Their family gatherings never made sense to me. Not the big ones, not the small ones. My ex’s dad would drag a lawn chair into the backyard, dressed in jeans and a button-up shirt, and just sit there staring at the sun. Not at the sky.
Not at the clouds. The actual sun. He had a boom box from the eighties blasting Iron Maiden while he squinted into the light like he was trying to make eye contact with it. I asked about it once.
Everyone just said he was metal as hell and to leave him alone. My ex’s father also refused to have more than one light bulb on in the living room after dark. We’d sit in this huge room, barely able to see each other, just this one fifteen-watt bulb glowing in a lamp across the way. One night I got up and switched on another lamp so I could read something.
He got up without a word and turned it right back off. Next time I was supposed to bring a miner’s helmet with me, apparently. Then there was the volume problem. Nobody in that house talked at a normal level.
If someone wanted to say something, they had to shout over everyone else. It turned into a shouting contest, and the kids would crank the TV up to compete, which made the adults scream even louder. They genuinely couldn’t understand why their hearing wasn’t great. Money, though.
That was the real weirdness. Thank God my wife doesn’t follow their lead. If her parents picked something up for us at the store, we had to pay them back to the exact cent. I’m talking $12.
42. $16. 81. If the total came to $12.
81 and we handed them $13, they’d hand us back the nineteen cents. And if we got something for them, they’d pay us the exact amount in cash. $7. 82 here.
$11. 41 there. Christmas was a nightmare. Everyone had to come as close as humanly possible to spending the same amount on each other.
If I spent $12 on my father-in-law and the agreed limit was $10, you better believe I’d get two dollars in the mail within the week. We’d have them over for pizza, and they’d calculate what their slices cost. Pie comes to $12. 50, eight slices, they ate four.
Sure enough, we’d get $6. 24 shoved into our hands before they left. No matter how much we insisted we didn’t want their money. At this point it was comical, but still deeply strange.
Nobody in that family drove either. Except the girl I was dating. They relied on other people for every ride. If you said no, they’d guilt trip you, then complain about how expensive cabs were.
It took me about a month to figure out they did this to everyone they knew, and I could just say no. What a headache that was. Half the time my girlfriend was out shuttling her family around town, at all hours of the night. Somebody needs a ride to the hospital because he has a headache.
Call an ambulance, then. Oh, and can you run me to Walmart on the way back? You have a truck, right? Can you help us pick up a couch?
Now it’s three more stops, but you can’t lift anything because your gout is flaring up. They were pieces of work. My in-laws are the kind of frugal that would get them cast on one of those Extreme Cheapskates shows. Case in point: when my husband and I were still dating, his sister got married.
For the reception, his parents bought stacks of plastic plates from Sam’s Club. Not the flimsy ones, but still, clearly single-use plastic dinnerware. His mother decided it would be a waste to throw them away. She wanted to reuse them, but for whatever reason didn’t tell anyone at the wedding.
So the guests assumed they were disposable and tossed them in the trash. Halfway through the reception, my mother-in-law and father-in-law are digging through the garbage cans, pulling out dirty plates, and stacking them in a plastic bin to take home and wash. I thought my husband was going to have a stroke. At the end of the reception, while I was mopping the floor in heels because we were too cheap to pay the venue’s hundred-dollar cleaning fee, my mother-in-law and her sister were arguing over who had to wash all the plates.
She won. She took them home, washed them up, and still pulls them out for family events to this day. I call them the trash can plates. When we got married a year later, she tried to give them to us for our reception.
The venue had its own plates, thank God. I do everything I can to avoid eating off the trash can plates whenever we’re at their house. My in-laws can get fourteen people around the dining room table. Siblings, spouses, kids.
Some of them live far away and only see each other once a year. And yet nobody says a word. You can hear the clock ticking. With my family, six people means five conversations going at once.
It drives my husband completely bonkers. My wife’s family acts like complete strangers to each other. They’re nice, honest people, but there’s zero familiarity. No I love yous, no hugs, no real concern for each other’s well-being.
My family is part Italian, so we emote at the drop of a hat. My mother gets teary every time I leave after Sunday dinner, and I live five minutes away. My wife’s sister lives ten hours away. She came down for a week once, and when she arrived there was no excitement, no welcome.
