Irritated by parents already😩

[Bellyblueboy]

I am an awful person. My parents are staying for Christmas - only arrived today - and I am already irritated.

The constant passive aggressive questions - the long, boring stories about people I don’t know - the complete lack of interest in my life

All my Electrical appliances have been unplugged so the remote controls no longer work. I will have to crawl under the Christmas trees now to turn them back on (don’t know how my dad managed to get under there, he is 80!).

the TV is up so loud I can’t think. They brought the contents of their fridge with them - I had to put most of it in the bin!

my mum keeps asking me are we having (fill in some obscure food item she never mentioned before) then looking disappointed when I say I didn’t know she wanted it. I went to Tesco to try and find Turkish delight with no chocolate because apparently it just isn’t Christmas without it.

i am already so irritated I could scream. They are elderly. They can’t help it. But in fairness they have always been a bit annoying, they have just lost their filter.

I am trying to find it funny. But failing. Every time I move my dad asks me what I am doing. Where I am going. Aggghhhh

I understand where you’re coming from, but my kids are currently 17 and 20 and I know that, as much as they love me, I irritate the hell out of them already so I have no expectations that that will changed just because I am 70-odd. I just hope that they will continue to roll their eyes dramatically and tell me so because we’ve tried to be open and honest as a family. I fully expect to be lovingly teased and have the piss taken out of me for fretting over whatever will be my equivalent of the plug sockets is when I get to that age. My inlaws take it with good grace as long as it’s accompanied by a big hug (and a cuppa or glass of port). And give as good as they get, bless ‘em.

They sound utterly disrespectful.

How would they react if you did the same at their house?

My DM is hosting Christmas and she'll do a wonderful dinner as always, I will probably get on her nerves with my suggestions of how to do things differently and she'll tell me to get out of her kitchen. I wish my DF was still alive to tell his anecdotes over and over again and I so wish Id appreciated him more when he was alive. Now I'm about to become a grandmother myself I'm hoping my little grandchild won't be spouting off about me on their social media when they get it.

We have DM round. She had some crappy daytime TV show on. DS was sitting next to her on his phone. She asked him 5 times if he wanted to watch something. He said 'no, you carry on watching what you want' every time until the last one, when he finally got fed up and took the remote control and changed it to something on youtube on the TV. She let him watch it for about 5 minutes then took the remote and changed it back to what she was watching!

MIL reads the newspaper out loud. Her local newspaper. We don't live anywhere near her and don't usually give a toss about someones sheep escaping onto the A5 or whatever the local news is. DH calls her 'The News at Mum'-to her face but she still does it!

Thats what DP is saying but tbh, it's not the money its the effort and thought and I don't get that back by returning her gift.

Mind if she doesn't actually show up tomorrow then I may rethink this! She absolutely has form for saying she will show up at a certain time then being hours later or just not bothering. I am still waiting (I mean, not with bated breath or anything!) for her to call me back from this morning when she rang my mobile then said 'oh, the lines shit, I'll call you back on Whatsapp when i get in the house (she had just pulled up outside her house)'... That was four and a half hours ago.

I am hoping the guilt she gets will be weighty indeed...

@WiddlinDiddlin is her present one that you’d like for yourself? If so - keep it!

I thought i was the only one with a busy elderly mum. She arrived 2 hours ago and has already cleaned one of the teenagers bedrooms (when the teenager was suppposed to do it!). She has also done 2 loads of washing when I wasnt going to revisit the pile until boxing day and gone and checked out what Ive done so far re food prep.

New attack tonight though - we are taking her to the pub and planning on getting her drunk! The teenagers are coming too and planning on making her do shots.....

Oh, wheesht will you. Finding being older hard is understandable, but it does not give anybody the right to make others' lives hard. Most of us dealing with difficult older relatives spend an awful lot of time biting our tongues, picking our battles, and being as patient and kind as we possibly can, often in the face of maddening and even unpleasant behaviour that gets excused because they are old and it's harder for them than us. So there has to be an outlet somewhere - like an anonymous forum.

