Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here.
Dear Care and Feeding,
My husband and our two kids took a six week long vacation to Italy and had his parents housesit for us to avoid having to board our three dogs while we were away. When we came back, there was a terrible surprise waiting for us in the living room.
We came home to discover our leather family room couch set was gone and replaced by a cheap, tacky fabric one that looked like it came from Wal-Mart! I was furious and demanded to know what the hell had happened to our original one. My mother-in-law said that she and my father-in-law had found them “hot and uncomfortable.” They needed something more plush to sit on —and the replacement was “more pet-friendly” anyway.
That leather couch set cost more than $8,500 and my in-laws fucking gave it away to Goodwill! I want to take them to court to recover the costs, but my husband is against it and it’s driving a wedge between us. How can I get him to see that his parents are totally in the wrong here?
—Couch Screw-up!
Dear Couch,
Wow. This is a wild thing for your in-laws to do! That being said, I kind of see where they’re coming from. They didn’t like the couch and they’d basically moved in for a month and a half. Should they have come up with a less drastic solution? Absolutely. But having a bit of understanding of where they’re coming from might help with getting through to your husband and to them, and come to a resolution without bringing in lawyers.
Has anyone spoken to them and explained to them the problem with giving your expensive couch away? Has anyone broached a compromise? If not, your husband should have that conversation with them, after you’ve both worked out what a reasonable middle-ground can look like. Maybe they take the couch they bought away, and reimburse you for half of the couch you want. I’d be reluctant to ask them to pay for the whole thing for a couple reasons—one, I think that invites them to get defensive and I don’t know what their financial situation is. The other reason is, no matter what happened in the house, they did provide you with pet and house care for three dogs for six weeks, I’m guessing without charge. They saved you an incredible amount of money, which deserves to be taken into consideration. Let’s say dog care would be $100/night for your pups (and, for three dogs, that’s a very conservative estimate). That’s $4,200, which is about half of the cost of the couch set.
Sure, this isn’t ideal for you, at the end of the day. But do you really want to deal with taking them to court? I think if you approach things with them (and your husband) from a place of finding a compromise you can live with, you’ll save yourself a lot of stress in the long run. And then, you might want to rethink whether you want them to dog sit in the future.
—Cheyna