One child has inherited AGAIN

[EWAB]

A decade ago my younger son benefited from a massive inheritance.

Essentially my MiL bypassed her three children and left everything to her 6 grandchildren.

The grandchildren: 2 siblings, 3 siblings and my younger child.

SHE WAS ENTITLED TO DO AS SHE PLEASED. IT WAS HER MONEY.

The fallout was quite seismic for lots of reasons. My partner felt that as he only had one child the family of the brother with 3 children benefitted disproportionately.

It was said at the time and I believe this to be the case that the will was designed like this. to stop my elder child from a previous relationship from benefiting as he might have done 40/50 years later if the money had gone directly to my partner.

As for my relationship, my partner refused to consider changing our wills leaving more to elder child who was at the time very unlikely to inherit from his own father. He is now on property ladder but any inheritance will pale into insignificance compared with younger child’s

Well it’s happened again!

Late MiL’s half brother has left his entire estate to the MALE grandchildren of his siblings. Younger son and partner’s nephew and we think 2 or 3 others.

HE WAS ENTITLED TO DO WHAT HE WANTED WITH HIS OWN MONEY.

I genuinely can’t contemplate my two sons having such vastly different lives.

I want advice to come to terms with it . I have disabled voting. I can’t talk to anyone.

I agree.

So if the nuclear family consists of a mother, father and their biological children, does that mean that any adopted children wouldn't ever be part of a nuclear family either?

It does seem as though you are saying that your don't consider OP's elder son to be part of his mum's nuclear family. I'm sure OP would disagree.

I don't think OP's "MIL" meant to cause dissension at all. She meant to leave her estate to her blood grand-children and that's what she did.

I agree. Everyone is entitled to define their own families.

people on mumsnet are very quick to tell step mothers they aren’t a parent and that they should leave any decisions about the children to the parents.

yet when it comes to grandparents apparently they should think of these same step children in exactly the same way has their biological or adopted grandchildren. But they aren’t - they aren’t their children’s children. And in many cases those step grandchildren don’t think of these older relatives as their grandparents.

OP is only upset by the money - it comes across as very materialistic and greedy. She wanted to be able to control her mother in laws wealth so she could ensure her son - who wasn’t related to the deceased - could also benefit:

He left his entire estate to the male grandchildren? Wtf

OK, sorry. I misunderstood about your reference to "children"

The effect/result of this situation, when it all boils down, is much the same as if you gave each of your adult sons a lottery ticket as a gift and one of them won a substantial amount and chose to keep his winnings confidential.
One son may have gained but the other son hasn’t lost as a result of his brother's win.

I think you deal it with by ceasing to see it as unfair. Anything inherited in a will has to be regarded as a windfall not an entitlement. Hopefully, that’s the sentiment that your two sons have been brought up with. With two different fathers, it wasn’t that likely that everything would always remain equal between them. You do yourself no favours in looking back at the past and bemoan ing or trying to square up what happened in families other than your own. That’s a thankless task leading you or sons nowhere but down. Look forward instead and teach them to look forward too, with a good kind attitude.
You can’t make it equal and you can’t fix what you see as the discrepancy, so concentrate on continuing to demonstrate and instil good family values with your sons, as well as a healthy attitude towards happiness and money. And focus on maintaining good mental health through work, exercise, moderation, education etc etc according to your own family moral code. Hopefully you have already done that since they were born so I’m sure they will each deal with any problem kindly and with good regard to each other. Trust in that.

Other than that, you can do no more. Life and luck won’t treat them the same just because they happen to both be your sons and it’s not your responsibility to even things out once they are adults, it’s simply your responsibility to help them learn to prepare/deal with the ups and downs which each son is bound to come across, regardless of their bank accounts.

Once these two young men leave home and start directing their own careers and lives, it will become less of a potential problem to you. They may well be very happy with their different paths in life.

It is what it is OP and difficult as it might be for you to come to terms with, you would serve your sons better by accepting it and not worrying about problems before they even happen. You envisage them having ‘vastly different lives’ but happiness and health isn’t always dependent on wealth or asset status …it’s wrong to let them see you think that….so that may not be as problematic as you appear to think it’s going to be.

