Well, further to my other AIBU thread (screaming at the inlaws), I am still in need of MN to let off some steam..
Inlaws visiting this weekend. They are terribly successful. Have a ginormous house with about seven bedrooms and all mod cons (BIL and wife). Dh's BIL's wife is a GP as are all the rest of his siblings. All have these mini-mansions and great big Chelsea tractors and BMW's and the like.
We live in a 2-bed ex-council house in a city in the North of England with our six month old son. It's in an 'up and coming area' (or was before the recession) and there are fantastic facilities, we enjoy living here even if the estate is slightly scratty. We don't - and never have - seen it as a 'forever home': it was our step on to the ladder as public sector workers.
I didn't come from huge money myself: my father is an alcoholic and hasn't worked for years, my mother is a teacher. The drink soaked up a lot of cash until they split and it took some years for my mother to build up money of her own so we used to rent flats, move about a lot etc. Despite the dysfunction of it all, it wasn't all bad: I would say I learned how to 'make do and mend' and I don't see either things or property as particularly important (although I owning my own home is important to me).
Growing up was all a bit chaotic and housework was always pretty far down the agenda, but we were all relaxed about it and the house wasn't a candidate for 'how clean is your house' or anything, just very rough round the edges. My own home is the same. My mother's philosophy was that housework was secondary to pretty much everything else and as long as the bathroom and the kitchen were clean-ish and you could see all your floors, you could get on with what she considered the 'proper business of life' - talking, playing, writing, reading etc.
Anyway, fast forward to this weekend. SIL and I were initially rubbing eachother up the wrong way when talking about childcare.. but we moved on. Yesterday we decided with the good weather and the match to have a BBQ. It fits in with my 'slob like' tendency to do the easy hosting thing - chuck some food on the barbie, relax with it etc.
However, it turns out how the other half live was not compatible with my lackadaisical approach to home dining. SIL took over our (very small) kitchen. Where was my pestle and mortar? Did I have any red wine glasses (I have about six, we don't entertain formally as we don't have the space - no dining area). Where was my dish for serving fish? How did I cope without a pantry? Was it very hard without a utility room?
Then - mortifyingly - she took out the insert for the cutlery and cleaned it, complained that the oven wasn't very clean and emptied our fridge of all foods past their sell-by-date. She hoiked out our table (we never open it fully as it takes over half the living area) and set it fully but of course I didn't have the prerequisite 'proper' cutlery for this - I don't have serving mats or bowls to serve food in, it's just not what we do.
Meanwhile, BIL was with dh, asking how we 'lived like this' and asking were we going to continue on in such a small house for long..
I can't explain how horrible I felt about it all. I felt like such a failure as a wife, like the dirtiest, foulest slob imaginable. Rationally, I tell myself things like: 'it's not women's work' and it doesn't reflect on me as a person: my house doesn't have new fangled appliances and it isn't always spick and span but we are happy with it.. it has hot spots of clutter but is generally a pleasant place to live. However, in my heart I felt such shame. I tried to 'help out' in my own kitchen and found I just didn't know what to do or how to be, that somehow there were all these new rules about what I should be doing and where things should go and I couldn't find things.
I know that the shame side is partially to do with having grown up with an alcoholic: I feel terribly vulnerable when people root around in my house and disproportionately ashamed.. so I think that SIL was most probably trying to be helpful but it didn't stop me from heading upstairs to have a cry mid-afternoon .
In dh's family we are treated like a charity case. We're not. We're very much a middle-income family but this is where and how we live. I can see they have a different lifestyle but I don't feel the need to get them to embrace mine. Why on God's earth do I feel I have to apologise for not being uber-wealthy and having the right stuff when I don't even have any interest in it? Why do I feel ashamed of my rough-round-the-edges house when it suits our family just fine?
AIBU to have such thin skin and if so, what the fuck do I do about it?