The Pie Police and Other Stories of a MIL From Heck

My mother-in-law was quite the piece of work.

I'm sure you know the type - classic narcissist. Luckily the two things that saved me and my husband were that she was dumb as a brick (and that's insulting to bricks everywhere), and that I had an inkling of intuition that moved her favorite target (my hubby) six hours' drive away from her vitriol.

But, oh, the holidays.... supposed to be full of family fun and get-togethers... they were the stuff of low-level nightmares for years to come.

Like the first year, when hubby and I planned an intimate at-home dinner and miniature golf game to celebrate his birthday. We were newly wed, on a shoestring budget, we could only afford to do so much. What did Darling MIL do? Called a week beforehand and ordered us to cancel all our plans, they were coming down to have us take them out to dinner at the fanciest restaurant around! Read that again. We were supposed to pay their bill, for the privilege of their ruining our weekend with Herself's Grandiose Plans. We politely declined. She screamed. We told her that then maybe she should have called us much earlier, and asked instead? She screamed again. Hubby politely told her that we already had firm plans, no they were most certainly not invited to join us, we were married now in case she'd forgotten about that big party we threw, and we'll do the planning for each other's birthdays from now on, thankyouverymuch.

So she insisted on coming down the week after the birthday. Why? Because she went to "all the trouble" of baking hubby a cake, and didn't want it to go to waste. Six hours' drive, hotel cost for two nights, to present her box chocolate cake with canned frosting at the fanciest restaurant in the county, known for its desserts. Yeah, not happening on our thin dime. Instead, we ate in, with takeout Italian from the restaurant down the street. The cake was sad, lopsided, and stale.

My own birthday was conveniently forgotten from then on, but Heaven help you if you forgot hers. She once read me a list of all the relatives' birthdays, and described just how much we should spend on presents for each one of them. She was livid when I deliberately let my eyes glaze over and stared out the window of the diner till she wound down. I then "snapped to" with a calculated, "I'm sorry, what were you saying?" She fumed, but we were in public, and safe from the screaming for a while.

Christmas presents? We were supposed to spend hundreds we didn't have to go all-out for gifts for the two of them. Forget our budget, forget our friends, definitely forget that I had family too, they were the most important people on the planet and should get the best and most expensive everything. What would we get in return? Freebie t-shirts from her catalog orders. I got a re-gifted ashtray one year - I'm asthmatic. Another year, my car got about twenty bucks' worth of presents, and were labeled as such. I myself received zero presents. One year I asked for an Enya CD, and it was deemed too much money, so she pulled a random CD out of the discount bin, and it was horrid retrograss. (I gave it to a good friend who loves bluegrass music, and even she said it was terrible.) One year they tried to foist an ugly statuette made of scrap nails in the "shape" of Don Quixote on us. Another year it was bundles of the freebie cheap plastic trash can liners and sandwich bags you get with donations to some charities. A different year I got ten dollars' worth of kitchen supplies - hubby's the cook, and they knew it. When they finally went to gift cards, hubby's was worth fifty dollars. Mine was worth five.

There was one year they handed out emergency road kits to every single family member, because the television personality said they should. To every person - including kids and babies. Each kit had a self-igniting road flare. All the kids under twelve were pyromaniacs. Yeah, that went over splendidly. See how well kids respond when their gift is confiscated.

We rather lost it the year they "helpfully" renewed our AAA membership without asking, and gave us the basic plan instead of the premium we'd been paying for, and completely wiped our history with the brand in doing so. And she had the grace and courtesy to scream at me for leaving ten minutes after their arrival to go to work, because they just "happened to drop by" after visiting hubby's sister's family one state over and gave them and the kids hundreds of dollars in brand new gifts, which they bragged about to us. And informed us that we weren't important enough to visit so don't bother expecting them when they left on their festive soiree, but then dropped in on us with twenty minutes' notice anyway.

Fun times.

But Thanksgivings were the worst.

Why? Because she wasn't the host, so she couldn't control them. She would do anything and everything in her power to sabotage them.

Luckily, the rest of her side of the family was used to her shenanigans, and they tried to keep an eye on her and thwart her whenever they could. When they kicked her out of the kitchen for interfering with the cooking, MIL offered to make all the pies instead. They allowed her to make the majority, but bought a few extra anyway, so she couldn't completely control their distribution.

But they were truly my MIL's siblings, and sometimes their own shenanigans showed through. The rivalry between the siblings was fierce, and they therefore set their own kids against the others'. Heartwarming, festive spirit there, no?

