I grew up in an unhappy home - my mother was either distant or angry.
She always preferred my brother.
My parents marriage was terrible. My father, I now believe was emotionally abused.
Having moved out at 16 I had an on off relationship with her until my father died when I was 26. My mother was 46.
She has since remarried a multi millionaire, they have 2 houses, one with 8 bedrooms, the other with 4. They spend a lot of time travelling and she seems to have mellowed a lot with this lifestyle. She is a fairly good grandmother although I am powerless to curb her lavish presents that she showers on the children to the extent that they cannot appreciate the value of money.
We struggle for money and live very modestly. This is fine - I expect nor want anything from her.
Two years ago my brother contacted me to say that I mustn't tell my mother, but that she was giving him a vast some of money to buy a house as he was single and mid 30's without a deposit. He said he felt uncomfortable with it and wanted to tell me about it.
It was not my proudest moment but I became very very upset with my mother and told her that while she could see the children I felt I didn't want to see her anymore. It felt like all the childhood hurts all over again.
I didn't talk to her for several months. In this time I continued to talk to my brother but he was increasingly upset that I had told her I knew, and felt that I was being unfair to my mother. He remembered our childhood very differently to me and didn't understand why I felt that she was a bad presence in my life. Eventually we just stopped really communicating - it was not an big thing, it was that we just stopped calling each other.
He died suddenly in 2012. I hadn't talked to him in several months, although this was not unusual, our last conversation was not positive.
He did not leave a will.
My mother and I have had an uneasy truce since the funeral and she visits every 2 months.
I have claimed nothing from him whatsoever, nor would dream of doing - my mother has dealt with all of it and I have kept out of it.
Last month I out of the blue received a call, at work, on my direct dial in a a busy office from a pension company to ask if I could confirm that my brother and I were estranged. I spluttered a bit but said, no, I wasn't (I am still unsure if I was or wasn't and that it was my mother from whom I was at that time estranged).
My brother and I were never close, and he was also not close to my mother. Christmas lunch was the only time he saw her for many years, but it transpires that when I decided to go NC with her, he spent quite a lot of time with her. For this I am grateful.
I have just received a letter saying that a very large sum of his pension fund has been awarded to me.
My mother has said that she wants to contest it as he would not have wanted it to go to me and that he hated me for the way I treated her. She is very wealthy, so does not want it for herself. She wants me to give it to charity.
I do not know what to do.
She might be right. I know he thought I was being cruel. Perhaps he wouldn't have wanted it to go to me. All I can think is that she went to sustained effort to persuade the pension company that my brother would not want me to have it - she put time and effort into contacting someone, giving them my work phone number specifically to stop me having something she did not want or need.
It is enough money to put my children through university, not a small sum. I wonder if I should put it into trust for them - it would seem to be something she would like and avoids controversy. But at the same time it could allow me to be a SAHM - who is to say they wouldn't benefit more from that? I don't know what the moral thing to do is.
Please help? I feel so sad. I have no family. I was petulant with my mother and it destroyed my relationship with my brother and now he's gone.