Tag Archives: OCD

Crazy Family, Mom in Law

Living in a world of your own

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Everyone was already in a situation where you thought you did something such as paying some bill but in the end you basically forgot to do it.  This can be rather annoying at time because you were at first 100% sure you did pay the bill which makes it even more frustrating to see that you were wrong in the end. Let me tell you there is nothing bad about it as it happens more often than not to me, especially when it comes to bringing the trash out (could be also my mind is doing it on purpose because who really likes to bring out the trash…). However this can be also very aggravating when it does happen to a person all the time and thus not only causes delay in doing certain things but also waste your time.

 

Who could I possibly talk about? My dear mother-in-law of course! I mentioned in various posts before that she is a rather odd person who is always right. No matter how clear it is that she did something wrong she is always able to blame others for it or it never ever happened. The thing is it wasn’t bothering me/ us so much as we didn’t have to depend too much on her most of the times but this changed a bit over time as she also started to visit us each year for three months and so on. Of course it wouldn’t matter at all in case these things were about trivial stuff but it usually always happens when it is about important or urgent matters.

I am making you brain dead as well!

Last time my wife was with Nathan in China she wanted to take some cash with her to Germany. Okay no problem there as she just had to go to bank with her mother (as the money is on her account) and withdraw some Euros. Now the problem wasn’t with getting the money but to find it again before flying to Germany. Few days before my wife and Nathan were about to fly back she started to pack and noticed that the cash vanished. She went to her mother and asked her where it could be. So MIL told that she gave it to her. Okay no trouble there but my wife couldn’t remember this at all so she asked her again. MIL then explained step by step how she gave the money to her when they arrived in the apartment. She even explained how she was giving it and with which hand. But as my wife couldn’t remember this at all MIL was just like “I gave it to you so it is your problem now!”. OKAY…according to my wife this went on for several hours until MIL finally decided to check her closet for something and voilà: THE FREAKING MONEY WAS WITH HER STUFF!!! Basically dear mother-in-law just created her own world once again and made up this story while she actually put the money to her closet and never gave it to my wife.

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Just for fun, a big fish (according to MIL)

Another example just to show you MIL’s insanity happened few weeks ago. As you might know both my wife and I have a little business (okay mostly my wife as I was just too ill to get anything done so far but things are slowly improving for me). All of our customers are from China so my wife has to send packages there every week. In case people buy some smaller amount my wife waits for a bit and then sends a big package to her parents containing stuff of several customers who had smaller orders. These things then are being put into smaller packages by MIL and then send to the customer. This actually sounds more complicated than it is because my wife strictly separates each of the items which belong to one customer and attached the name and address of this person. So all MIL has to do is to take it out, put it into some smaller packages (in case my wife didn’t put it already into some smaller boxes), attach the address of the buyer and give to some logistic company. Well well there is not really ever anything easy when it comes to MIL.

Few weeks ago my wife sent such a package containing the items of several buyers but there was one item without an adress as the buyer was just moving to a new place. The customer then sent few days later the new address to my wife and there was so far no problem. But the trouble of course started when my wife called her mother and gave the address for this last package. MIL was like “What package? I sent everything already away! There is nothing here!” WHAT??? How is this possible as there was this one package without any address! MIL was 100% sure that she sent this package but she didn’t remember any longer to whom. My wife then spent the whole day trying to figure out where on earth her mother could have sent this box. Late in the evening MIL then contacted my wife “Oh, by the way I found the missing box, it was with my stuff”. Guess how furious my wife was after wasting a whole day trying to track down where the box could be.

In the end father-in-law’s words ring too true “She is just crazy, she lives in a world of her own” and “She is able to bend reality and thus the truth to her own liking, she is never wrong about anything. Just crazy, you know”.  This poor man living with her for so many decades, no wonder he developed several OCD’s over the years.

Do you know someone who creates her/ his own reality when it comes to such things?

Be sure to follow me also on Facebook and on Twitter as I will post there occasionally pictures which do not find their way into my blog posts. Furthermore I also have a YouTube Channel in which some videos might pop up from time to time

https://www.facebook.com/CrazyChineseFamily

https://twitter.com/CraChineseFam

https://www.youtube.com/

Crazy Chinese People, Crazy Family, Dad in Law, Mom in Law, Our cute son, Uncategorized

The Silent One

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Last week I wrote about the often unpredictable behavior of my crazy Chinese mother-in-law. In the comments I was also asked how her husband is dealing with it all and I have here something like an answer.

