I have a story about someone who is, in fact, a good friend, but I would think twice about inviting them over as a guest again. Not because they are needy or greedy: rather the opposite. It was quite uncomfortable, and I am curious what my e-hell peers have to say about the matter.
See, I am from Europe, and my boyfriend lives abroad – which is a good 300 km away. When he comes over, he sometimes brings a friend because we do share a social circle. This was the case on this occasion. My boyfriend and the friend arrived, and we had a fabulous day in the city.
Naturally, as they came from afar, they were both going to stay the night. Since we are all students, I let house guests sleep on the couch in my own room usually. This friend did not feel comfortable with that, however, and insisted he’d find a bed and breakfast. I fully respect his wish not to share a room with me and my boyfriend: I can see that someone would want to sleep alone. However, I did not want to push the costs of a bed and breakfast on his narrow student budget when this lad has traveled so far to see me. So I made sure he could stay in the room of a housemate who was away, and, since he did not want to sleep in their bed and threatened me with sleeping on a bench in the park, I put up an air bed in the room for him. The blankets and pillows we had to put there secretly since he not only refused those, he told me I was being patronizing for giving him bedding. Naturally, he declined any food from my kitchen. In the end he did sleep in our house, but made no use of the blankets and slept under his own coat.
I like to think that, with the means I have on hands, I am a respectable hostess. And I am sure he only wanted to be polite; but his declining all my hospitality really gave me a lot more work than a “yes, please” would have. I would have loved to entertain this mutual friend of me and my partner’s but I felt very unable and I think I won’t invite him over again soon. 0817-14
Tag: Guests
The Forlorn And Forgotten Guest
This event occurred several years ago but I still think of it from time to time and wonder if I handled it correctly.
My daughter (Miss E) was 7 years old at the time and had been invited to a classmate’s birthday party. I was recovering from surgery and unable to drive so I organized a taxi booking to pick up E and drop her at the party and collect her 2 hours later. This is not such an unusual occurrence where we lived and taxi drivers in our town were known to be very friendly and trustworthy members of the community charged with ferrying children to and from school regularly. It was only a 5 minute drive between our homes. I called the host to RSVP and mentioned the taxi arrangement only to explain why E would be presenting herself alone. The host insisted on picking up E herself despite my protests that I didn’t wish to inconvenience her while she was preparing for the party and that it was in no way any problem for me to do this. I just wanted to ensure E got to the party as she was really looking forward to it. The host mum remained insistent and said that it would make better sense to pick up E as she planned to pick up some catering just before the party and would be driving past our home anyway. I agreed and cancelled the taxi.
So, the birthday girl’s mother did not arrive to collect E who was dressed head to toe in the theme color (purple) and pacing across our porch with wrapped gift a good hour before the expected collection time. This time came and went, I tried calling the host but it went to voice mail. At the party start time I called the taxi company again only to be told that without a pre booking it would be at least a 45 minute wait. At this stage my daughter was quite forlorn, not angry, just sad and I just felt so heart broken for her.
I called a friend who dropped in that evening with her favorite take away and a movie and we had a nice night, I hoped our treat helped her feel better. On the following Monday E went off to school, with the gift, and gave it to the birthday girl who according to E explained that her mother simply forgot to pick her up.
This seemed to satisfy E but I have wondered if I should or could have done more. At the time I had considered inviting the girl out with E and I for a picnic or some other activity thinking it might show the girl that there were no hard feelings on our part but to be honest I was a bit miffed that the other parent never even contacted me let alone suggest such a solution herself. In hindsight I also realize that I should never have relied on a busy party host to do me a favor, despite her insistence, and I should have retained my booking.
Miss E is now a confident 17 yo, and has attended dozens of lovely parties since, but I now have a 2yo son and soon I’ll be back in the realm of play dates and kids party etiquette. I’d love to hear some opinions on this. 0212-16
Dueling Houseguests
I have a rough situation that I would appreciate you and your Ehellion’s input. A bit of background: A few years ago, at the request of my mother, my husband and I moved in to my Great Aunt Sandy’s house to help take care of her and the property. My GA is getting on in her years and desperately needed some assistance. At the time, I had recently accepted a new job that required us to move near my GA and the timing seemed perfect. The house is quite large (five bedrooms across three floors) and it was too much for one person to handle on their own. Our goal was to stay only for a few months to help her get settled and to allow us time to find a proper home. A few months turned into a year and anytime my husband and I discussed moving out, my mother and Great Aunt Sandy would ask, “But why?!”