Well I'm one that's glad my monster of a mother is dead. She can rot in hell for all I care. 💁🏻‍♀️ Merry Christmas 🎅

You don't know how lucky you are having a kind, caring and loving family. Some of us aren't so lucky.

It would be amazing if they offered it but I would never ask. I would have to be in absolute dire straits to even consider asking for money as a loan.
Obviously it's their money to do as they wish with, but if I'm ever fortunate enough to be in their financial standing I'll be doing everything I can to make life easier for my children.

I find these threads about elderly and irritating parents quite sad. DH and I are rapidly heading towards 80, and go out of our way to be as inoffensive and unintrusive as possible. When visiting, we generally stay in an airbnb so as not to invade. We bring food-real food, not the rotten fruit from the bottom of the fridge. Fresh fruit and veg from our garden, home baking, frozen meat and so on. We order in pizzas to save DiL and DS from having to cook. After checking, of course. Wouldn't dream of rearranging anything. Do gardening, weeding etc with permission, fold laundry, and cook if the adults are busy with work. Read to the DGC, take the little ones for walks to the playground, play with them. Is that ok, or should we be doing something more/less? Is staying three days ok to avoid being the proverbial "fish"? Please spell out the Rules For Visiting Old People. Grateful thanks.

That sounds lovely - as long as you check first I think it’s all ok. If you take the approach of ‘would I be ok with this?’ In your house and go from there…. With my parents it’s the fact they literally won’t do anything and expect to be waited on hand and foot, but everything is wrong, the house is too cold, it’s cold outside, they want another cup of tea and expect a new fresh cup (if you wash up they comment on it), snacks but only appropriate snacks and whatever it is they’ll say someone in our family shouldn’t have it. Then they’ll want the tv off because they don’t have a tv and everything on it is ‘rubbish’ and if the kids play games on it then it makes them sick so that’s a no go too… and then finally they’re obsessed with their phones/iPads and will literally sprint across the room if a breaking news alert comes up and will soberly inform the whole room of whatever the news is as if it’s an impending doom situation. Can’t drink too much wine because get told they’re worried I’m an alcoholic, but yet still bring wine and drink it in front of me so can’t be that concerned. The list goes on!

You both sound absolutely lovely and nothing like the parents and in laws on this thread.

They sound absolutely horrendous. You don’t have to be nice about them to a bunch of pathetic strangers haranguing you for still having them.

You’re a far nicer person than I am. I wouldn’t be hosting people who spoke to me like that.

For all those of you waiting for updates about people you’ve never met, Wendy’s sister’s ex husband (who she was still very friendly with) was found face down in the bath a few weeks ago and Pat (who used to send the nice Christmas cards written in fancy handwriting) didn’t send a card at all this year because she’s been admitted to a care home with dementia. Merry Christmas one and all!

Go on, switch some appliances off! You know you want to! 🤣🤭

I really do not know why many MILs have such trouble following the parents' rules for their children. It's weird. If I had a DIL and grandchildren, I would just follow simple rules like no cartoons. It's not hard!

But as a DIL I don’t understand the need to control my PiL? My kids were/are lactose intolerant, so my ‘rules’ when the kids were with nan n grandad were: your house, your rules but if you buy them an icecream/milkshake, can you avoid a pizza for a couple of days? Delay bedtime at your own peril but as you got my DH to adulthood I trust you.

My kids survived, relationship blossomed [ToysRUs did well] and kids were really happy tp be back to routine when they came home.

We've got my mum here. She's been needling me on where I got every single thing she sees and touches - the drinking glasses I've had for more than 20 years, the bottle of lime cordial, the waterproof coat we've bought our adult son. I have no idea when this became her go-to conversation but it's so bloody boring and pointless.

The people posting stuff like this will be the difficult PIL of the future, you can just tell.

Oiled 🤣🤣

The stories about the olds unplugging everything are doing me in, especially the waiting for the kettle or coffee machine that doesn't start! 🤣🤣🤣🤭

Oh dear!

And for those who want to know about my late father's partner's hairdresser, she's still seeing that married man, and the wife knows all about it! Unconnected, the hairdresser does have a nice house in Eastbourne.