Member- lapisphoto
- 4 years ago
My wedding is done and over now and I’m living on the other side of the hell that being engaged was with a crazy MIL. I honestly felt like my wedding day was a bigger success because of all the crap my DH and I had to endure because of her, and how BADLY she wanted our wedding day to flop!
The biggest thing that helped me was early on deciding to not share much more than the general details with her. She wasn’t paying for anything but the alcohol, so she didn’t need more than the basic idea of the docorations and flowers.
I will go a bit further and explain why I made this decision aside from money and the fact that my parents were hosting. From the moment we got engaged, a switch flipped. Beforehand, we had gotten along pretty well and I even did her hair for my then-boyfreind’s cousin’s wedding. But after we got engaged, she was so upset that my fiancee hadn’t talked to her about proposing beforehand that she wouldn’t even come downstairs the day after to talk to us (becuase she was too busy slamming doors and screaming about how betrayed she was by her son). And when I finally did see her the day after that, she told me that no one would know that my engagement ring was a diamond unless I told them (maybe because it’s a natural blue diamond and not traditional white?), told me where I HAVE to buy wedding flowers, every detail of why her two daughter’s weddings were amazing, and all of the wedding tradtions from her family that we would NEED to do!
Some Choice Examples of her behavior:
1) Said unkind things about my mother trying to insinuate that she was controlling (which was so untrue! My mom was nothing but supportive AND PAYING FOR EVERYTHING!)
2) She tried to force us to register for gifts over 9 months before our wedding and when we started to she made fun of me for not registering for enough things
3) She made fun of my decision to not do a “first-look” and just have my husband see me when I was walking down the aisle, saying we wouldn’t be able to get the pictures we wanted if we didn’t do a “first-look”. I personally think our photos turned out gorgeous:
4) She told me that her daughter’s dresses for our wedding hopefully wouldn’t “outshine the bride”. …Wha…?
5) Drunk one night she called both of her daughters “b****es” and asked me if I was a “b****”. What, the, what….?
6) Told me that she didn’t know what my mom’s “friend” was doing for flowers, but if you’d have asked her, she would have told me to go to sam’s club like one of her daughters did because they have the most beautiful flowers. (okay, if you did Sam’s Club I’m sure they were beautiful, but I had a great resource where I could get the arrangements AT COST!) My mom’s “friend” is her COUSIN that owns her own floral company and made us custom centerpieces out of the most luxurious roses, succulents, ghost wood, hydrangea, pearls and crystals! Here it is!:
7) Speaking of flowers, she tried to out-do our wedding arrangements with bouquets from Sams Club at the rehearsal dinner. (obviously her bouquets we not as beautiful as our wedding day flowers, and I was vague on our flowers too so she was reaching). She made the rehearsal dinner as fancy as possible so she could throw more money out there to tout her importance in general! She even chose lobster tail for the rehearsal dinner because it was “fancier” than what we were serving at the wedding. (One of our guests told us that they hadn’t seen anyone try so hard at a rehearsal dinner ever before.)
8) In general, she spent more money on alcohol, the rehearsal dinner, and our honeymoon than she did on her two daughter’s weddings. I think it’s TOTALLY unfair to her daughters whose weddings she was mostly paying for, and I told her many times we didn’t need so much alcohol or a fancy honeymoon! But in the end it wasn’t my choice because it wasn’t my money, so she won the money battle there.
9) Told my finacee after we had been engaged a long time that “he could still get out of it” and asked if I knew about their “special relationship”. O_O He told me this afterwards and was visible disturbed and told me that if she got too out of hand we might need to cut ties.
10) She insinuated that I was a bridezilla multiple times and even asked my mom to her face if we were “getting along” and if I was being “too demanding”. My mom just looked at her like she was crazy and said that we have a very close relationship and the we respect each other.
10) Lastly, she tried to break up my fiancee and I one month before our wedding saying that I wasn’t “family oriented” even though I had chosen to do some of her family’s wedding traditions to keep the peace and gone to as many family events as I could during our busy engagement (only missing two events, and one was for a second cousin’s son’s birthday). My fiancee was upset but sided with me and knew that she was being unreasonable.
These are honestly just a few of the things that happened while we were engaged. Now on the other side we are MUCH happier and we get closer and closer everyday in our new home! My husband is starting to ignore more of his mother’s abusive behavior and he is much happier!
I think now if I had been open with his mom I would have heard more mean comments and she would have tried even harder to force her opinions on us. And believe me, there were different points early on where I did try to include her and I just got slammed with judgement and teasing. So the walls went up so I could protect myself as much as possible and SURRIVE. Wedding planning is stressful enough without someone telling you how to live your life! And I didn’t share much with anyone because of how she acted–which I honestly don’t regret one bit. It made the wedding a surprise, and it made it seem even more special.
So does anyone else have thoughts about sharing information about the wedding while you’re engaged? Any awful MIL stories?