About a year ago, the health of my Great Uncle Roger began to deteriorate. My GU Roger lives with his son, Fred. Roger’s youngest daughter, Carol, lives a few hours away by plane. Carol heard the news and decided she would like to spend more time with her ailing father. Carol is unemployed and her husband, Bob, is a consultant and makes a quite comfortable living while telecommuting. It was assumed that Carol and Bob would stay in a hotel or with her brother, Fred. Surprisingly, she asked if Bob (and only Bob) could stay with us since we lived a few minutes away. GA Sandy agreed, although we were quite confused as to the reason why since Fred’s house had plenty of space and we barely knew Bob (we had only met him a few times over the 30 years they’d been married). But she loved Carol like family and agreed to her request, so we hosted Bob for those four weeks. It then turned into a year (on-and-off). Carol would care for her ailing father, and Bob would stay with us, often without warning.
Bob is not an easy man to live with. He commandeered our common living room and turned it into his personal office space. The house has plenty of rooms, but he felt most comfortable working where the family relaxed, interrupting our conversations or quiet time to talk about his clients. My husband and I are our own “maid service” and spend the whole of Saturday cleaning the house top-to-bottom. Bob would conveniently be visiting Carol and her family when Saturday rolled around. He constantly left dirty dishes and pans in the sink, never took out the trash, and left lights on in every room of the house. At one point during his stay, it began to snow quite heavily outside. Bob stomped around the house, yelling about how much he hates snow. As the snow continued to fall, he decided to he would clear the driveway and snow around our cars. I peeped out the window to find Bob with the snow shovel trying to use it to shovel snow off my car! I ran downstairs and kindly suggested he wait until tomorrow to finish. But it was too late. My car had scratches from the snow shovel and a broken mirror, to boot. Bob never apologized or even acknowledged the damage to the car. When I walked in and told my husband and GA Sandy about the broken mirror, he expressed mild surprise and quickly left the room.
My GA Sandy decided to become a Snow Bird and flew to Florida for the Winter. She asked if my husband and I could stay with the house until she returned, upon which we would move into our home that is currently being built. We were looking forward to having the house to ourselves until I was surprised with an e-mailed flight confirmation from Aunt Carol. Guess who’s back! My husband and I have no idea what to do. While the house is not ours, it is one that my GA said we could use as we wish until her return. And we are simply not able to prepare the house for uninvited guests since I will be traveling soon for work. We would appreciate any suggestions to help steel our polite spine. Since, as GA Sandy would say, “He’s family and family comes first!” 11-24-15
The situation is simple and obvious. Both you and your husband and cousin-in-law Bob are houseguests of Great Aunt Sandy. Both houseguests intended to stay only a short time, a few weeks to a few months, but both ended up extending their stay to over a year with Great Aunt Sandy being very gracious with her hospitality. I’ll assume that since Great Aunt Sandy has the financial means to be a Snowbird during winter that she has and continues to pay for the mortgage thus releasing you and your husband from a financial burden to pay rent or a mortgage in exchange for caring for her and the property. So, you have a nifty arrangement where, for one day’s work a week, you get to live in a lovely house rent free.
Great Aunt Sandy can invite whomever she wishes to stay in her large house and as a guest yourself, there isn’t much you can do about this. You made an arrangement to swap care for free boarding but other guests are not obligated to negotiate that kind of deal or any deal for that matter. Bob came into the picture as a guest only with no strings attached to his staying at GA Sandy’s. Great Aunt Sandy did not appear to be disrupted by Bob’s makeshift office in the living room unless becoming a snowbird was her passive aggressive way of avoiding Bob.
So, your lack of a polite spine was in not standing up for having a house of your own and moving out to be the masters of your own domain. I’m dubious about the need for a live-in family to “care of her” since Great Aunt Sandy has no issues whatsoever with packing up, getting on an airplane and living alone for months during winter. So, move out. It’s as simple as that unless you have indentured yourself to Great Aunt Sandy as a means to save money for the house being built. Until the house has been finished and is habitable, you and the husband suck it up, do what you agreed to do and count the days until you can leave. What happens to Bob and how he trashes the house then becomes an issue between him and GA Sandy.
