zeemczed:

ayellowbirds:

arquus-malvaceae:

bogleech:

lifesgrandparade:

Imagine typing out this letter and not stopping halfway and thinking “Hmmm, this makes me sound like the worst human being in the world.”

Holy fucking shit

Imagine receiving a gift that someone spent weeks, if not months, building from scratch and probably destroying their wrists and hands making and your reaction is, “How DARE you?”

This is what happens when you devalue labor. Her time probably cost more than the yarn did in the end, but because her time and skill don’t have a price tag attached to them, this woman acts like her DIL just handed them back the gift card.

boy, i hope the advice columnist tore her apart.

More or less.

But nothing did happen. You received a thoughtful gift that cost more time than money. That’s it! If someone gives you a present you don’t like, you smile and say, “Thanks, how thoughtful,” and then stash it in the back of your closet. You don’t ask your kid to complain to the gift-giver via backchannel. It’s fine if you like to give expensive presents—and can afford to do so—but that’s not the only way to show someone that you care. Even if you don’t like knitwear, your daughter-in-law spent countless hours over the course of a half-year working on something very detailed for you, and you say yourself it was a lovely bedspread. Whether she got the yarn with the gift card you gave her or spent her own money is beside the point; you’re acting as if she re-gifted something when that clearly wasn’t the case. Your daughter-in-law’s gift was thoughtful and intricate; yours was financially generous and relatively generic. There would be no reason to compare the two if you hadn’t insisted on doing so in the first place.

You are grown adults with plenty of money; if there’s something you want for yourself, go ahead and buy it—this kind of petty scorekeeping around gift-giving is barely excusable when little children do it. Writing her a letter to express “sadness” that her own parents didn’t teach her proper etiquette would be wildly inappropriate, out of line, and an unnecessary nuclear option. And it’s a guaranteed ticket to make sure you see and hear about your grandchildren way less than you do now. You still have time to salvage this relationship—don’t die on this hill. Let it go, apologize for your churlishness, and take yourself shopping if you want a pricey gift this year

Prudence didn’t add “BITCH” to the end, but she should have.