Reliably Unreliable

My husband’s mother is absolutely notorious for doing these things in this order.

1. Constantly criticizes and guilt trips us about not visiting enough.
2. Asks us to appear at her house on a certain day.
3. We call and text that day before leaving our house to confirm arrangements. She says yes.
4. We drive the hour to her house.
5. We arrive and she is not there. Yes, at the appointed time.
6. We are expected to wait for her to get home. Sometimes, it’s four or five hours. Sometimes, she never comes back at all.
7. During this interlude in Passive-Aggressive Hell, sometimes, she responds to us on her cell phone. Often, she doesn’t, and [Husband] wastes half his day off waiting in her empty house.
8. Sometimes, she eventually comes back. Sometimes, she does not. After experiencing this a few times with [Husband], I now give her twenty minutes. Then, we leave.
9. Several hours later, when she finally arrives home and does not see us patiently waiting, she starts angrily texting us, “Why aren’t you here?!” and, “Why didn’t you call me?!” We were there. We did call her.
10. She sends passive-aggressive texts for the next four to ten days, absolutely infuriated that we did not spend all day waiting for her.

There is a variation of this where she says she’s coming to my house. It’s usually her idea because, duh, I know she’s about as reliable as a dead cat. In that version, we clear one of [Husband]’s days off for her. We miss out on other things we’d rather do. We cook food to feed her dinner. We clean the house and stress all day instead of relaxing.

And then, she either doesn’t show up at all, cancels just before she was supposed to arrive, or sends a string of texts and calls (lots of texts and calls) about how her life is hard and she’s busy doing things and, okay, she guesses she’s not coming. She does this on my son’s and [Husband]’s birthdays. She does it at the holidays. She does it on summer weekends when we all could have been doing something else.

I guess I’m partly to blame for what happened yesterday, July Fourth. I know what she’s like, and in all the busyness of the weekend of the Fourth — we made it to fireworks, a BBQ, and two different birthday parties in two days — I forgot to have a backup plan in case Grandma bailed on our plans.

To fit her into our (crammed) weekend, we cut out some much-needed quiet family time and naps at our house before we went to the fireworks at 10:00. We had been planning this with her all week. [Husband] texted her to confirm before leaving our house (an hour away). She said yes.

We arrived, and guess what?! The b**** wasn’t there. She had decided to go out on her boat instead.

It was 90+ degrees (32+C), it was 6:00 pm, and we had four hours to kill before the fireworks. We couldn’t wait in the heat, and I was not going to wait all day in her house, with my son, who was being blown off by Grandma yet again, and who didn’t get a Fourth Of July at all the previous year because [the global health crisis]. We didn’t have enough gas or gas money to drive home, sleep until fireworks time, and drive back.

So, I took my son swimming. I had to buy shorts for both of us to swim in because we had on nice new clothes for Grandma’s “dinner” that she was supposedly having us over for. Thank God [Retail Chain] is cheap. It was too hot to not swim.

So, we were splashing around and actually having a great time, and about three hours later, the frantic texts and calls began. My mother-in-law was furious because “Why didn’t you call me?!” and “Why didn’t you answer my text?!” and “Are you coming over to eat or not?!“

I made [Husband] turn his phone off. We ate fast food for dinner and went to a completely different spot to watch the fireworks than we usually do. It was on the river, the sunset over the water was absolutely beautiful, and we had tons of fun giving each other silly Internet quizzes. We made great memories for my son, and that’s what really matters — not his super-selfish Grandma.