MIL's wierd excuses for calling

[bee well]

MIL calls the house at an inappropriately early time, gets no answer. Later she gets an answer from DH at work and starts nagging him because she couldn't get in touch with us earlier. The reason for the call?  She had heard on the a.m. news that the day before someone had died in an accident, working in the fields, more than an hours drive away from here, and wanted to make sure nothing had happened to us. Neither of us work in the fields, nor would we have any reason to be in that area. WTF (Shakes head here...) This would be (tragi) comical if it weren't for the poor fellow that died...She doesn't live alone so I can't say she was desperate to talk to someone. Any excuse for a macabre conversation, I guess.

What's your wierdest MIL phone call excuse?

[NarcKiddo]

My mother comes up with endless weird excuses. I can't remember them all now. Quite often it is to impart some utterly trivial piece of news about a neighbour I don't know.

My MIL did a brilliant one on my husband. This was years ago, long before I knew him. He'd taken a girl out on a date. It was in the days before mobile phones. His mother telephoned the restaurant and had the waiter fetch him from the table to take the call. She then informed him that he had left his electric blanket on. 

[Empie2204]

Years ago, my MIL called us for the urgent matter of flour moths flying around the kitchen and making noise (!) With their wings, I suppose. 
It was a late winter afternoon in the middle of the week.
Her theory was they were congregating in the gap between the curtain track and the ceiling.
They were not. (The track was dismantled and cleaned.)
There were some 4 or 5 of them flying around but their residence was between the wall and the kitchen cabinet. The sealing of the cabinet was bad so there were crumbs, flour, and other small particles on the floor behind the cabinets.
We cleaned that too.

She wanted company, we knew that. But she did not want to be with us during winter when she had nothing to do in her garden so she used a couple of moths to bring us to her house and spend there the whole evening.
The next morning there was work and school for us, at home there was a pile of house chores to do but she had to deal with the problem immediately.
Needless to say, this was not the exception.

[bee well]

Hi All,

Oh My, NarcKiddo! My MIL loves to talk about the neighbors too... Calling about the electric blanket during a date? And fetching DH from the table? That takes the cake!

Weird excuses for contact seem to be a PD thing across the board...

Empie2204, The moth thing is odd. It's interesting that you point out the urgency thing. Often "they" use the "emergency" calls to create drama and get attention. Nevermind what might be going on in others' lives. That seems to be the common theme.

[Cat of the Canals]

My MIL routinely calls early in the morning, like 6 A.M. This might be explained by the time difference, except she did it when we lived near her, and she also frequently tries to call/text even earlier, like 3 A.M. She has never gotten a response but still tries periodically. There's never an excuse, either. She calls when it suits her.

[Andeza]

My uPDMIL has never called with a super weird excuse, but my uBPDm and my DH's uHPDGma have both had some good ones. My m used to call to inform me when certain actresses or actors had died... as though I hadn't seen it on the news myself. She really did have nothing interesting to talk about I suppose? And DH's Gma just calls or texts for whatever. Usually "Did you get the package?" "Did you get the letter?" She's paranoid about packages and letters getting lost/uses it to force communication. She especially loves fawning thanks for... sending useless crap. She's just trying to force the person who received the crap to call her and fawn and thank her for the useless crap. The thing that kills me the most is that she used to text at 5 or 6AM for us, which is 3AM for her. Why the heck is she texting anybody at 3AM?! Boredom. HPD and boredom don't sit nicely with each other.

[Cat of the Canals]

The thing that kills me the most is that she used to text at 5 or 6AM for us, which is 3AM for her. Why the heck is she texting anybody at 3AM?! Boredom. HPD and boredom don't sit nicely with each other.

I wonder if insomnia is common for certain PDs. My MIL has a history of being up in the middle of the night, and when my husband was younger and still at home, she would blame him for it -- even if he was being silent, his being awake was keeping her awake somehow. He also told me she used to come into his room in the middle of the night, while he was dead asleep, and start nagging him about how he needed to do various chores with no preamble or attempt to wake him up. 

