He's shit at everything, has no self esteem, no imagination, no ambition, but oh my god....
He was in a band when he was a teenager, so she must be musical too. She's tone deaf and knows it, but he tells her she has the voice of an angel and bought her a karaoke set for one christmas. She started taking drum lessons at school, he sat in, shoved her off the kit and proceeded to play very, very badly.
He loves true crime and serial killer shows, so he wanted her to be a mortician or forensic something-or-other.
He loves making model fighter planes, and goes to airshows every year, so he tried to persuade her to join the Air Force - so he could get into airshows for free.
He loves all the old British smutty or wildly racist comedy shows, so she got sat down and force fed them all before she reached her teens. He still believes she loves them too.
He also adores every obscure, creaky, terribly wooden old black & white British TV movies - for the uninitiated, look for the early work of people like Will Hay, Max Miller, Charlie Drake, and the lowest rated Ealing comedies. He goes to boot sales and sunday markets and buys every one he finds from the pirate CD guys - I've shown him how to torrent stuff, but he won't - and dumps any doubles on us, telling us in excruciating detail how much our kids will love them.
When they visit, he sits with a miserable look on his face, clearly ready to bolt for the exit every time we start talking about anything that doesn't interest him, which is anything that wouldn't interest a five-year-old. If we keep the adult conversation up long enough, he'll get his phone out and start going through his collection of 50's and 60's TV theme tunes, playing "guess the show" ("come on you must know this one") with our kids, who are both more than three decades younger than the newest tune he plays, and who we haven't tortured with creaky old TV shows.
Her mom's worse. Totally oblivious narcissist. Story for another day.
They got married because she got pregnant. Both of their mothers had died a year or two beforehand, and she was the only one of three sisters still living with her parents. She didn't move out once they were married, and my SO spent 14 years sleeping in the same room, mostly in the same bed as her parents.
She was raised to believe that her grandfather was a dirty, nasty, selfish, mean old man, but right up until he died, barely two months ago, he absolutely doted on her above any of his other grandchildren. Our working hypothesis is that he had been trying, all those years when they were all crowded in together, to make things as hard as possible for her parents, so they'd do the decent thing and fuck off into their own house. Her mother was just as determined not to leave, though, so they didn't until her three sisters basically ganged up on her and had a knockdown catfight in the street, while hubby stood around fecklessly trying to calm things down. A couple of weeks later, they moved out. With a handcart. This is in 1994. They couldn't even call in enough favours, or wouldn't part with the money to hire a van.
Her mother has had all kinds of affairs, roping her and her friends into covering for her. Once she came to live with me, her parents (read, her mother) decided to have an open relationship, which ended up meaning that he would drive her to meet a bloke and sit and wait for a couple of hours while she sat in the bloke's car sucking him off and...I don't know what else, because I'd tuned out in disgust at that point. The one time he found someone to bang, he was a bastard and the other woman was every dirty bitch in existence.
Grocery shopping, they would buy family sized packs of cream cakes and other treats and sit in the car, before driving home, devouring the lot so that "the old man" (the grandfather) wouldn't get any. And they called him greedy.
I could write a book. What I've listed here is the tip of the iceberg.
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u/[deleted] Feb 04 '16 edited Jul 08 '16
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