Holiday Guest Kindness
I would love to share my holiday story! Some years ago, my fiance (now husband) and I were both fresh out of college and newly employed at low-paying entry level jobs. We moved into our first apartment at the beginning of December. It was very sparsely furnished, almost entirely with hand me downs. The rent and security, as well as the few things we had to purchase (a cheap set of dishes, things like that) had pretty much wiped out our meager savings. The cupboards were stocked with canned soup and ramen, and whatever other cheap items we could pick up.
A couple of weeks later, just before Christmas, a childhood friend of my husband’s (we will call him ‘Mark’) called and said he was taking a ski trip to the area, and would we mind putting him up to save the expense of the hotel? We told him he was certainly very welcome, but hoped he would not expect much in the way of entertainment and meals. We didn’t even have a spare bed or real couch, but he was welcome to sleep on the loveseat. He said that was fine, and arrived a couple of days later. I felt terrible that I did not have the means to provide very good accommodations, but tried to be as gracious a hostess as possible. Mark stayed for three days. On the morning of the day he planned to depart for home, I was awoken by a bit of a commotion in the kitchen. I got up and went to see what was going on.
Very early that morning, while we slept, Mark had gone out to a 24 hour grocery store, and was now stuffing our cupboards, refrigerator, and freezer with food. Staples (like bread, milk, flour and sugar), meat, fresh fruits and vegetables. He certainly spent as much on food as we would have on a hotel! I was dumbfounded, and began to cry. He simply said, “Thanks for letting me crash, and Merry Christmas.”
This was the most amazing act of kindness I have ever experienced, and truly made it a wonderful and very merry Christmas. 1007-15
One Big, Happy, Squished Family Celebration
I was very young at this particular Christmas time, so my memory is hazy, but the memory of it has stayed with me all these years.
On one side of my family, the ages of my first cousins, siblings and myself spanned a couple of decades and more, so when I was a toddler, I attended my oldest first cousin’s wedding. He was finishing college and then graduate school, and he and his wife lived in the dorm complex in a very small apartment. I don’t know who first voiced the idea, or how so many normally practical people ended up agreeing to it, but the entire extended family was invited to spend the holiday with my cousin and his wife and baby son at the college a very few years after that wedding, and everyone accepted! As best I can remember, there were about 28 of us at the time including the host family. Normally, every Christmas was spent at my grandfather’s house at his insistence, and how he was convinced to do this, I’ll never know.
The entire family descended upon that tiny apartment, between the men’s and women’s dorms which were devoid of any other students because of the holiday. There wasn’t room for everyone to even sit in one room, so naturally, we were all spending the night—by invitation — since the accommodations were so grand!
I don’t remember how we handled eating, perhaps a lunch room, but I remember getting ready for bed in shifts, and going to talk to my mother before I was taken off to my sleeping spot. She was bundled into a bed with three other women, and all four were giggling almost to hysteria. My dad was sleeping in the lounge in the men’s room. He was lucky because he got a couch. The younger male cousins had to sleep on the floor on a pallet.
My slightly older sister, a female cousin of her age, my very youngest male cousin who is two years younger than I, and of course, me, were put on a pallet in some sort of gymnasium type room, which seemed enormous to me at the time, but was probably not large at all. I think some older cousins might have been across the room on the floor, but in my child’s memory of it, it was just the four of us. My little cousin, who was a real tough acting little boy with a notorious temper, cautiously reached over and put his hand in mind and whispered, “I’m kind of scared. Will you hold my hand? Just don’t tell anyone.” I squeezed his hand, assured him it was fine, and that it was our secret. I was about six, but his fear made me feel brave. We slept well.
The next day was a crazy day of opening a mountain of presents, visiting, and packing up to go. People had slept in rows on the living room floor, I discovered, in addition to the crowded bed and the other rooms that were used. It should have been a nightmare, or at least a fine submission as a Holiday Hell story, but it wasn’t.
Instead, it was fun. We enjoyed ourselves happily while we laughed and laughed, and we continued to laugh over that Christmas for years to come. No one ever complained; they always re-told the funny parts over and over. I never squealed on my little cousin, who is now a fine upstanding man and a loving grandfather to little ones as well. It was the Christmas celebration of a lifetime. We never wanted to do it again, but we wouldn’t have missed it for the world! 1006-15