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 😁

This is hilarious 😂

A lot of people seem to think I made all these decisions. I didn't. We're a couple. We talked and decided what was best for us.

And in terms of grandparents:

DH's grandpa is incredibly frail and poorly in a nursing home. We had already arranged to visit with cake after the wedding. We haven't been able to go this week on the days DH was WFH as when we called the nursing home they said he's feeling too poorly for visitors. DH has to be in the office Wed-Fri so We are hopefully seeing him early next week. We are planning on taking a nice lunch for us to all have together as we can't get him to a restaurant.

My grandma is 400 miles away. No matter where we got married it would have been too far for her to make it, unless it was basically on her doorstep. We are traveling up to visit her this weekend and going for a meal.

I think you've misunderstood. The wedding party didn't want to do speeches in the middle of the meal when she was making a racket

Yup 😏 when I was busy chatting to our guests she would gather all her sons and get them to all stand together for pics, ask other guests to take pics of her with them and a big show about 'her boys' 'her family'. My DH said to her I will go get Blondey to come into the pics too and MIL said no no leave her to have fun with her friends I'll get pics of her later.

Oh and when it was our first dance and everyone stood watching she sat at a table on her own making an angry face and wouldn't once come up to us as a couple. Sad lady.

She was being a deliberate bitch because you didn’t invite your bil and sil to the wedding

This is bizarre but also hilarious 😂

I had quite a traditional wedding and MIL (not British) caused a massive fuss by insisting that FIL did a speech. My own late DH would never have said anything but it meant a lot to him (and he wasn’t a confident speaker) that he did the traditional father of the bride speech. The stupid cow got her way but DH managed to negotiate it down from 6 pages (!) to a very short speech and luckily FIL realised how much he was stepping on my DF toes and literally stood up said thanks to all the people from his home country who had travelled and then sat his arse down. MIL looked like she was chewing a wasp. What fucking killed me was that at her DD wedding if her son in laws father had done that should would have been livid. But my MIL is a master in the art of a lack of self awareness.

How have I misunderstood, exactly?

I also feel like some of these situations could have new avoided by simply saying no to the cheeky fuckers.

My DH was not interested in his extended family because they were all batshit, but because I was family oriented and wanted to involve them, I invited them all to our wedding.

One told me 'it wasn't the done thing' to mix families up on the tables 🙄 (I thought it was a good way for them to get to know eachother).

The best part was his cousin offered to let us lend their sports car for the journey to the church. I really wasn't arsed. Anyway they decided they couldn't come. Ok no worries, I booked a taxi for the journey and I gave their spaces to someone else. A month before, I stupidly asked my MIL to check those who had said were coming....but she asked the cousin if they were coming again. They said yes. I had to explain that I could only accommodate the cousin, not the partner for the meal because they had already RSVPd no and there was no space. I really was nice about it but they were really shitty with me.

On the wedding day, the cousin's mum (MIL sister) was a no show with no explanation. By this point I wasn't arsed if she was there.

Apparently she boycotted it because I had uninvited her daughter due to the fact they said they couldn't/wouldn't lend us the car???? This was 8 years ago and she still has beef with me now! I remember seeing her in a pub and she called me fat randomly! Lol

After a few other incidents....I know now why my DH avoids his extended family. I have nothing to do with them now.

Not at my wedding. But when we announced our engagement to his family MIL was very dramatic. SIL asked how he proposed and as I was telling the story MIL kept interrupting and demanding we pose the grandchildren together for some photos to try and be disruptive. She then called up my partner the next day in tears telling him that he never visits her (he does). She gaslighted him and made him feel an awful son. He called me up in tears. I've never seen him cry even at funerals. I have and will never forgive her for making him feel like that and choosing that moment to bizarrely start acting like a victim. I've always got on with MIL but I'm very wary now of her manipulative streak and always take her "woe is me" moments with a pinch of salt.

Not really, on the birth of her first grandchild my DH brought her to the hospital. I know mum's are biased but she was a very lovely baby and MIL looked in the cot and her first words were, "What a shame" followed by "never ask me to babysit." One of her finest moments was in front of my teenage sons from a previous marriage when she wanted to know if my husband being circumcised as a baby have affected our sex life. She also told my husband I was having an affair, she said it in front of me. Her evidence? I referred to my other boss as "Mr Smith" and this one I referred to as "Mr Lawrence Jones" so me using his first name proved it. She didn't know his name was double barrelled and his first name was Paul (I've changed the names) She couldn't understand why we both found this so funny.

I must be very laid back or a mug because I think lots of people would have cut her off.

You clearly don't accept that every family is different, or you would have noticed that the difference between OP's family & yours is that most of hers died early. Hence her aunt & uncle being her parental figures.

& to all the other PP's having conniptions about the sibling thing: maybe you are blessed not to have grown up in such a dysfunctional family that your closest friend actually becomes your family.

I've explained why she's weirdly emeshed in a previous comment. I left out details not relevent to the wedding in the main post as I didn't think it was relevent.