When she left, it was the middle of the afternoon and everyone was home. She just said, “Okay, I’ll see you all. ” I think her dad nodded. That was it.
We didn’t see her for almost a year. Most people would assume they hated her, but to them it was completely natural. So I make a point of being genuinely happy and excited whenever I see any of her family. Even her dad, who we see three times a week.
They get a kick out of it. They seem to enjoy that someone was actually looking forward to seeing them. I think I’m breaking them down. Her dad now comes to the door to say goodbye when we leave, which freaks my wife out.
My wife’s father calls sauce gravy. Pizza gravy. Spaghetti gravy. It’s not freaking gravy, Greg.
Everyone thinks their way is the only right way to load a dishwasher, but my mother-in-law and husband seriously need lessons. Silverware goes in the silverware compartment, not randomly scattered across the top rack. She’ll wedge three forks into one slot. Bowls and plates can’t be literally stacked on top of each other.
I end up rewashing everything every time. There’s a designated spot for every item, and the dishwasher holds twice as much if you do it right. Of course, I can’t bring it up with my family because then I get the classic “oh, so you’re volunteering to do the dishes, I guess. ”
At Christmas, my husband’s family gathers around the tree and opens gifts one by one.
And if you don’t like your gift, you give it back to his mom to exchange it. This horrified me and my sister-in-law’s husband. We were used to opening ugly sweaters, smiling, saying thank you, and planning the Goodwill run in our heads. She does it because she wants to make sure you get exactly what you like.
At this point my sister-in-law and her husband almost never return anything. But I once opened a pink shirt and took half a second too long to just say thank you, and my husband said without blinking, “Oh, mom, she hates pink. You should get her black or gray,” and handed it right back. All the food in their house belongs to a specific person.
Can I have some chips? No, those are my dad’s chips. Can I have a glass of orange juice? Nope, mom’s OJ.
It works for them, I guess, but it seems selfish and unreasonable to me. In my house, everything in the kitchen was fair game. If you brought something for yourself and didn’t hide it in your room, somebody would eat it in under three seconds. My girlfriend’s mother invents words.
Mostly portmanteaus. My girlfriend and her brother grew up using them like normal vocabulary, and she seems genuinely shocked when she realizes that “twiggle” isn’t a real word everyone uses. You can’t just drop that without an example. That’s torture.
My boyfriend’s family stores all their bath towels in the parents’ bathroom. Every time one of the kids wanted to shower, they’d walk into their parents’ room, grab a towel, shower, then bring it back. The kids’ bathroom has towel racks. They just don’t use them.
I’m sure there’s a story behind it I’ll never hear. They talk crap about everyone. Each other, friends, strangers. I was raised with “if you don’t have anything nice to say, shut up.
” It eats at my soul. I don’t engage in their gossip, and my girlfriend gets upset, thinking I’m taking someone’s side. I’ve told her time and time again: it’s not that I’m on their side. It’s that it’s none of my business.
Also, on a lighter note, I just found out they give Halloween gifts. As in, here’s a present, but it’s Halloween. Weird. They are the most dedicated lingerers I’ve ever met.
It led to a serious conversation with my boyfriend about what my silent screaming eyes mean. I have to limit gatherings with his extended family because they drain me completely. The shortest dinner I’ve ever had with them was three hours, not counting the goodbye ritual, which deserves its own rant. Seventy-five percent of every conversation is stories everyone’s already heard, a few of which are deliberately retold year after year like some unspoken tradition.
And not only do they expect you to stay long after the check is paid, rather than moving somewhere that isn’t about to close, they insist on staying even when they’ve run out of things to say. You just sit in a few minutes of silence until someone recalls another old story, tells it, and then falls back into silence. The night inevitably ends with the mortifying ritual of being the people still at the table after closing time, sitting in silence while the staff glares at us. It’s not like we’re having a lively conversation and lost track of time.
They see us holding up the close, just sitting in uncomfortable silence together. And when my boyfriend and I say we’re tired and begin the goodbye process, visibly struggling to keep our eyes open, they respond with genuine surprise and a chorus of “What, so soon? ” Then someone starts retelling a story. Every Thanksgiving in Detroit, the local rock station plays Alice’s Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie, an eighteen-minute folk song.
