling me how beautiful my sister looked - no comment about me though.

Why is it that mother in laws in particulars seem to go so completely mental when it comes to weddings?!

This was the only cringey one I have been to @Shirls2. Usually they are quite amusing. I have sat through a fair few father of the bride speeches were he bigs up his new son-in-law and says something like we knew he was the one when she brought him home for the first time - and we can remember the early days when he told us they couldn't stand him!

The glass tinkle, kiss tradition. Cringe. Thought the sports kisscam thing was bad enough.

When we got married, we only wanted a small guest list of 20 people. We had asked both sets of parents who they wanted to invite before issuing invites and agreed to their choices.

MIL decided if anyone dropped out she would be the one to invite someone else in their place. I only discovered this in Tesco's when her random neighbour told me they couldn't wait until pay day so they could put a deposit down on the villa her whole family would be staying in for my wedding. Thankfully my blunt mother was there and just said why are you booking a villa when you aren't invited.

MIL got more stealthy with her invitations after that we ended up way over our numbers and 50% of the guest list random people from her life.

She made a big deal about hosting a family dinner the night before the wedding then told me I wasn't invited because I wasn't family.

She paid a deposit for the local hairdressers and beauticians on the island in the hope noone would be free to the wedding parties hair and makeup. Unknown to her our wedding company had their own on staff so it worked out fine.

During the speeches got her sister to give one which was only about MIL and how in this was her special day.

We had dinner at one venue then moved to a beach bar for cocktails for the rest of the evening. When they arrived at the venue I was told the wedding was over and this part of the day was for her sisters birthday, they them started putting up happy birthday decorations. At this point the wedding company told her if she didn't stop she would be asked to leave.

She also has a large canvas in her front room and which I've been badly cropped out.

Because of her behaviour I could barely look at her for a year when we got home. She sent me a very long text message, which she must have thought was an apology. She never said sorry just tried to justify her behaviour because FIL had never married her this was her only chance for a wedding day of her own.

Talking about best men - My exh dithered hugely over who to choose for his best man, a long standing friend from his school years or a much newer friend who he'd gotten very close to. He went for the newer friend who literally stood up on the reception, said "I'm no good at making speeches so I'm not going to make one" then sat back down. 🤣

I am a MIL already and will get that privilege again next year. So far as I am aware the red mist hasn't descended yet. Perhaps it has and I only think I am behaving reasonably!

She also wasn’t invited to christening due to her behaviour so attended and hid in a bush 😂

Stealth MIL!

😂 I enjoy a thread about MIL antics. I would particularly enjoy a separate one regarding the birth of grandchildren. I really loved the poster’s story about her MIL just so happening to be “in the area” when she gave birth. 😁 When my niece was born, I remember a stand-off between my mum and my sister’s MIL who both insisted my niece was the “spitting image” of their child. It still makes me chuckle…

We had something very similar! DH best man stood up and said " I'm no good at speeches so I'm going to hand over to Gary (DHs very awkward brother) and I'm going to the bar"
Very embarrassing....

MIL & FIL refused to come to the wedding early to look after our 10 month old while we got ready (my parents couldn't make it because my dad was too sick) or help with set up the tables. They would have had to come the night before because of the long drive & they didn't want to pay for the £80 hotel room. They were both retired & own multiple properties so they had plenty of time & money. First thing mil asked when they showed up was my coat because she had forgotten hers. They also didn't pay us back for the room we booked for them for the night.

BIL was working abroad at the time. He said he would only come if we paid for his flights. We thought he was skint so we asked if he wanted to share a room with our friend who was also attending the wedding on his own. He said no he would rather stay in his own room & pay for it. He never paid us back for his room. He also insisted on flying BA instead of easyJet. Btw he was in his mid 30s, well paid job & never had a student loan (ILs paid for it) so he was obviously not that poor.

My friend's step father refused to come to her wedding, he said COVID rules were the reason but there were minimal restrictions in place at the time, in reality he'd made demands that he was to sit at the top table and not her own dad, and took the hump when she said no The saddest part is he wouldn't let her DM without him. He had married into the family when my friend was an adult and never a big part of her life.

The CF part is his own dad died a month later (not COVID related) when stronger restrictions were in place and he went apeshit when my friend wouldn't drive across the country to attend the funeral (she'd never met his dad). He even posted on Facebook how selfish she was and was purposefully trying to make him look bad.

What a horrid controlling person.

My sister in law was pregnant and had gallstones when it was our wedding. We were having a 7 course taster menu, but rather than telling the chef what she couldn't eat, she came up with her own 7 course menu for herself and not a simple one either. Then she just didn't turn up to the wedding. No letting us know she wasn't coming and no apology.

So why are they ‘lovers’ but other people are fine. It was a perfectly normal request. You seem the very unreasonable one here

@AngryBirdsNoMore no they didn't, this girlfriend lasted a month I think. We never met her. So the decision was correct even in hindsight.

I can predict prior to my children getting married or having children and making me a grandma that i will be so happy and excited and everything in between that I will want to be there a lot.

af reading lots of these posts i can imagine i will become the mother in law that is complained about
but ive been excited about all of that for years. I tell my kids it is what I will be like and will be devastated at not being a part of everything. Though not to tell them what to do etc but to be apart of their lives and that of my future grandchildren. I think my daughter dying at 12years old and my first grandchild dying at a few months old has made that much more a part of my future that I have planned for. I am in a career where i can reduce my hours without much impact on my living situation and I planned for the prospect of this with my first child. So I could look after my grandchildren and not have to put in daycare as I had to do with mine as i had no family at all.

so i hope my future daughters and son’s in law don’t view me as this negative as I am wanting to have a large extended family

@ChiefWiggumsBoy No idea.

Mine was in a huge huff all day and 'stressed' despite having no input and no tasks to fulfill, all because my husband and I had planned the entire wedding by ourselves and asked friends to help out with some of the logistics.

She was furious after being told we were planning everything ourselves after, having initially been polite and listened to her suggestions, we finally got sick of her 'summoning' us to her flat every few days to shout at and berate us over every single detail we were considering. We reminded her that she'd already had her own wedding and told her that all she needed to do was to turn up!

She had a face like thunder all day, turned up at my hair and makeup session and demanded the makeup artist squeeze her in (and expected me to pay for her, then wiped it all off anyway), is holding onto my husband's arm for dear life in all the group photos (literally like she's trying to pull him away from me) and chose to wear an off-white suit.

She did not get great feedback from my friends and my lovely boss.

Also, my best friend's colleague's got married last weekend; her MIL turned up wearing what only can be described as a wedding dress.

Weddings really do bring out the worst in some people!

@MoonCharged 😱

What if your adult DC and their partners/spouses actually want their children to go into nursery for social development etc? Will you accept their decision? It’s great you want to be involved but you need to know when to step back and let them do their own thing!

Lots of I there. Its not about you, your wants or needs though. It's whatever your DC and their partner wants.