Anything can happen. Stay positive about each of their futures now they have their lives in front of them to make of them what they will.

Hi OP

Sounds a really tough situation. Especially so having thought about it for a while. How far apart in age are your two boys? How old was the elder one when you moved in with your current partner?

He’s part of his mother’s blended family.

Adoptive families are just that, adoptive families.

‘Nuclear family’ isn’t a descriptor with a value judgement attached to it, any more than ‘blended family’, ‘single parent family’ or ‘adoptive family’ is. A different family type does not inherently mean a lesser one.

Don't alter your will without speaking to your daugher and son first. You need to check that a) she would be absolutely fine with this plan and b) that her future husband has not sorted things legally so that his inheritance and house is ring-fenced so that your DD would be entitled to none of it should they split up in the next few years. Imagine the ructions if you altered your will to benefit your son, you then died, son is left fine financially, then the next year your DD splits with her boyfriend/husband but there is a legal arrangement where she walks away from the marriage/relationship with nothing, and your son does nothing to help her.

It could be better to just leave it to them both equally and then upon your death they could decide between them AT THAT TIME to do a deed of variation in the case that your daughter decided she was perfectly financially fine without her share of your estate. But you can't assume. Never assume. Open and transparent discussions are the best.

Exactly. There are so many different family dynamics. It is far better to arrange things so that adult children decide how their family money they inherit should be passed down to the next generation. You can get step children who come into the family onyl when they're at almost at leaving home age, who have had minimal contact with step grandparents. It doesn't really make sense for them to inherit any of their grandparents money, but where do you draw the distinction between how much of an "honorary grandchild" a step grandchild is? Who is "deserving" to be treated as an honorary grandchild. It varies in all families. Maybe the child was a baby when they came into the stepgrandparents lives and for a while they treated him like their own but then the child changed which biological parent they lived with over time and then let the relationship with their step grandparents dwindle. Anything could happen.

OP @EWAB I've looked through your previous posts over a number of years. I think some posters on this thread are being a bit unfair in thinking it is all about you wanting to grab your DP's family's money for your own children equally.

It's apparent from a number of posts over most of the last decade that you are very heavily emotionally invested in both your own and DP's families treating step-children as if they were of the same status and relationship as biological children. You said somewhere you made it very clear to DP that you and DS1 came "as a package". But it's also really clear that both your own family and your DP's family don't see this as necessarily the case, and that over a number of years you've had multiple upsets / discussions / issues with both families over the issue.

This isn't a question of whether you or they are "right" in that step-children should be considered family in the same way as biological children. There's no generally, universally-accepted rule here. But your relatives and DP's simply don't see it this way, and you can't oblige them to agree with you.

Unless you accept that both sets of relatives simply don't agree with you and think the same way, you are going to continue to be upset and hurt, and that's not good for anyone, including you, DP and both your children. I think you are going to have to try to come to terms with the fact that your DP's family simply doesn't see your DS1 as "family" in the same way as DS2.

It's also worth noting that DP isn't in fact DS1's stepson - you aren't married. In some circumstances that might make a difference, or might not, depending on the particular person.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/3265540-To-try-to-have-included-son-in-step-family

A lot of it can depend very much on how the parent handles it. If they go in with no expectations of their in laws beyond being kind to the child when in the same company, then that’s more likely to engender closeness than making demands. I’ve known of cases where a fairly new partner has told the ‘MIL’ that she shouldn’t provide childcare for her grandchildren, or spend any time with said grandchildren, without offering the same for the ‘stepchild’. That went down exactly as you would expect.

Trying to force people into providing the family relationships you believe yourself/your child to be entitled to is almost guaranteed to result in a digging in of heels, and cementing opposition.

Those extended family relationships may be something parents want their child to have, but they aren’t something biological family will always offer. Despite this, some parents do seem to think that unrelated in laws have to provide them (oftentimes to compensate for the perceived failing of the biological family). Cue strife, disappointment, and bitterness.

You said it....