At eleven o’clock sharp, my wife’s entire family gathers in the living room and listens to it in near silence, aside from the occasional hum or chuckle. That’s their Thanksgiving tradition. My fiancé and his dad do the same thing, except they play it on vinyl. My in-laws sang happy birthday to my brother-in-law at a funeral viewing, standing around the open casket so grandma could be involved.
I had to leave the room. It’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever experienced. Years ago I had an ex whose sister-in-law was an amateur opera singer. Without fail, every time she visited, the family corralled her into belting out an aria in the living room.
A capella. To be fair, she was good. But just standing there in front of everyone, wailing away while the family cooed and clapped, my toes curled and I counted the seconds until it ended. I had a coworker who did the same thing at every office party.
It was nice, but completely awkward. They show hardly any physical affection. I come from a huggy family, so hugging my in-laws feels stilted and makes me laugh. On the opposite end of the spectrum, my partner randomly massages his mom’s shoulders and air-humps her while she does mundane kitchen tasks.
She either doesn’t notice or is too stubborn to tell him to stop. They never introduce people. I was shopping with my mother-in-law and thought we were being stalked by a strange man. Turned out it was her new boyfriend, joining us for the day.
First time either of us had ever met him. At holiday dinners, the same three or four people cook everything, and they put onions in every single dish. Ham covered in onions. Potatoes stuffed with onions.
Corn mixed with onions. Bread. Onion bread. Jell-O with onions in it.
Cottage cheese with onions stirred in. My son and I are both allergic to onions, like a lactose intolerance thing, so we have to bring our own food. Several times we brought our own dishes, and someone noticed the lack of onions and stirred a whole bowl of them into the crock pot without thinking. We’d have to drive to the grocery store, buy something safe, come back, and cook it.
They say they’re coming up for a few days, then stay for months. An uncle arrived three weeks early for a wedding on August fifteenth. He still hasn’t left. I’m going nuts.
They communicate by yelling at each other from across the house instead of walking a few feet into the next room. It’s really annoying when you’re on the phone and they start talking to you from down the hall. They only have two or three topics they can discuss, and they practically scream. Everyone talks over each other constantly, and I just sit quietly and wait for it to be time to go home.
They can’t make a decision to save their lives. Take something simple like what kind of pizza to order. Seventeen years I’ve been with my wife, and the pizza is always hamburger. But we can’t order it without an hour and a half of “What kind do you want?
” “I don’t care, what kind do you want? ” Everyone gets annoyed, and nobody answers. I’m sitting in the background saying, “How about we get what we always get? Hamburger.
” And then it starts all over. Do you want hamburger? I don’t care. Do you want hamburger?
It only happened once, but on the first Christmas morning at my in-laws’ house, my wife, her two sisters, and her mother had a contest to see who could deep throat a wine bottle the farthest. My wife won. They play the same games every Christmas. Catchphrase.
Apples to Apples. Dice games. And every single year, they read the entire rule book for each game before they start. We spend more time discussing the rules of Apples to Apples than actually playing.
I usually just sit at the end of the table and get drunk with my mother-in-law, who also recognizes how strange they all are. Anything that could go stale, chips, bread, cereal, they kept in the oven to keep it fresh. No bread box, no bag clips. Just put everything in the oven.
I started several fires because I didn’t check before preheating. Growing up, there were two occasions for receiving gifts: birthdays and Christmas. My partner’s parents buy gifts for Halloween, Easter, Thanksgiving, Columbus Day, Labor Day, the Fourth of July. The list goes on.
I find it extremely strange. Some of my in-laws are chiropractors who claim to fix all sorts of physical and mental ailments through holistic healing. I mentioned my OCD once, and my wife’s cousin offered to crack my back because psychology isn’t real. Then he told me gluten makes people psychopaths and that I was poisoning my son by vaccinating him.
We weren’t invited to visit anymore. My wife’s mother argues with her husband about everything. She left Thanksgiving once because he said it was quarter till six when it was actually quarter after six. She screamed, cried, ran out of the car, and drove around for five or ten minutes.
Then she sat in silence through the entire dinner, which was honestly fine with me. She thinks she knows everything about everything, and she has a doctorate in education. For instance, she insists pork must be cooked extra, extra well done, even cured bacon, because you have a 150% chance of getting trichinosis from anything less than two-hundred-degree pork. Her parents were farmers in the sixties, and back then it was a real concern.
