Over a @#$%ing salad

[Flying Grype]

Hard as it may have been on the bride, in the long run, if her parents are peeved enough to cut them off altogether, she may actually come to find she prefers it.

I don't think these are the kind of parents who would cut her off. They do this attention-getting stuff because it shames and manipulates. They want their daughter to do what they want, and if she doesn't they'll embarrass her.

She needs to cut them off, because they won't be expecting it.

[Seshat]

That's just terrible. At least the bride has a new set of in-laws who are hopefully behave much more civilly. If my parents behaved like that, I'd be happy to swap them out for a set of in-laws in a heartbeat.

After my father met my maternal grandmother, he finally found a mother who he deserved.

He didn't quite cut his natural parents out of his life, but he learned how to not let them affect him - and how to give his love to people who deserved it.

Nan was his mother after that; and the only person he treated as 'mother'. His genetic egg-donor was simply a person he had a genetic tie to.

[raudf]

It's stories like this that make me glad that my late MIL disowned my husband long before the wedding (over christmas lights... long story and nearly involved a fire) and that my parents allowed us to "elope" rather than deal with the planning and crap.

She'd have made me a bridezilla, because she had a very bad habit of trying to take over anything and making it about HER.

[Merriweather]

Hopefully, they are paying for the wedding. And hopefully, everybody stuck them with a HUGE bar tab.

If something like that had happened earlier, during planning stages (before some vendors etc. had been paid) I would have wondered if it were a way to get out of paying for the wedding. I've heard of that happening, pareents say they'll foot the bill, change their minds, and jump on any reason they can find to just totally disassociate themselves from the wedding entirely, leaving bride & groom left to deal with the financing as well.

[taxguykarl]

Those parents should've kept in mind, she might be the one who chooses their nursing home.

Sounds like a good last laugh to me.

Just when I thought that boorish people couldn't get any lower, I hear a story like the OP.

[Shalom]

If she's a smart woman, she won't let her parents ever see the grandkids.

+1 on that.

My cousin had exactly one parent at his wedding, out of the usual four. (Well, one and a half; see below.) My uncle had passed away some years ago, so he had no father to attend, and his bride was basically disowned by her parents when she married him. Why? He's too religious for them. Specifically, he would not worship at their synagogue, which is Conservative (i.e. has mixed-gender seating, which is anathema in Orthodox Judaism). This might not have been as much of a problem, except that her father is the rabbi there and took it rather personally.

The details of the basis for this dispute are better suited to Fratching, but the result of it was that while they were dating, her parents did everything they could to break them up, including such interference as calling boys that she'd gone out with previously and telling them she wants to get back together with them. When nothing succeeded in this endeavor, they basically gave her a choice: him or them. She chose him, as was entirely right and proper, and they washed their hands of her, to the extent of telling her developmentally-disabled brother that she had died. Of course they didn't show up at the wedding, but we didn't want them to at that point: we were even talking about getting a restraining order to keep them away in case they tried to make trouble.

The upshot of this was that she borrowed her best friend's parents to walk her down the aisle. They now have two lovely children, who have never seen their maternal grandparents, and likely never will unless her father gets a little sanity in his empty head. When her mother died last year, she attended the funeral together with a large contingent from our side of the family; they pretended not to see her, as if she and we didn't exist and those seats were unoccupied. Nor did they mention her in the eulogies, and they even refused to let her uncle, the dead woman's own brother, who's the only one from her side who stayed in touch, speak at the funeral because they knew he'd mention her name.

She's better off without them, in my opinion, and so are her children. I daily thank my Maker that He saw fit to give me sane in-laws.

(Oh, the half parent. My aunt and uncle were divorced many years ago, and he remarried. The wedding was arranged by my aunt and her late ex's second wife, who is considered by the family as an honorary bubbe (grandmother) despite not being related to us in the slightest.)

[Moosenogger]

I'd say it's time to disown her parents, especially if they've acted like that before. If it's a pattern, it's obvious they can't keep themselves in line (Acting up at a rehearsal dinner? REALLY?), and they don't deserve to know her. She needs to cut her losses and write them off.

[Rainman]

Such a sad story I know alot of marraiges dont last these days but still, in alot of cases this is a one time event that everyone will remember for their rest of their lives. I agree with other posters this was the culmination of some other drama, but even still, to deliberatly put a stain on that memory for any reason. . . just wrong. Now that bride will always look back on that day and either feel a twinge of sadness, or the years harden her, justification, instead of remembering that day and smiling, the way it should be.

[ADoyle90815]

My parents didn't care much for my ex, either. I had no idea until after we divorced. When I asked my mother why she would hide something like that from me, she responded, "We knew you'd marry him anyway, because you were in love with him. We didn't want to sacrifice our relationship with you, and felt the best thing we could do was support you no matter how things turned out."

I had a whole new respect for my parents after that.

Same with me, my parents hated my ex-husband, but they kept quiet about it until I had filed for divorce. I also had a new level of respect for my parents, especially when one of my mom's friends complained that she was "letting" me marry him, and she told that friend to butt out.