I truly think they are oblivious to the idea that the rest of us are having completely different experiences than they are. The fact that they are awake and thinking about XYZ means that we are also naturally awake and thinking about XYZ.

[lkdrymom]

My father called me at work to tell me I had to come over right away and prove that he is 'allergic' to his new bed.  And by new, I mean the one he has had for 4 months at this point.  I told him I couldn't get there for another 2 days and by then he forgot all about it.

[Call Me Cordelia]

"I need to know the name of that little girl who was so snotty to you in the fourth grade."

[OutlawSally]

Not so much an excuse, but a very PD style of phonecall nonetheless.

MIL will call to tell us she's upset about some news (aka gossip) she's heard about someone, but she's often so focused on her feelings we can't tell what the actual event is. It goes something like this;

MIL: I heard about *insert name of someone we don't know* and I'm beside myself. I'm so upset.
Us: why, what happened?
MIL: it's awful. They have a child too! And Jane is upset. Terrible.
Us: ?
MIL: I'm so worried about them.
Us: ... what happened? Was there an accident?
MIL: I found out yesterday and I just can't stop thinking about it. 

And so on and so on. We may or may not ever get to the bottom of what happened.

[bee well]

Wow...!

This is one of those times that it appears we are dealing with variations on the same people. The commonality, regardess of their family role is obviously the disordered behaviour.  I'm not qualified to determine this with any certainty but I'd surmise a lot of us here are talking about "cluster b stuff..."

Andeza, The "Did you get the package?" That one is familiar. It's a legitimate question until it gets asked over and over after the initial response was. "It takes a while due to the distance." And yep, then expecting us to fawn when the odd gift arrives...And the early morning communications that Cat of the Canals was also talking about: it's no wonder someone would be wonky in the daytime if they are up at night texting and ruminating. Which brings me to this:

Cat of the Canals,

I think  a lot of uPds have persistant insomnia. My MIL is one of them. She says she worries all night and will talk about it a lot at mealtimes, either in person or on the phone (captive audience). That being said, a lot of people worry at night. The difference between cluster bs and C-PTSD, or garden variety insomnia ("only") in my observations being that disordered individuals, when further down the spectrum, and untreated, will impose their worried thoughts on people incessantly during the daytime. What you wrote here sums it up:

"I truly think they are oblivious to the idea that the rest of us are having completely different experiences than they are. The fact that they are awake and thinking about XYZ means that we are also naturally awake and thinking about XYZ."

That last part brings up more of why I posted initially. DH said when MIL called about the accident, she said "Oh I  got up in the morning and turned on the TV full volume and heard about it on the news. I'm sick with worry about you. "

Why did she have to share that detail about the full volume? Maybe it was to justify the early call and explain why she hadn't heard about it the day before, as it was already in the news? Oh yes, she is deaf and won't wear her hearing aid (has selective hearing though, even without it).

All of this smells like b.s. to me because the news is one thing she pays attention to and "hears" with regularity. I have a feeling she was sleepless, worrying in the night and felt the impulse to call first thing... (I haven't talked to her since she had this last exchange with DH and she will probably think I am angry because I didn't answer when she called first thing in the morning. Ugh...)

Excuse me, everybody, I'm rambling a little here with my armchair psycologist/detective work but I think  you get the idea.

Call me Cordelia,

"I need to know the name of that little girl who was so snotty to you in the fourth grade." What? I mean, really? Why does that not surprise me.

Lkdrymom, Mnnn... The soon forgotten emergency...that's another one most of us likely experience more often than we'd like to remember.

Outlaw Sally,

Oh My Goodness! That really is frustrating. Those conversations happen in person too, right? Everyone hanging at the edge of their seat (or not) and no one knows what is going on....

[OutlawSally]

For sure! It's easier in person as FIL will often clarify what the details are. For MIL I think it's a combination of placing herself at the center of the drama and the point of her telling of the story being how she feels about it, not the actual event that took place. The fact that so-and-so are getting divorced is secondary; the important part is MIL is upset about this news.

The fact that your MIL justified calling you so early by saying she couldn't sleep and heard because the TV was on loud shows she is aware it's not normal or acceptable to call so early on a flimsy premise, but she chose to do it anyway.

[Leonor]

How about, (from a teary, shaken MIL, to DH):

"Your sister said she is going to rent out my flat to war refugees in support of some foundation she heard about from the vet!"

Yes, really!

[SeaBreeze]

My late uNPDm called at weird hours about anything and everything. Her tone was equally gleeful be it good news or bad that she was just so eager to share.

Here's the most memorable of such calls. A few years before my mother passed, I learned one of my ex-boyfriends had died in his early 40s. (This was one of the nicest guys on earth, who I broke up with because I didn't think I deserved a nice guy...) I called my dad (at a reasonable hour) and told him, as my dad and ex-bf always got along well and, at one point,  worked together at the same employer. I didn't tell my mother, because she only met the ex-bf once and didn't have anything nice to say about him. My dad and uNPDm were divorced several years but they both lived near my brother so bumped into each other sometimes. So about 2 weeks later, uNPDm calls late at night with that gleeful tone mixed with mock concern. "I don't know if your father told you, but did you know (ex-bf) died???!!!!" She sounded so deflated when I calmly told her yes, I knew, and that in fact I was the one who'd told my father.

There's an old thread here on Out of the FOG where a fellow member named these sensationalistic phone calls "The Death and Dying Report" or something along those lines. Hilarious thread if you can find it!

[moglow]

SeaBreeze: Could have been me - My mother was particularly fond of the dead and dying report. She rarely called with happy or funny news to share, almost inevitably it was a recitation of who was in hospital/dead/dying or listed on local funeral home marquee. If I wasn't sufficiently upset or indicated that I had no idea why she was sharing, she'd go into sixteen degrees of separation to define how I knew them, why I should and how awful I was for not being upset. Literally: my cousin's 4th grade teacher's mother's neighbor who had the little fluffy white dog that died? The dog's groomer was in hospital. 

[Cat of the Canals]

So about 2 weeks later, uNPDm calls late at night with that gleeful tone mixed with mock concern. "I don't know if your father told you, but did you know (ex-bf) died???!!!!" She sounded so deflated when I calmly told her yes, I knew, and that in fact I was the one who'd told my father.

My MIL did something similar when my husband's brother died. Went off on a ten minute monologue of every detail leading up to his death, and then reveals at the end that "he's gone." She couldn't hide her disappointment when my husband didn't give her a big, dramatic reaction. Her voice went ice cold, and she demanded to know "who told you." I guess she'd forgotten about the text she'd already sent that said, "The worst has happened." Or perhaps she thought it was vague enough that we wouldn't guess her "big news" and would be left on pins and needles wondering what "the worst" was? Either way, the entire thing was a lesson in How Not To Tell Someone A Family Member Died.

[Call Me Cordelia]

Lord, have mercy. Her own son's death by suicide. 

That's horrifically inhuman, Cat. Even for these boards. I'm so so sorry that's who raised your husband and his brother.

[Cat of the Canals]

Thanks, CMC. It was so on par with her usual behavior that it sometimes doesn't fully register how insane it really was. We know... but it's also like, "Yeah, that's MIL... what are you gonna do?" *shrug*

[Sneezy]

My MIL used to call in the summer to re-hash everything she thought I did wrong during the previous holidays (Thanksgiving and Christmas).  She would call DH and demand to know why I didn't join her for coffee at the appointed hour or why I dared to take a 30-minute nap while everyone else was watching TV or (the worst offense ever) why I didn't stick with the required color-scheme that she had designated for that year's wrapping paper. 

My mom is much less complicated when it comes to phone calls.  Any excuse will do.  Typically, it's a long message regarding the weather and wanting to know if it's raining at my house.  She lives 8 miles away, so she can pretty much stick her head out her own window if she wants to know what the weather is like at my house.