I don't know why you're demonising me, and acting like it was just DHs side who weren't invited. We both only invited parents/parental figures and our friends. Again it's in comments.

I've explained in previous comments why his grandpa wasn't there. He's ill in a nursing home and prior to the wedding we had arranged to see him and take him cake.
And finger slices was the wrong term. I meant we'd cut the cake into rectangular slices as we could get more out of it for everyone. We'd already said we'd give some to siblings. She could have just waited

And FWIW My 2 parental figures didn't act like this. Because they know how to behave.

MIL wore an ivory dress identical to mine almost

10 days before the wedding MIL kicked off a massive row (behind our backs) due to step-FIL not being on the top table. Thing is, he was on top table and there was never any discussion he wouldn't be. FIL was also on top table (opposite end!) which she didn't like, so decided to kick up a stink and bad mouth me around the family that I was excluding step-FIL. Luckily, my SIL to be decided that speaking to me would be the sensible thing to do, so we clarified.

Obviously that blew over, so at the wedding she decided to start bitching and causing bad feeling because husbands step-niece (who I had never met before, the step siblings weren't close) wasn't a bridesmaid along with the nieces. She had 6 months to have bought this up before if it has caused the massive upset she claims. I was a pretty chilled bride, and if she's said it was causing a problem I'd have probably just agreed she could be bridesmaid. It wouldn't have been a massive deal (the dresses were fairly cheap and they only had a tiny posey for flowers). Why wait till the actual wedding to start being all snotty about it?!

Op, I think your idea of a wedding sounds perfect. Honestly, ignore the expressions of horror that you didn’t include your siblings. Utterly bizarre.

As a family we’re all really close but when my brother got married 20 years ago with just both sets of parents as witness, we siblings didn’t mind at all. We were really happy for them. They are lovely people and deserved the wedding the wanted. I don’t see why others don’t get that, especially when weddings are so expensive now.

I disagree with you that family takes presidence over friends. I think it would be odd to not invite parents but if each of the couple had 2 or 3 siblings...I can see why they chose their best friend each. Many people are much closer to their friends than family members.
I agree she wasn't cheeky to ask the couple to dave cake for absent family. I think she was out of order however to chose the cake cutting moment to yell it out....and she was beyond entitled to then go hacking into someone's cake! It should make no difference if you get a large or a small slice, it's the sentiment that counts. Why couldn't she just ask later if there was a larger piece she could take to cut up and distribute to other people? Oh I know, because it would mean ASKING and entitled people don't do that!

First wedding, I actually stayed at my ILs the night before as my family lived an hour away. SIL had booked a hairdresser for me and her.

On the morning of, the hairdresser had ‘somehow’ double booked so SIL said she’d have hers done and she would do mine for me. I think the fact I couldn’t have cared less really wound her up 🤣 that was a weird family. Marriage lasted less than three years.

Second wedding. SIL (DH’s brother’s wife this time).

• wouldn’t agree to her two year old being part of the wedding party (ie literally wearing a suit to match his dad who was best man) because he wouldn’t tolerate wearing a suit. Fair enough. Turned up on the day wearing…a suit (different to the wedding ones).

• sat in the front row of the (very small) ceremony with the toddler, loudly performance parenting while feeding him an incredibly messy cornetto to keep him quiet. Completely trying to disrupt the vows.

• took the one vegetarian meal from the precooked menu because she fancied it more than the chicken. Basically lied to the waiter that she had preordered it. My cousins wife (actually vegetarian) had to wait while the kitchen found something for her.

• heckled her husbands speech by screeching from the back of the room that he’d forgotten to thank the bridesmaids (he hadn’t). She was at the back of the room because she refused to sit at the sibling table so moved to sit with others.

• got drunk and corralled me out in the terrace for nearly an hour to tell me how miserable she was with her life. No shit. I was too nice (then) to extricate myself so had to be rescued. Literally sobbing in my lap.

Ive posted about her before. We no longer speak although it took 10 years for me to finally have the balls to go NC.

I was actually quite fond of my (now ex) MIL, but I was a bit po-faced when, a few months after our wedding we visited her in her home and found she'd got wedding pictures of all DH's siblings displayed on a special wall, and not a single one of us.

Also, I know I said I wouldn't go into malicious. But this woman was so enraged that her other children weren't invited that she took it out on our autistic child.

When she was staying with them on the wedding night, she had a meltdown due to the change in routine. MIL screamed at her to shut up and when she wretched due to crying MIL threatened to make her sleep in her vomit.

Looking forward to someone justifying this and telling me how evil I am for making a joint decision with my husband to not invite ANY siblings or grandparents. Because mine weren't invited either. My family are just (relatively) sane 🙄

Oh goodness she's a real peach. Would definitely be a good sitcom though! Well done you for sticking it out. She must have managed to have somehow raised a good man though at least.

It’s not worth shedding any tiers over, OP.

I’ll get my coat.

My mil got a wedding canvas made with a photo of the wedding! However I'm not in it!! 😁