Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the best IL's are the ones who have had the worst IL's.

There may be something to that. My ILs, especially my MIL, are wonderful. They are like second parents to me. My MIL told me early on that her own MIL was just awful to her and she had to put up with it for 30 years and she swore to be the complete opposite when her son got married. Her MIL would do things like pretend to forget her name (when they lived 10 minutes away and saw each other weekly or more) or "forget" to buy her a ticket or get her a seat when the whole family went out together. Terrible, mean passive-aggressive crap like that. I am the lucky recipient of her suffering -- I could not ask for a sweeter, kinder, or more thoughtful MIL.

Agreed. My great grandmother was the (bad) example in our family. She was just so horrible to my grandmother that it is still talked about now, many years later. The prime example was the fact that she started soiling herself the day she moved in with my grandparents, since she knew my grandmother would be the one that had to clean her up. She never used the toilet again for the rest of her life to punish my grandmother for stealing her precious son away. No health problems to blame it on, she just wanted to punish my grandmother.

Needless to say, the subsequent generations have been incredibly welcoming to new family members.