Why so rude? Is it me?

Did the children complain? Did they feel their birthday celebrations were truncated or light on proper celebration? Sorry, Caro, but there seems to be an undercurrent of antagonism toward your SIL that goes beyond this event. Was she rude? Maybe, maybe not. Three-and-a-half hours isn't trivial, even for a family party (not exactly an eat-and-run). Maybe it isn't optimal in your mind, but if this is her pattern, next time plan some activity that requires their presence earlier in the day--for the kids, not for you. Have an early afternoon meal and see if they still leave after three hours or so. Are you most put off because you didn't have enough time to talk with your brother, or just because they didn't play the game the way you wanted them to play it? Some people who dearly love their family members still find that more than three or four hours together becomes strained or uneasy. If your answer is that your SIL is just a controlling bitch, then it doesn't really matter what they did or how long they stayed, does it? If so, the problem goes way beyond this event. And maybe she senses your antagonism loud and clear. I'm just reading into what your original posts says--obviously I don't know all of the details. But if I knew my SIL though I was a jerk, I wouldn't be keen on hanging around her for any more than what I considered to be a brief but polite visit.

I think it depends on what type of gift she gave you. If it was awesome, then everything's fine. If not, she sucks.

CaroGirl said:

It's not me, is it? It's her. I'm sure it's her.

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Lol!

I wish I had your relatives, mine come for a visit and they never leave! Seriously people are all different in their tolerance for social activities whether it's with family or friends. I LOVE my family and friends but I really only like to visit with them in small doses. Just long enough to enjoy seeing them, to ascertain that they and their family is in good health, hear the high points of their lives, eat a bit of food and then leave. If it's an activity planned ie swimming, sliding or picnic that might be a bit different but just a meal and a visit, a few hours is plenty for me.

In your sil's case it could also be that they have a good distance to drive, it will be dark when doing so (I'm in semi-isolation here with lots of kamikaze wild life wandering about so driving in the dark is nerve wracking for me) and if their child is youngish it's a pain to drive a tired cranky child for too long.

Try not to hold this against your sil (unless she's deserves it) but as a socio-phobe I can understand short visits - leave them wanting more, rather than wanting them to leave is my mantra.

jmo of course.

I don't know your family dynamics, and it's probably more complicated than mine, but what I do is just be extremely direct about what I would like. "Can you come over about 3? And then we will have dinner and open some presents after the kids get a chance to play?"

Although some might take that as TOO direct. But it seems to work for me.

I have to agree about the late thing. That really bugs me. If you say you're going to be somewhere at a certain time, be there at that time. My SIL is the same way - always late. It's so bad that I tell her to be there at least an hour before I expect anyone else. It's bad enough when you've invited someone and told them between 4:30 and 5. But when you leave it up to them and they're still late? Ugh. Rude.

JMO, but...

I love my family to death. I call my mom and sister in law at least twice a week, and we'll talk for hours. But family functions? Oiy...three hours is about the limit of my endurance for those things. Kids get cranky, adults get tired, and frankly, 9:00pm is an hour past my kids' bedtime. I don't know how old your nieces are, though.

My situation is a bit different now, but at first, my sil DID NOT care for my hubby one bit, and she was very sweet to his face. Didn't stop my DH from knowing how she felt about him, and wanting to avoid being around her. He tolerated attending for my sake.

Just a thought. Being polite is important, of course, but I'm pretty sure your SIL can tell how you really feel. I wouldn't want to spend a ton of time around someone who disliked me...would you?

Unique said:

I will say this from personal experience - my birthday is December 23rd. For many, many childhood years there was a "family" get together to celebrate my birthday & Christmas w/my aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents (til the grandparents moved waaay out of state)


I guess I'm just wanting to warn you that tying your daughter's birthday with a major holiday like that can leave lasting scars. They truly can. To this day I don't celebrate my birthday and anyone here who really knows me - knows I despise Christmas. All because family members unwittingly made these "holidays" some of the most miserable days of my life.

Please be careful how you celebrate - especially with family members like that. Of course there is more to my story than just those incidents - the other side of the family got their licks in as well.

