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Mother-in-law viral email diss

What blows my mind is that the mother-in-law was so determined to make sure the bride-to-be got the email that she sent it 3 times in one day. She really wanted this girl to know that she thought her to be so inferior.
 
The people who make the biggest fuss about "manners" are usually the people most devoid of them.

Very, very true.

Heh, Dawlish, where the future MIL lives, is close to where I am. There are a lot of people like her around here.
 
Not sure the point of sending something like this. Makes you out to be a huge bitch (even if you're 100% correct), and all it accomplishes, at most, is alienating your son to the point where he's likely going to stay with the girl, and just not come home anymore. When you don't get along with the in-laws, the couple doesn't go there very often. Congrats?
 
I have read that the young woman is diabetic and that is the reason behind her refusing certain foods. (edited to add - in the full email it is obvious that Mrs Bourne was quite aware that Ms Withers has diabetes).

I also believe that Mrs Bourne has also stated that her dog Bomber has been "profoundly upset" by the girls manners. I have never met a dog that knows the difference between good and bad manners.

Also Mrs Bourne is only the groom-to-be's stepmother having married into the family in 2003. Freddy's mother is keeping her mouth closed about the matter.

Full email is here

By the way - I have never sent a hand-written note thanking someone for letting me stay at their place. I buy them a nice thank-you present that I give them just before I leave.
 
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Every story has two sides. One may be crap, but no determining until both sides are heard. For all we know, the girls a selfish bitch. Or the mother in law is one. Or they both are and are trying to out-bitch each other.

That's all I was honestly thinking.

My mom always says, you can catch more bees with honey than you can with vinegar.

The sad thing is, though, is that that isn't technically true.

Okay, sorry, I really couldn't resist to point that out. *runs away*
 
Since we'll never get the whole story we can only assume things.

Personally my mom can be a stickler too.. at times she can harp on her bets friends in a really insulting manner aka "Did you see that? Do you know what they did?" etc and she's just a totally different generation than me that lives by different, sometimes archaic rules and can get pissed when someone breaks them.

However it was really bad form and manners of her to write such an email.. i know that mothers in law and daughters in law do not always get along and sometimes there's downright hate and i can only assume that this is the case here. She doesn't like her at all and may have blown small incidents way out of proportion (as someone said she had diabetes and naturally can't eat certain things which was turned around to being rude and not wanting to eat everything) - my mom and dad do that too which on several occasion has fried my nerves and i had to set them straight hard.

At best we got a bit of entertainment out of that.
 
It seems that Freddy's mother likes her future daughter-in-law.

But Freddie's mother Penelope Godfrey, 62, said today that Miss Withers was a "charming girl" and she had no criticism of her future daughter-in-law's manners.

Ms Godfrey added that Miss Withers, a PA who works in the West End, would always be welcome in her home.

Speaking outside her home in Putney she said: "It has not got that much to do with me really. The whole thing has opened a can of worms that really should not have been opened.

"I love my son and Heidi is a charming girl who I have never found rude - not once. She is also Freddie's choice and will always be welcome in my home."

Source

Alan Withers, Heidi's father, has called Mrs Bourne "Miss Fancy Pants".
 
For those of you who follow the links provided by those who follow the story: Do take a peek at the comments too! -some of them are a bit funny!

Paul Humphreys said:
The fact that Mrs Bourne has been married 3 times speaks books! I'm surprised she managed to get her over inflated ego down the aisle so many times.
Mark said:
Totally concur with Paul Humphreys on this. Additionally, Mrs Bourne's first child was born out of wedlock, apparently. Sounds like a real stuck-up old prig who thinks her bodily functions smell of roses.


jaime said:
So, Hyacinth Bucket (sorry, Bourne) is a serial bride....
Nobody should be surprised. The poor guys found out too late and have probably issued super-injunctions to prevent their names from being disclosed.
I understand that whenever she goes into a room, all the mice jump on chairs.
(These quotes just from the latest link!)
 
Always takes two. The mother in-law sounds like no angel, and some young women are uncouth. Clash of feminine guiles, all that alpha female crap. Not pretty. Feel sorry for the guy caught in the middle. Why can't they arm wrestle and be done with it? :p
 
The correct thing to do, if the new party is beyond redemption, is to simply cut off contact with them, whilst trying to persuade own's one flesh and blood to do the same. If they do not, there is no choice other than to either cut off contact with them, or figure out a polite way to maintain contact with them while limiting contact with the new party.

If my mother ever addressed my girlfriend like that, she wouldn't need to cut off contact with me.

Not that my mother would ever do that.
 
I don't really have any desire to comment on what was clearly meant to be a private communication.