"S/HE WAS ENTITLED TO DO WHAT HE WANTED WITH HIS OWN MONEY"

My step grandparents both died with a few years of each other ( had been SGP since I was 6 so over 30 years ) me and my full blood sister were very close to them growing up and saw them a lot in their later years / helped to care for them etc . They left us nothing in their wills and our younger (half) brothers a lot of life changing money .
It hurt in a way because it really showed that they thought us differently- which we were! BUT I don’t care . We are both on the property ladder and have been for years - doubtful we will inherit from our mums side as it’s all being swallowed up by her care , but this is the way life is . Sucks for your
eldest but you can try and support him as much as you can. If he had inherited from his Dads side then your other child wouldn’t benefit from that. It’s the savagery of separation.

Blood is thicker than water? Really? So adopted children don’t count as ‘real’ relatives? Blood is a metaphor and kinship is reckoned by relationships, actions and love. How many people are NC with ‘blood’ kin but much more intimate with non-‘blood’ kin/non-kin? Family is culturally constituted differently throughout the world. Please don’t be so reductionist.

Perhaps one brother will decide to make a gift to the other brother at some point. It’s behind your control. The boys know this. It’s up to them.

I'm planning to do this different inheritance to my nephews. One will inherit a quarter of our home (detached 1 acre Sussex) and his brother will get nothing from me as he is an unbearable racist and treats my sister like a doormat. My lasting message to him how undeserving he is!

You need to just get on with your life. One of your sons could have won millions on the lottery at some point. What would you do then? Nothing. Be happy for the rich son and just hope that he may give some to your other son. It's not really your situation to deal with. The will was the will. You family dynamic is your family dynamic. End of.

Omg have you no feelings for this woman at all it's not the DC fault either , I myself had one son when I met my husband and then had another son after we were married, then my hubby went on to adopt my first son and our will is made out to them both receiving equal also the same with my mil as she has left equal amounts between her 4 grandchildren with two of them being my son's and the other two children being his brothers children.
This to me shows that I married into a loving family who treated a child that wasn't blood related to them but was still in their hearts part of the family and was loved just much as my other son was loved .

I don’t understand why people even have these conversations. Who cares? It’s nobody’s money but the persons who died.

You will need to see this from other people’s perspectives. Also giving more to elder son to make up for it isn’t right. Do it if you think he needs the help. But if he doesn’t I would make it equal. My mum has helped out my sister a great deal because she needed it. Mum sometimes feels the need to give me comparatively bigger gifts on occasions to “even” it out. It’s a bit silly, unnecessary and most of all wrong.

Please forgive me of someone has already asked this question:

You said, "The fallout was quite seismic for lots of reasons. My partner felt that as he only had one child the family of the brother with 3 children benefitted disproportionately."

If the MIL by-passed her children and left equal amounts to each of her grandchildren, then that isn't disproportionate. Or, did she leave more to each other granchild and less to yours and your partners child?

It seems your MIL didn't intend to leave to the parents or the household but to the children as individuals.

It wouldn't be fair for the siblings of 3 to get a total of £500, for example, to be shared amongst them and for your younger son to receive £500 all for himself.

I can imagine this is really tough. Most people try so hard to treat their children the same and through things outside of your control they will have very different opportunities. Firstly I wouldn't lie (by omission) to your older child. It doesn't really matter what your partner thinks. He can have a view but he doesn't get to veto your view for your child. Secondly I know you can't even the playing field but can you put any savings aside to at least build something to help towards a house deposit maybe?

Your feelings are valid. The lack of openness is the issue here.

if the situation were reversed I’m sure your DP would want your younger son to have a heads up, as a family is only as sick as its secrets. No one has done anything wrong but there is a clear advantage in life for one child.

The truth is it’s neither child’s fault. When your younger son comes of age if he has a good relationship with his brother, and money to spare, he could decide to gift some to give him a leg up. Money is nothing compared to family and your older son will of course feel badly done to.

It’s very hard and the people who do these things think nothing of the mess they leave behind. Resentment in families is cancer, honestly and ‘themes the breaks’ is the way to go here. Your elder son may become extremely motivated and do very well.

Inheritance can be ruinous when young. I’d keep it from your younger son until he’s entitled - and already chosen a hopefully useful path.