One year, the cousin who was a firefighter, his squad was on active duty, and everyone was warned that he could be called out at any minute. So they stuck him in the back corner of the "kids table," the table where they threw all the kids and any adult they wanted to punish. Unfortunately for them, they also threw my hubby and I back there, so we made sure he had an easy exit. Sure enough, he was called out right when he had served himself a full plate of food. When he came back exhausted, we found out they'd thrown it out when they said they'd keep it for him! So he made himself another plate - and he was called out again, and they threw it out again. Neither he nor they mentioned anything to his wife, or us, or we would have gotten involved and stopped their crap games dead cold. Instead, when he returned and finally told us what happened twice, we made my MIL give up two full apple pies to him, because that was all the meal he'd had, after fighting two huge fires. And told off the other sibs for being colossal jerks. They didn't like that at all. Too bad.

One year they kept shoving the hungry kids out of the kitchen when they'd come begging for food because they were hungry, and lunch was already two hours late. The children got ordered upstairs to play - and the adults had completely forgotten that they'd put all the pies up there for safe keeping. Guess which room the kids played in? And guess how much pie was left? I laughed at that one, they deserved it for being such insensitive clods.

But the years that stand out in my mind were the ones where my MIL became The Pie Guard. Apparently to "prevent" the "abuses" described above, MIL laid out the pies in the middle of the table right after the full luncheon was served, and demanded that everyone come and get exactly one slice. Not of each, ONLY one slice of only one pie. I come from a tasting family, so I asked for a sampler, and hubby offered to take the other half of each slice to keep it even. You would have thought I asked MIL to sacrifice a baby! MIL refused my request because she claimed it was too difficult, and took the knife away from hubby when he said he could do it instead. And when everyone else - whether because they'd never thought of it, or knew it would needle MIL - also asked for a tasting samplers, MIL pitched a fit. I nibbled at mine, and when MIL tried to take my plate away multiple times, we had to yell at her to leave me alone to eat my food at my pace. She sulked in a corner.

The next year, same setup. This time I decided to wait for a while before eating dessert, since we'd just finished the meal. I was quite full, and I figured I'd get some pie when I had room again. Apparently I was wrong. MIL hid the pies. After a half-hours' hunt, finally FIL admitted ALL the pies were locked in their car because MIL ordered him to take them out there, including the ones she didn't bring. When that was rectified, we found out that she'd also hidden all the knives and forks so we couldn't serve ourselves. We found them in the back of the larder, behind boxes of pasta.

The next year, my sister-in-law came to Thanksgiving after her divorce was final. MIL made her trusty daughter the Pie Police. Poor sister-in-law got in my face to ask what pie I wanted on MIL's orders, and when we all reacted with the "what the ever loving heck are you doing?," sis-in-law said the MIL put her up to it, saying I refused to tell MIL what pie I wanted last year to be obstructionist! We regaled sis-in-law with stories of MIL's actions the previous years, sis-in-law realized she'd been set up, and gave her own mom such a piece of her mind that it finally ended the era of pie policing.

I should mention that MIL also ordered us to stay at their mouse-infested place for each holiday, turned the heat down so that our room was freezing and gave us one threadbare blanket because "that was enough to keep you warm," ordered us to keep our bedroom door unlocked so she could just waltz in at any time of day or night to berate us, ordered us to be passengers in their car so that we couldn't leave on our own, and almost killed us twice - once when FIL kept driving home on the wrong side of the road into oncoming traffic, and once when she was so mad at us that she took off before my hubby was in the car, and got ticked off when we were both screaming at her to stop while I held onto him so he wouldn't be thrown out of the moving vehicle. And then they had the temerity to not understand when we'd take measures to make sure that situation would never happen again: lock the bedroom door, break the lock on the closet to get all the blankets to use, turn up the heat and whenever she turned it down we'd march over and turn it up again, refuse to drive with them ever again when it was obvious they were unsafe drivers. When she started portioning our food and refusing to give us more, and refused to allow access to all drinks in their household except water, we moved to a bed and breakfast and brought our own food and drink to eat alongside their meal. They continued to be baffled that we didn't appreciate their "generosity." A gift that comes with strings ain't no gift, people, it's a trap.

The year we realized that we'd rather eat leftovers, than face that twisted competition, sister-in-law had seen enough as well and decided to host holidays for her parents at her own home, "to save you the trouble." Yay! The shenanigans were greatly reduced when the need to compete was eliminated, and we had some nice laid-back festivities with her and her awesome kids. Surprisingly, MIL forgot to be mean when she got dementia, and though her forgetfulness brought its own challenges, it was nothing like her former nasty self.

Today, hubby and I celebrated an early Thanksgiving with my parents. We had planned for my stepdaughter, her husband, and their kiddo to join us, but our granddaughter has a nasty cough, and I'm immunocompromised, so we've rescheduled with them. But there's nothing like watching football games and playing Five Crowns in relative peace after so many years of dealing with toxic people who don't really like each other, but continue to have holidays together - not in the name of family and unity, but in the name of backbiting and sabotage. That's a tradition I would rather not continue. I'd like to think I've made the right choice, even if I got my tushie kicked in two straight games of Five Crowns.