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That can be true, but my birthday is on a holiday and close to Christmas (Dec 31) and it never really bugged me. I had the same situation with birthday/Christmas family celebrations. And ONE gift -- wrapped in Christmas paper...ok, that kind of bothered me. But the celebration part didn't.

WendyNYC said:

I don't know your family dynamics, and it's probably more complicated than mine, but what I do is just be extremely direct about what I would like. "Can you come over about 3? And then we will have dinner and open some presents after the kids get a chance to play?"

Although some might take that as TOO direct. But it seems to work for me.

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Sounds normal to me Wendy. That's how people always used to do it, at least in my experience.

Caro, hard to say not knowing the dynamics over the years. If there has been underlying antagonism over time maybe they wanted to set a limit on the amount of time spent. Then again, it could have just been holiday exhaustion. When I was married, although my husband's family and I got on quite well, the list of visits was long and he and I did settle on a "plan" prior to each round of visits; i.e. okay we'll spend x with your Mom, then x with your brother and his wife, and so forth. This was not out of rudeness but rather a desire to both save our holiday sanity and get home safely on winter nights when so many people have been partying and maybe shouldn't be driving.

Having the birthdays within that I think can add to any tensions or pressures - it can be a lot to cope with all at the same time, trying to ensure everyone has a nice time. It is quite possible that it wasn't rudeness, but hard to tell from here naturally.

Jersey Chick said:

My SIL is the same way - always late. It's so bad that I tell her to be there at least an hour before I expect anyone else.

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Some shrinks say that people who do that are power-tripping to compensate for inner feelings of insignificance to others. One of my former sisters-in-law took lateness to a level of greatness. We too set special times just for her, 90 minutes before the actual time usually. Sometimes two hours if an event was Really Important. It worked, but only if every person involved kept to the story and didn't spill the beans about the real time.

Caro, sorry to hear that the visit didn't go as planned. My SIL is a controlling bitc# and I know she has terrible motives towards my family. My brother is all the family I have left alive and he married her late in life several years ago. Since she came into the family, she's succeeded in turning my brother into a Stepford Husband. We never see him and she's tried to turn him against my daughter, his only neice. My brother has money and I guess she wants all the money for herself and her son, who's grown. My brother is stupid and blind so he does not see what's happening. I just want to tell her, I don't want his money, nor does my daughter....I just want my brother and a little of his time. I think they could have shared a little more time with you.

nerdsRus said:

Some shrinks say that people who do that are power-tripping to compensate for inner feelings of insignificance to others. One of my former sisters-in-law took lateness to a level of greatness. We too set special times just for her, 90 minutes before the actual time usually. Sometimes two hours if an event was Really Important. It worked, but only if every person involved kept to the story and didn't spill the beans about the real time.

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I don't know if it's control or just self-centeredness. She's one of those who just doesn't give a damn if she holds things up - what she wants takes priority over everything else. And that's not me just being nasty, because I actually like my SIL very much and get along fine with her. She's just got a lot of issues that should've been dealt with a long time ago, but her parents were in denial until it was really too late to do anything about it. We just clean up the mess (which I don't agree with, but I don't dare go against the family because it'll just come back to haunt me, All I can do is grit my teeth and suck it up.) And clean it up again. And again. And again.

Regardless of whether it's family or friends or business associates, anyone who shows up late for a sit-down dinner is abominably rude and irrevocably so. It doesn't matter a rat's patootey what the family dynamics are, the tardiness alone merits an apology from the SIL to her hostess. What if Caro had prepared the dinner so it would be ready at 4:30? The meal would be ruined; her words 'gourmet feast' have huge implications. As a hostess/cook who regularly makes souffles for company meals, trust me--I know of what I speak.

The rest of the issues are bunk. Caro, your SIL and your brother owe you an apology for being late to a meal that you tooka great deal of time and effort to prepare. Everything else is secondary. That point alone is just plain rude and inexcusable from adults.

Now excuse me while I go try to explain this to my teenaged daughters...

CaroGirl said:

It's not me, is it? It's her. I'm sure it's her.

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Yep, she's rude. We have one family member who is like that. What she and her husband do, is say they'll come, then either almost always call fifteen minutes before dinner, call, and say something came up and they can't make it. Or only one will show up and stay an hour and leave.

