Reply to Vent: Gifts with Strings

Forum Index » Family Relationships

Reply to "Vent: Gifts with Strings"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]Ugh.  This is mostly just a vent and totally a first-world problem, but am curious as to what others would think or do.  My parents offered a rather generous gift that would entail some amount of work on the part of myself and my husband, but the offer had a non-negotiable deadline attached to it.  (Background: We've been renovating our home ourselves over the past several years.)  This came up about a month ago when we were thoroughly engrossed in another project that was finishing up, but we had zero bandwidth to deal with anything else at the time.  We said we were interested, but we couldn't look into it quite yet.  As soon as that other project wrapped up, we had to orchestrate a fairly large annual family event and couldn't really investigate the options surrounding their offer until this past weekend.  They were well aware of both of these situations.

So on Sunday we spent several hours trying to figure out a way to make this work, but in doing so, realized that we didn't have as much time as we initially thought given delivery and installation timeframes.  It was theoretically possible to still do the project before their deadline, but when taking into consideration our other priorities (financial and time) right now, it just doesn't make sense to take this on right now.  It was hard to turn it down in terms of it was quite generous and something we would like to take advantage of it, but given their parameters (which is their right, I suppose) it wasn't going to work.

We called and politely explained that we would have to turn down their offer.  I knew they would be, and could tell that they were disappointed.  Today I received the not unexpected guilt trip email saying "if you had started looking into it when we offered..." (and on and on and on).  I'm not sure if or how to respond to it.

Concurrently, this past weekend while we were looking into this other offer, they mentioned they wanted to get me a birthday present (much smaller in scale, but probably $2-300) and would I prefer X or Y.  To be honest I don't really want/need either, but I haven't responded to that offer yet.  In an ideal situation I could say, "hey, tone down the gifts" but that wouldn't go over well.  On this one, I could just say I'd love X and let them spend the money, but I'm growing uncomfortable with the increasingly generous gifts that come with expectations attached - (i.e., you need new clothes, here's a gift certificate to this one particular store that has nothing that you would wear in it, and then "how do you like/have you worn your new clothes?" or "you need new shelves in your kitchen, let me buy them for you" and then I have to take down the old ones, make appropriate repairs and install the new ones when I have other priorities...)

My family is disfunctional in a lot of ways, and I don't want to stir the pot if I don't have to, but at the same time my husband has a point in that many of their gifts come with added stress.  Any thoughts on if I should just let this blow over or address the longer-term issue now?

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics