giving away the gifts

[bee well]

My MIL came to visit and there were incidents involving boundary breaking, cruel words, and bad behaviour on her part. I am not talking to her at this time as a result of this.

I've written about it in the IL section.

Now our place is full of her gifts. We've talked about weird gifts in another section so please excuse the over lap.

MIL has a habit of bringing a lot of food items when she come to visit, She says only what is fresh and genuine, but much of it it arrives as it's on the verge of rotting. She also bring old things that are not useful to us. I have habitually put them in the charity box.

This time she brought a bunch of stuff she had canned but told us to taste it and to throw it away if it was sour. A good precaution but frankly I don't trust her canning process as she has poor hygiene.

She also brought a bunch of free-range meat . There ìs a backstory with the meat as she knows I have an issue linked to a specific meat product. I told her but she persisted to talk and laugh a lot about my issue. She finally stopped insisting on talking about this product, and also talking about how it gets from farm to table,  ( details, not nice or necessary to go into)   and stopped bringing it for her Son after he told he won't eat it any more, and that it would get thrown away. (He stopped eating it out of respect for me) She continued to bring other meats even when asked not to. I have a feeling meat thing is part of her disordered behaviour. Certainly food in general plays into it.

After she had stopped bringing that certain food, we decided to just let her bring what she wants, keep what we want and throw away or give away the rest. Stop the push pull protest that ended with accepting anyway.

After this latest incident we are giving it all away, I don't want to cook or eat any of it.  DH at  first suggested we should keep some of it, but now agrees we should just give it all away, as he doesn't think it's reasonable to expect me to cook it for him. Considering her behaviour, would this be a common reaction on my part to have an aversion to MILS food gifts?

How would you deal with it?

On another gift related note FIL and MIL both tried to give DH money to pay for the place he had rented, and the meals. Their gesture is in itself not out of the norm, but DH refused as we think it's correct to pay for the hospitality we offered, even after what happened. I think this offer is some sort of guilting or possibly trying to get gossip fodder so che can say not only did we make a place for her to sleep in our home, but that they had to pay for the place we booked. Note that when we were in a larger home, we gave them our room and slept in a different room.

Any comments or experience with similar?

[treesgrowslowly]

Hi Bee well,

I have given away anything I don't want in my home or space. Looking back, it was common for me - it was something i had to do early on in life...otherwise I'd drown in the constant stream of gifts (junk) left behind by the PDs in my FOO every time they visited.

I have given away many many things given to me by narcissists.

You asked if others felt that aversion to these gifts. Yep. I had a huge aversion to keeping most anything they tried to give me. I certainly wouldn't put up art / home dec. they wanted me to put on my walls. Why be reminded of them daily? No thank you! 

Over the years, I have donated most of the Christmas "gifts". First week of January, I haul a car full to goodwill. We all need holiday traditions - that became mine!   

I have given away food to others, because I didn't want it.

(sealed) boxes of chocolates went to homes where they could enjoy them, not knowing the source was a PD. That felt good, to give away the treats that a PD gave me, and give it to someone who could just enjoy them.

I had a lot of untreated mental illness in my FOO, which resulted in throwing out anything I suspected was not safe to eat - it is very common for disordered people to try to feed us rotten food.

As a child I watched the PD's undercook meat and baked goods, and am surprised I'm still here to tell the tale it was so common to have spoiled / spoiling food around us!! 

So yes, do throw away that canned stuff you are not feeling safe about consuming!!

There is no shame in this. None.

Are they gifts? Not if they stress you out. A gift is something you feel good about getting. Not everything that someone gives us, is a "gift" even if they insist that it is.

One of the ways that I learned something was 'up' with my relatives, early on in my learning about PD's, was their reaction when I tried to tell them to stop with the spoiling foods  and crummy 'non-gifts'. They had no capacity to comprehend what I was saying (and no capacity to stop with the spoiled foods and non-gifts)....so that was one of the early signs for me that these were not "healthy" people. The average Non (non-disordered person), doesn't want to feed people spoiled food.

As for accepting cash from our disordered relatives, I think different people have different feelings on this, and none are wrong.

If one does not feel comfortable taking cash from a relative (disordered or not), they have the right to refuse the cash, and do what makes them most comfortable in regards to accepting money gifts. Others here might share how they dealt with that specific situation.

Good for you for asserting yourself about how all of this has made you feel. It isn't easy to manage those IL relationships.

I am sorry you are dealing with this. To this day, when someone sends over baked goods / cooked food to our home, I have to test it to make sure it isn't spoiled. I just realized that probably comes from growing up in a PD home where you had to constantly do that.

Trees

[Cat of the Canals]

Improperly canned food can be literally deadly. Definitely throw that away and anything else you don't want to eat. PDmil brought us brownies once and was giggling in a very suspicious way... we were so weirded out that we threw them away without tasting them, afraid she'd done something shady to them. (In hindsight, I think the giggling was duping delight at coming up with such a "clever" excuse to show up at our house unannounced, again.)

She also did a strange thing last visit, which was to buy things she knew we already had in our fridge. We had stuff for sandwiches, a loaf of gluten-free bread for her, some cans of flavored seltzer. She showed up the day before they left with a GIANT package of lunch meat, another loaf of gluten-free bread (she'd eaten maybe 4 slices of the other), and a 12-pack of seltzer. On the one hand, it seemed like she was trying to "replace" what she'd eaten... but in that case, buying more GF bread made no sense because she's the only one who eats it, and buying enough lunch meat to last a week for a large family doesn't make sense when it's just me and my husband here. So most of it got thrown away.

Which is par for the course when it comes to gifts from her. She likes to shop, but she doesn't seem to consider much what she's buying. We've ended up with some absolutely random crap over the years. Most of it gets donated or otherwise given away. I felt a little guilty at first, but over the years, I've realized there's no sense in feeling that way about "stuff."

Are they gifts? Not if they stress you out. A gift is something you feel good about getting. Not everything that someone gives us, is a "gift" even if they insist that it is.

Love this. And absolutely agree on the point about monetary gifts. If I am given actual GIFT, like for a birthday or holiday, that's one thing. But my PDmom is not above outright bribes, so I avoid taking money that isn't explicitly given without strings attached. I would say to trust your gut about your IL's "paying you back" or however they phrased it.

[bee well]

Hi All,

Trees, I've already done away with the fruit that was going bad. Hopefully DH's friends will take some of the rest which seems ok.

You wrote: it is very common for disordered people to try to feed us rotten food.

"As a child I watched the PD's undercook meat and baked goods, and am surprised I'm still here to tell the tale it was so common to have spoiled / spoiling food around us!! " I think that is probably more common that we think. I really have no way of wrapping my brain about  it."

You also said:

"So yes, do throw away that canned stuff you are not feeling safe about consuming!!

There is no shame in this. None."

And then there's this:
"Are they gifts? Not if they stress you out. A gift is something you feel good about getting. Not everything that someone gives us, is a "gift" even if they insist that it is."

I agree. There are lot's of things in our home linked toILs which have no problem with. Some are attached to good times..The food thing is just too weird not to mention potentially dangerous, especialy with the canned goods.

Cat of the Canals,
As I wrote before it's not a good idea to risk with those canned goods.

MIL also brings duplicates of things of perishable things we would necessarily have before her arrival-hence, more food wasted.

Def not accepting payment for the place rented, which was a gift to them....

I feel like a rag today but I am enjoying the quiet (today would have been a phone call day) and  getting "our stuff" in order, in the home and otherwise.

Thanks again to both of you all the support.

[bee well]

Mnnn, I thought about this some more and wanted to come in and add. Trees wrote:


"Are they gifts? Not if they stress you out. A gift is something you feel good about getting. Not everything that someone gives us, is a "gift" even if they insist that it is."

We did not accept the money for the place we had rented them as it was a gift from us to them, that had been accpeted when they went and slept there. The money to pay for the place was not offered until after the scene with MIL. That makes me think it's some sort of a guilt trip...anyway, I'll never know. I need to do some serious self care.

[escapingman]

Very interesting discussion.

I am not sure if my mum is a PD or not, but she surely has got some traits. We live in a different country to her and every time she used to visit she had tons of gifts, always things to eat and always either home made or shopped from the cheapest shops. So we got overloaded with dried mushrooms she had picked, instead of a jar with enough to use a couple of times it was tons. She obviously loved picking them herself, but it was to much for her to eat so someone else had to help her eat them. She gave us so much I started hating the taste and smell of it in the end. I remember once we got a bucket full of honey as she had been given loads by a relative that had started keeping bees, no one in our household used to eat honey so the bucket just stood there making me feel guilty until I had to put it in the bin in the end. There were some favourite sweets that the girls loved, but instead of buying them a couple of them when visiting the went to the cheap shop and bought kilos of budget sweet that was already old when she picked it up in the shop.

When it comes to food I am not sure how I didn't end up food poisoned several times. She used and still do use the same chopping board for cutting raw chicken and then cut up the salad stuff, she only wipes it down with a wet cloth in between. For Christmas for example she cooks a large batch of sausages, meatballs etc - this is then reheated and put out on the buffet for every meal until it is all eaten - this could potentially be a week.

MIL who definitely is a PD  always showers us in gifts, but every gift has strings attached. She told us she would buy a freezer for us when we moved into a new house, but she only allowed us to buy the cheapest bottom of the range freezer that was a different colour to everything else in the kitchen. When we refused she went in to a sulk and didn't speak to us for a while. She also likes going to garden centres, she often come home with plants and realise they don't go in her garden so therefor it is dumped at ours and we are forced to find a place in ours for it.

[Pepin]

CN MIL operated on this vein as well for many years.  Every visit required her to bring food.  DIdn't matter what it was or even if we had seen her a few days prior.  I have written about her and food at length many times on this forum.  It was clearly a card she favored playing.  We set numerous boundaries with her but she would just go around them.  We gave up and after she'd leave, I'd get rid of the food by tossing it or giving it away.  While there are those that believe love is equated with food, in the case of CN MIL, I'd have to say no to that.  And fattening up DH when he was younger by rewarding him with food for tasks, is not love.

Another thing I found odd is that whenever we would go out to eat, CN MIL, at the end of the meal, would reach into her purse and pull out a dollar or more to give to each of my kids.  At fist my kids were like YAY but after several times they didn't like it anymore...and it was easy to see why they would suddenly cringe at that: she literally ignored them the whole time to talk to their father.  She was essentially paying them so she could have time with DH.  Ugh.  Glad that garbage is in the past.

[bee well]

escaping man, Pepin,

I'm glad both of you joined in.I think there are a lot fo people with poor hygiene and or peculiar habits around buying food and storing things (and giving in general). I To each his own--that doesn't mean they have a pd. but definitely there are some PDs who have integrated issues about food into their disordered thinking and behaviour.

escaping man wrote:


"When it comes to food I am not sure how I didn't end up food poisoned several times. She used and still do use the same chopping board for cutting raw chicken and then cut up the salad stuff, she only wipes it down with a wet cloth in between. For Christmas for example she cooks a large batch of sausages, meatballs etc - this is then reheated and put out on the buffet for every meal until it is all eaten - this could potentially be a week." Yikes, sounds like you have a strong stomach and are probably good at identifying which things not to put on your plate!

You also wrote:
"MIL who definitely is a PD  always showers us in gifts, but every gift has strings attached. She told us she would buy a freezer for us when we moved into a new house, but she only allowed us to buy the cheapest bottom of the range freezer that was a different colour to everything else in the kitchen. When we refused she went in to a sulk and didn't speak to us for a while"

I find it interesting how some of the gifts are really either not needed or are maladapted to the space they are supposed to go into. But really if a kind  person gave me a gift I didn't like I would try to make it fit in or keep it some where, especialy if there was a particular sentimental value in it,  or perhaps just give it away as we writing here do. It wouldn't be a thing at all. It's the insistance around these gifts that create an uncomfortable situation...

I don't know all of the story behind the freezer but a simpler solution might have been for MIL to contribute what she was able to or wanted to, and let you all buy the one you wanted. In any case disordered behaviour is not usually simple or logical.

Pepin wrote:
" While there are those that believe love is equated with food, in the case of CN MIL, I'd have to say no to that.  And fattening up DH when he was younger by rewarding him with food for tasks, is not love."

It's also not love to encourage people to fatten up then shame them into a diet and then say they look ill because they lost weight. Another of of my MILs behaviours. We could go on and on here.

Glad your kids started wising up to the dollar for your silence bit. (That's what it sounds like to me.)