Relative Behavior

I have a great-uncle who I am told is a foul mouthed, disrespectful, cantankerous old man. Family members have strong opinions about his personality, as do many health care workers who have to deal with him. He lives at the nursing home where my daughter works. Her coworkers will sometimes ask her to accompany them to his room when he is being especially abrasive.
I have heard these stories for probably 20 years, but I have never seen this behavior. He has always been polite and sweet to me. He also seems to like my daughter, but he also thinks that she is me. (I had her when I was 25, and it must do a number on his brain to see me constantly getting older/younger by 25 years each time he sees 'me.')

I was going to blog this, but I thought it might be interesting to hear other stories.
Do you have any relatives or close friends who are totally different around you (or other family) than the stories you hear?

 

Everyone said my great-grandma was the meanest woman in the world. My grandpa was afraid of her (his mother-in-law), and I don't think he was afraid of anything else.

With me, though, she was sweet as she could be. She knew biscuits & gravy was a particular favorite of mine, and every time I visited, she offered to make it. She would tease me by calling my Smurfette doll, "Snoopy," but other than that, I didn't see meanness anywhere in her. I always just assumed she mellowed out a bit by the time I came along, but then I heard stories about her giving nurses at the hospital all kinds of hell

 

My wife's Uncle Bill is the kind of guy who doesn't take any crap from anyone. He apparently has never liked anyone his daughters dated prior to their husbands (and, from what I hear, isn't even all that wild about one of the husbands), and never liked anyone his nieces dated, though he tolerates my brother-in-law pretty well. I was absolutely terrified to meet him, expecting he would be the biggest ass in the world and might make my life hell (he apparently doesn't filter his mouth very much when speaking to people he doesn't care for-- or sometimes people he does care for).

We liked one another on sight. He used to work on the fringes of the music and entertainment industry, and clearly used to be kind of a badass, a rebel for a middle-class Jewish context of his generation. I have occasionally been known not to take crap from people myself, though I am usually pretty good about filtering, and being diplomatic about it in public. We just hit it off. I don't know that we'd ever go and hang out together as pals, but we definitely enjoy seeing one another at family gatherings, and always relate well to one another. I think my in-laws (who Bill cordially dislikes, and who like me but don't get me at all) were completely nonplussed at Bill and I liking one another the way we do.

 

My wife's grandmother didn't really like my MIL and I think she loved my wife, but only because she was her granddaughter. She loved all the men in the family and made no bones about it. She treated me like I was one of her own and even said to my wife one time that if anything happened to our marriage it would no doubt be my wife's fault. My FIL had no idea how she treated the women. It was amusing, yet cringeworthy at the same time.

 

Well, some people deserve to have a mean assed woman riding their backs, and others don't... ( don't you wonder what your grandpa did that pissed her off so much? )

 

She hated women...pure and simple. Worked out for me pretty good though

 

My great-grandfather on my dad's side was a sonofabitch of legendary proportions. I've got a copy of an alibi letter he wrote when accused of murder (he didn't do it, but he closed the letter with "my greatest regret in this sordid affair is that I was not the one to send [the victim] to his "happy hunting grounds".) He once assaulted a preacher right after church. My only memory of him was when I was about 4 and he shook hands with me and left me holding his prosthetic.

Then there's my mom's mom, who was every bit caricature of a bitchy society lady. Growing up, everything I ever did was measured against my cousins in front of my eyes, despite the fact that they were older. Now that she's got dementia, she's actually a lovely woman, but back in the day, she was hell on wheels.

I guess those tidbits explain a lot about me.

 

He shook hands with you and left you holding his prosthetic? Oh, how horrible! (sorry, I actually laughed my ass off when I read this )