There's always one in every family and many times there's no changing what they do or how they act.

CaroGirl said:

Now, is it rude to turn up at someone's house just in time for dinner, take their presents, and then just leave? I think it is. I think a family celebration should be longer than that. This is my SIL's doing. My brother has no balls and she makes the decisions, but I think it's just rude.

Rant/vent over, for now.

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Yes, it is rude to show up late, eat shoots and leaves.

My SIL is a bitch, too. Sounds exactly like our situation. In our case, they came in separate cars for Thanksgiving dinner and we suspected something was up then. She deliberately picked a fight with my mother so she'd have an excuse to leave right after dinner, that her "feelings were hurt." Oh, bite me, bitch.

Wow, Ed. Need a valium or something there pal?

mscelina said:

Wow, Ed. Need a valium or something there pal?

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I was being nice there. If you'd really like my opinion on my SIL, that would require a PM or I'd be banned and the post deleted.

oh cool! PM me!

*loves the lowdown on people she doesn't know*

My anniversary is dec 24th. We used to have my wifes family over on the 24th because her SIL celebrated her christmas with her family on the 25th. After 13 years of this I finally told my wifes family (quite against her wishes) that since our anniversary was the 24th we would be celebrating christmas on christmas day from now on. They could either make adjustments with their family or tough noogies. My wifes brother is chronically late. Never ever shows on time. He and his wife always come in separate cars and were fifteen minutes late to an hour or more late. We made a point of telling everyone that dinner would be promptly at two and it never got started til three or later. My wife spends two days preparing food and desserts for christmas. One day I decided that if they werent on time we were going to start without them. Now we dont wait. 2 oclock hits and we are grubbing. They are still late and have to eat cold food cause they are too lazy to show on time or to heat their food up when they do arrive. Still drives us all nuts, but at least dinner isnt ruined anymore. My older brother is chronically late too. Our solution to him was to tell him to be here two hours before anything is planned to start. That way he is only around fifteen minutes late unstead of an hour and a half. If we want him here by two we tell him to be here by noon. Good luck with your relatives. Like they say you can pick your nose but you cant pick your relatives.


yer pal Brian

hey, it's not always the sister-n-laws fault.

In my case, it's my brother-n-law!

What a dick he is.

This trouble between us has gone on for years, 11 to be exact. He nitpicks about everything.

"Your house is a disgusting mess."

"I know you're halfway through nursing school, but do you really care? Why not come to work for me, dong loans?"

"You're horrible parents and should have been sterilized at birth."

"Your house is a fixer upper. Nobody will buy it because it needs too much work."

"You're a bunch of f'ing idiots and I tell everyone you are like The Addams Family."

It goes on and on and on. Visits from him are like visits to hell. At 4 in the morning he is sitting in his room with the light on, analyzing all our mistakes.

"Here's $100, go buy yourself a better light for reading."

And when I graduated from nursing school:

"Pam will never like that job."

Every visit ends up with he and I fighting, and my husband usually stands around shuffling his feet, refusing to get involved.

Oh, I forgot to mention that my brother-n-law asked me out first, and harbors some weird thing for me, buried deep beneath the hatred. He once even said that his niece, my daughter, was supposed to be his.


All in all, it's creepy.

Oh, and recently when we visited him and sat on a sofa, and the owner said "please excuse the cat hair," my bnl said "Oh, Pam loves cat hair on everything," because I have cats.

And he said I should "donate Lucky to charity."

The SIL sounds insecure. Your bro found something he loves and wants in her.

If possible, meet your bro during his lunch hour or after his work for time between just the two of you.

Call me lax, but half an hour late for an event that (a) didn't have a set time, (b) is 45 minutes away (where I live the timing of driving anywhere more than a mile away is inextricably linked to traffic), and (c) with kids (depending on their ages, of course -- if they're over 40 it might help...) doesn't seem *that* egregious to me. Asking someone when do they want to arrive can imply that you don't have any preference. An arrival time range of half an hour can also imply that their timing doesn't need to be right on the dot.

It depends - one time thing, not a big deal. All the time or most of the time thing - rude.