First, the qualification: I like my Mother-In-Law. We get along. For the most part she is perfectly fine, very sweet.
But she really rubbed us the wrong way with something she said the other day.
Here’s the backstory: She recently sold a house that she had been renting out of state. Before we got married she gave DH a cut of that money and told him she’d like him to put that towards a house for us. We were very thankful for this and told her we would absolutely do that. We had absolutely no intention of using that money for anything else, and we made that clear.
A few weeks later Mother-In-Law and SIL tried to pursuade us to use the house money to buy a new car (we did need one) but we said no, we’d rather make payment out of our other accounts and save the house money. They thought that was a little silly, but let it go.
Meanwhile, we were planning a wedding. We weren’t too vocal about budget or where the money was coming from, but we did make it clear that we had been saving up and were using money that we had saved ourselves. We never said anything about the house money, because it had been sitting in an account accruing interest until it was time to buy a house.
Last weekend we decided to start looking at houses. We told Mother-In-Law that we were looking and we reiterated again how thankful we were for the money she gave us, as it will be our down payment. All sounds good, right?
She bursts into (happy) tears and tells us she’s so glad to hear that we didn’t spend all the money on the wedding. She’s so glad we’re using the money as intended.
WELL NO SHIT! Of course we’re using the money as intended. We haven’t touched a cent of that money since we got it, we’ve been telling her that. It’s so insulting for her to assume we’d just take it and use it for other stuff. Both DH and I were really annoyed. We reminded her about all the conversations we’d had earlier about it and told her it was not really nice of her to assume the worst, but she kind of brushed that off.
It’s insulting. We love her, and we are so, so thankful. But that was insulting. We’re not selfish idiots.