"I gave the wrong address to my mother-in-law to prevent her from sending my daughter another offensive birthday present"
Large families are great fun if you all get along, but sometimes, this is not always possible. It is said that we can't chose our relatives, so incompatibility and tension between family members can be expected.
The subject of this story knows something about this: a husband, a father and a son-in-law who, in acting to protect his daughter, managed to unleash the wrath of both his mother-in-law and his wife. Let's find out what happened:
via Reddit
In a long post on Reddit, the man recounted his experience: "I'm 42 and have been married to my wife for 15 years. We have a beautiful 14-year-old girl and an 8-year-old boy. I've never gotten along very well with my mother-in-law, however. She has ideas which I don't agree with and this created some tension. When my daughter was 12, for example, my mother-in-law sent her a present for her birthday: it was a book about a crash diet that claimed the reader could lose 5 kilos in 3 days. This was an appalling thing to do to my daughter".
This so-called "gift" upset the man's daughter - to the point where it was over a month before she could eat properly again. When the man's daughter's 14th birthday arrived, he decided to do something to prevent this outrage from happening again.
"My mother-in-law wrote to me to ask for our address in order to send a gift to her grandaughter. Since my wife had not responded to her mother, I took the opportunity to give her the wrong address to avoid any nasty gift surprises. I made up an address and, as a result, the parcel was returned to my mother-in-law. This infuriated both my mother-in-law and my wife. My wife eventually gave her mother the correct address and the parcel was resent," the man explained.
When the parcel arrived, the man opened it and saw that it contained a dress which was two sizes smaller than that which a typical 14-year-old girl would wear. Again, the woman was clearly signalling her grandaughter to lose weight.
This infuriated the man and he decided to raise the matter with his wife. But she said that there was nothing wrong with her mother's gift and was furious with him for rasing the matter. So, what could the man do in this circumstance? At his wits end, he turned to the internet for advice.
"I think your wife must have been subjected to treatment like this when she was young. Perhaps this is why she can't see anything wrong with what her mother did," wrote one user. "If I could give you an medal, I would," another user. "You deserve a round of applause for the way you stood up for your daughter, even if your wife disagrees," added another user.
And what do you think about this? What would you have done in this tricky situation?