NathGrandpa
First time carrying his grandson #Nathancuty

All the general info about him I wrote already down in two other posts About Father-in-law and The Love for Table Tennis. For the ones who don’t want to read it all I give you some short summary. He is in his mid fifties, loves to play table tennis, eats tons of sweets, as an OCD when it comes to cleaning and is able to eat about double the amount of food for lunch and dinner than the rest of the family combined. In the post About Father-in-law I wrote that he is working as a driver in one of the city’s bureaus. This is no longer true as the whole department has been shut down by the government to safe some money. Now he is unemployed and bored as hell every day at home. For him it is not about being unemployed and not earning money but that he has too much time on his hands out of nowhere. Worst of all for him is that he is whole day home and so is his wife!

 

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Watching over Nathan

Wheras MIL is a very strong person he is more the weak one. He easily gives in when his wife has something to complain about and most of the times I think he is doing so in order to escape the endless annoyance of MIL by making her think she won once again and shuts up. I know this might sound mean but once you heard one of her charades you will understand. Come to think of, his wife always has something to complain about him but usually it is actually something she did wrong herself. She pushes down by accident some vase? His fault because he placed it there and so on. So how can he partially escape the madness called his wife? He plays with his phone some weird farming games or does so on the computer whenever he is not cleaning the apartment or watching sports on TV. The good thing for him is that MIL loves shopping and goes dancing and thus is often gone for many peaceful hours. I think he is always looking forward when MIL stays with us for three months…

Though he is very invisible when going around as his wife wants to be the center of everything he still shows his presence when needed. When we need something he goes off and gets it for us in an instant. When we want to cross the street he will go ahead and wave to the cars to let us through. When he sees my wife looking at something in the shop window he will immediately gives her money (though my wife always takes the money she returns it before flying back to Europe without anything spent). He is very caring but sometimes way too much as he gets afraid that something is not good enough. Everytime before buying something he will carefully check the item he wants to buy to make sure that everything is 100% fine. When going out to eat he will clean each cup, bowl and the chopsticks. At home he is cleaning the apartment twice a day, each time done three times. Because he is so worried all the time that everything works fine he has high blood pressure and from is former afro hairstyle nothing is left.

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Meet Afroman

Of course we want to give him sometimes some nice presents but that is a futile effort. Not only does he not want anything but when he actually gets something from us he will store it safely away because he wants to wear/ use the old things first until they are broken. During MIL’s days as a model she often got some nice clothes and also gave him some. These days are over twenty years ago and still the clothes he received are originally packed and stored in his closet. Few years ago we bought him a new shaving machine, it took over a year until he used it and only because MIL threw away his old one as even threatening him that she will give the shaver to me would make him use it. In the end all I can say about FIL is that he is a very reliable person who prefers to stick to the background and is thus the exact opposite of MIL.

Do you also have a more quiet person in the family who is always there when you need her/him?

Be sure to follow me also on Facebook and on Twitter as I will post there occasionally pictures which do not find their way into my blog posts. Furthermore I also have a YouTube Channel in which some videos might pop up from time to time

https://www.facebook.com/CrazyChineseFamily

https://twitter.com/CraChineseFam

https://www.youtube.com/

Crazy Chinese People, Crazy Family, Dad in Law

Strawberries

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Visiting a strawberry farm was the very first activity we did together with my parents in law when they were visiting us in Finland last summer. Okay, not really the very first activity as this was most likely getting home from the airport…

Strawberry
A big red one

Anyways, why visiting a strawberry farm? There are actually two reasons for this. One, my wife always wanted to visit one and handpick herself strawberries (she loves strawberries) and second, my parents in law could not imagine picking berries themselves and eating them without some very thorough cleaning. Especially the second part seemed to be an impossible task for my father in law due to his OCD. Nothing is ever clean enough for him except he cleaned it himself three times.
But imagine our surprise when he went and started picking up strawberries without gloves and ate them without any cleaning. When my wife asked about it he just shrugged his shoulders and said “It is so much cleaner here than in China” and continued collecting more strawberries. No further information given by him but he looked relaxed while  walking those fields and searching for the biggest and reddest berry yet. All my wife managed to say about it was “I don’t believe what I am seeing” and stared at her father.

strawberryfam
The family evaluating the strawberries

Besides being busy with collecting and eating strawberries my parents in law were also surprised that there were so many people in the fields instead of just buying the berries from the supermarket. According to mom in law there wouldn’t be many people in China going to the countryside to spent hours on a field picking some strawberries and then paying for them. Later on my wife told me that her parents had never done anything like this before so I guess it was a nice first day in Finland for them.

On a side note: I did not collect even a single strawberry as I was more content filming everything and furthermore my father in law seemed to overcome parts of his OCD as he even touched one of our rabbits, he has not touched a single animal in a long long time.