Pre-warning, this is a long read about family dynamics. It mentions step-parents and inheritance and I’m prepared to put my hard hat on regarding people cheekily expecting money from their parents, but please remember this is real people I am writing about.
My father had three children with my mum. I am the youngest and have an older brother and sister.
When I was 6 my mum had an affair and my parents’ marriage began to collapse into vicious rows in front of us. We grew up inside this unhappy atmosphere. Eventually when I was 8 (my older brother and sister 12 and 15), my dad moved out and they divorced.
He bought a flat in the same town and we saw him 2-3 times a month, never overnight. The rest of the time, we lived with my mother. After the divorce she became highly unstable - my dad had always been the “calm one” and without him around her fiery temper grew out of control.
As kids, we had the outward signs of being middle class (Sunday school at church, grammar school education, detached house), but behind the scenes my mum was physically violent to us and emotionally abusive, oscillating between periods of incredible love (holiday to Disneyland, elaborate birthday parties) and unhinged behaviour (irrational screaming, storming in and out of the house, hitting us).
The separation hit my father hard and he had a mini-breakdown. He was just about able to continue working. He owned his own business and was a higher earner although not “rich”.
As children, our relationship with our dad was friendly but distant. He would take us out for dinner and the cinema and occasionally on holiday. But there was a superficiality to things. He was reluctant to know too much about our home life. At times he felt like a kindly uncle rather than my dad and he stepped back to let her make all decisions about schooling, life admin, etc.
After a few years he met a woman ten years younger. It was a long time before he introduced us to her. She had a daughter from a previous marriage who was my age. Unlike the image of an evil stepmother, she was a nice woman. Straightforward and made an effort to be friendly. She had been a nurse and was a single parent, who had had a tough childhood. She hasn’t worked since being with my dad. As a kid, I sometimes felt jealous that my dad now had a new daughter the same age as me, who lived with him and benefited from his time and resources, but I just learned to deal with it.
My mum did not remarry and grew bitter about my dad moving on. His business flourished and he invested in several properties including a lavish holiday home in Spain.
Mum’s career developed so she enjoyed a comfortable life, but she struggled before eventually (20 years ago) meeting a kindly widower who brought a new sense of calm into her life. Since then her personality has improved a huge amount. She has apologised for the difficulties of our childhood and been eager to support her three kids with help for home deposits, despite her relatively unflashy lifestyle. She is now 80. Our relationship is not perfect, but for better and for worse she has made an effort. I’ve had therapy to understand why she is the way she is, and it’s helped me to lay the past to rest.
After several years my dad married his new partner, and they have now been together a total of thirty years - he is 80, she is 70. None of his children were invited to their wedding, although her daughter was. We were told afterwards, which was humiliating at the time.
Five years after they married, my dad’s new wife had a spectacular falling-out with my sister over a disagreement. She refuses to be in the same room as my sister and won’t facilitate contact. My dad won’t challenge this despite my sister begging to apologise. As a result, my dad sees his daughter and her children only once a year. My sister is devastated about this but has had to accept it.
More generally, our relationship with our dad has remained distant. Like many older parents, he is fond of telling us about what his neighbours are up to, or to talk about politics, but he shows very little deep interest in our lives, careers, families, etc. He gave all of his children financial support at university (monthly “pocket money” to see us through) but has provided zero financial support in the twenty-plus years since we graduated. (Many people would say this is quite appropriate given we are all grown-ups, and I don’t disagree).
Our relationship is still in the kindly uncle stage and he is very resistant to deepening it beyond being quite superficial. Birthday cards, Christmas cards, and a couple of dinners out per year where I hear the same old stories. I’ve tried to open up to him about the past but it’s clear the mental scars of the divorce remain for him and he is totally incapable of addressing the past, which I’ve had no choice other than to respect.
Both my parents are now old and have had health scares. My mum has prepared her will to leave the majority of her assets to her three kids.
I saw my dad for lunch last week and he raised the topic of his own will, without any prompting for me. He told me that he expects his wife to outlive him (not unreasonably given she’s ten years younger) and the plan is for half to go to her daughter (50%), and the other half to be split three ways between his kids (17%).
Here’s the AIBU. This conversation has hit me like a ton of bricks. I’ve been unable to sleep and felt upset ever since I found out.
This may sound weird, but it doesn’t feel it’s really about the money. (That old adage that when someone’s response to something seems irrational, it’s about something more than the thing it seems to be about).
I was expecting that he would choose with my step-mother to split the estate four ways, which means my share would be 25% - not that much different from the 17% I may get in this plan. Rationally, it’s not something to get worked up about especially as no-one knows what the future holds (bear in mind we are probably talking about assets of over £2m).
What has floored me is what this means emotionally to me. Not the money. I have always felt that my dad abandoned us when I was only 8. That he moved on with his life, even married someone with a daughter of the same age as me, and then just discharged a kind of genteel minimum in our relationship ever since. He left his children in the care of a woman who he knew was mentally unstable, who hit his children. Despite accruing significant wealth in the years since, he hasn’t made an effort to use it to bring us together, no big holidays for all his children and grandchildren. He’s enjoyed business class holidays while his elder daughter has scrimped and saved to provide for her kids. And all along, he’s just continued with an arms-length relationship with us.
On some level I always had an unspoken feeling that underneath it all, we still had a fundamental importance to him. In a crazy way I felt that although he let me down so many times through my life, his last act would be to see us right. This news makes it feel like that’s not the case.
I don’t know if I need to give my head a wobble and see this as merely behaviour that’s been consistent with his relationship with us his entire life.
I’m expecting people to say that this is just gold-digging or highly entitled. Maybe it is and I’m just shocked about having a slightly smaller inheritance. But it genuinely feels like it’s not about the money, it’s about what it says about how he has never prioritised me ever, how I will never really have been at the forefront of my dad’s mind. Even his own flesh and blood takes second rank here and I don’t know how to really process how that makes me feel.
I don’t know whether to tell my dad how this makes me feel, or whether to keep silent. Or whether to take this as the signal that our relationship will never really mean that much to him and that I need to finally emotionally disengage from him.
I don’t know what I’m asking for here. Please be kind.