Today, trichinosis is basically eliminated in developed countries except for wild game, but you’ll never convince her. I’ve had this argument with my husband repeatedly. He insists I cook pork into a hockey puck every time. I tell him it’s perfectly safe now.
He refuses to believe me. My girlfriend’s family burps. Loudly. Constantly.
At dinner, just “brap” and then the conversation continues. When I pointed it out to her, she’d never even noticed. I love her family and feel totally accepted, honestly. The burping doesn’t bother me.
I just think it’s funny that nobody acknowledges it. They don’t tell each other they love each other either. My girlfriend’s parents never said it to her, but she knows they do because they visit and give her money. It’s just strange to me.
I’m thirty-two and I can’t remember the last time I told anyone in my family I loved them besides my husband. I say it to my in-laws just to appease them, but I don’t mean it. We all love each other, we just don’t say it. We don’t hug either.
The television is always on. Christmas Day, everyone sits around watching All in the Family marathons. Bugs me a lot. We’re all here together, why are we watching TV?
What’s the point of even gathering? My own family plays kazoos at every large event. It’s not disorganized noise either. Sometimes there’s sheet music, and multiple harmonized parts for everyone.
My grandfather even invested in a high-quality kazoo. Weddings, kazoo ballads. Birthdays, happy birthday on kazoos. Christmas dinner, jingle bells, kazoo style.
I haven’t heard a funeral march on kazoo yet, but I wouldn’t bet against it. Christmas at my girlfriend’s place, everyone takes turns rolling a die. If you get a six, you’re allowed to open one present. It takes forever.
In my family, me and my brother sit by the tree. My parents on the couch, my sister in the La-Z-Boy. My brother grabs gifts and hands them to me. I yell out who it’s for and toss it to them.
As you open yours, you say thanks and move on. Between tosses, I grab some of my own and rip into it quickly. Christmas is done in twenty minutes flat. When they open gifts at birthdays, they don’t pretend to like things they don’t.
They just give a look, say nothing, and move on. No fake enthusiasm whatsoever. My in-laws are the definition of meddling. Everyone is all up in each other’s business.
They send family-wide emails discussing personal matters or lecturing each other, and now they include me. Every time I read one, I just wonder when these people plan on cutting the umbilical cord. My husband is forty-two years old, and they talk to him like he’s still a child. My wife’s family says “seen” instead of “saw.
” I have literally never heard them say “I saw it. ” It’s always “yeah, I seen that. ” I seen it on TV. You saw it.
You freaking saw it. It doesn’t even sound right. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. They told their daughter nothing about sex or drugs, but plenty about traditional women’s roles.
The first time I was at their house, they had a large assortment of firearms laid out on the table. And when she left for college, they acted like they were glad to see her go. I didn’t think that actually happened in real life. They had their childhood dog cremated, and every Christmas they take the urn, roll it across the floor, and say “roll over.
” When their mom died, they buried the urn with her. I’m always late to family traditions. My family uses bobby pins to collect earwax, saves it in an envelope, and sends it to Grandma Nebraska. I’ve asked several times why, and nobody knows.
They also have a large cheese-shaped eraser, and they spend most holidays trying to trick family members into finding it. My husband and his family leave dirty paper towels on the kitchen counter. We went on vacation with them recently, rented a house, and it wasn’t just one paper towel lying around. Two or three, I guess to wipe up multiple potential spills.
I actually do this while cooking, so I don’t waste another one if the current towel is still good enough. But I throw them all out after I finish in the kitchen. For them, it’s a frugality thing. I was always taught to make things last, but I’ve known people who reuse Ziploc bags and paper plates too, so I guess it’s not that extreme.
My girlfriend’s mother is inappropriate. She drunkenly texts him in the early morning hours with ridiculous nonsense. She sent a picture once captioned, “How could you kiss one girl and let another girl suck your dong? ” It was a photo of him as a toddler, kissing a little girl on the cheek while another little girl slept in his lap.
She also introduced herself to me as my partner’s boyfriend. When I looked confused, she said, “That’s how I’ve always introduced him, because he’s never had a girlfriend. ” And the last one: he has longish hair, and she hates it. She legitimately got in my face about me not providing him with hair ties.
“I did not raise a son so he could wear ponytails. ” She also hates my dog because he’s a pit bull. He’s the sweetest animal on earth.