:guffaw:

The MIL is a stuck up bitch. Guess what, you don't get to convert everyone who marries your relatives into.. YOU. Or your family.

What exactly did she think this was going to do for her relationship with her step son? Could anything at all good have come of it? Exactly WHY would Heidi ever ever ever want to see this person again?
 
Always takes two. The mother in-law sounds like no angel, and some young women are uncouth. Clash of feminine guiles, all that alpha female crap. Not pretty. Feel sorry for the guy caught in the middle. Why can't they arm wrestle and be done with it? :p

That's how I am seeing this. Both of them are in the wrong. If she was harping on her for not being able to eat certain foods because of diabetes, that was rude. And putting it in writing wasn't nice. But the fact is that someone released this e-mail, and decided to turn this into a public stink, and I'd bet it was the young woman. It definitely took two to create this situation, NOT just one as some people seem to think.
 
from what i've heard, she forwarded it to some friends in a case of 'holy cow, can you believe this?', one of them forwarded it elsewhere and it went viral.

personally, i would've been more inclined to hash such issues out with the guest in person at the time...

and i really don't get why she's moaning about the whole marriage-in-a-castle business, plenty of people get married in castles or country houses if they can afford it and the place allows it.

apparently, father of the bride to be, said 'miss fancy pants' has her head up her arse and doesn't know whether to speak or fart :guffaw:
 
Any time you forward something online, you should be aware that you are surrendering control of it and that it runs the risk of becoming public. That's why I fault her for forwarding it even if she wasn't the one that actually made it go viral.
 
I fault the stop-mother in law for sending it in the first place. She complains that Heidi didn't send a hand-written letter of thank you but doesn't write a hand-written letter to Heidi but sends her an email instead.

If she thought that the girl was ill-mannered she could have just told Freddy that she didn't want to see Heidi any more. It would seem to me that Mrs Bourne wasn't that keen on Freddy (or else didn't really know Freddy much at all). She said

Unfortunately for Freddie, he has fallen in love with you and Freddie being Freddie, I gather it is not easy to reason with him or yet encourage him to consider how he might be able to help you.

As Freddy was around 21 years old when his father married this wife I doubt Freddy really sees her as a mother at all.

The fact that the email was sent three times says a lot as well. Maybe Heidi would have let it slip and not shown her friend if it had only been sent once.

Why should Heidi be blamed for it going viral when she forwarded it to a friend. Heidi might have been unwise to forward the email to a friend, but Mrs Bourne was both unwise and downright nasty to send the email in the first place.

BTW Freddy is part owner in a company that organises "weddings on your dreams". Though this company wasn't set up until after Freddy and Heidi's wedding plans had been made it light suggest that Freddy was much more involved in the wedding plans than most men would be. Maybe the choice of the castle was his idea.
 
Any time you forward something, you KNOW you are surrendering control of it and it could go anywhere. So yes, I absolutely blame her for it going viral. Since when can one justify bad behavior by pointing to other bad behavior? That's a very shoddy attempt at an excuse, if you ask me. She could've taken the high road and proven she was better than what she'd been made out to be, but she failed. HER responsibility, HER choice to do that.
 
If I got something like that from my MIL I would post it on the bbs.

My rudeness would TRIUMPH over all this petty rudeness!! I would be the rudeness queen!!!
 
Any time you forward something, you KNOW you are surrendering control of it and it could go anywhere. So yes, I absolutely blame her for it going viral. Since when can one justify bad behavior by pointing to other bad behavior? That's a very shoddy attempt at an excuse, if you ask me. She could've taken the high road and proven she was better than what she'd been made out to be, but she failed. HER responsibility, HER choice to do that.

Maybe it is just me but if I received an unsolicited and hateful email I might forward it to a friend asking for advice about how to handle the situation. Why is that bad behaviour? The bad behaviour is mostly on the person who sent it, secondly on the friend who released it to the entire internet and only lastly on the person to whom the email was rudely sent. Heidi didn't ask for the email to be sent to her, she was under no obligation to keep it secret from her friends (as it was unsolicited) and she certainly doesn't have any obligation of loyalty to her future stepmother-in-law. Mrs Bourne should have known never put into an email what you would not say in a public forum.

However I might go teacake's suggested route and post it on this board asking for advice though I would remove all identifying names before I did so (which would have been the wisest thing for the friend to do if s/he wanted it to go viral).

I once received a very, nasty letter from a boyfriend I had broken off with a month before. I simply took a red pen, corrected all the spelling mistakes (there were many) and posted the letter back to him. This was before the age of the internet. If it happened today I would post the corrected letter on the internet with only mine and his first name given and then I would send him a link.
 
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