Dear Eric: My parents divorced when I was 5 and my brother was 3. He went with our father and I with our mother. We saw each other on holidays and summers. Both parents remarried and had two more children. There is a seven- to nine-year gap or more in our ages.
My brother and I were treated less like family and more like a resentment. Thankfully, we had loving grandparents who showed us love and created safe places for us when we were with them.
Fast-forward to today, we are both retired, have families and have done well by all accounts. We worked hard to build and maintain a relationship with our parents and stepparents/siblings. I thought progress had been made.
Both parents passed within a two-year period. Both stepparents redid their will’s writing us out of them. I was surprised. Less for me, but for my children and their grandchildren.
I am left with an angry residue of past resentments that have resurfaced. There is nothing of my parents’ I want. This isn’t about money – there isn’t much, I know. I just don’t know how to move forward. Do I ghost them? Stop calling, writing and visiting because it feels very one-sided? I have done most of the work and effort to maintain a relationship.
– Slighted Stepchild
Dear Slighted: What petty people your stepparents seem to be. They can adjust their wills in whatever ways they’d like, but it’s very telling that they didn’t make the big change until after your parents were gone. It doesn’t sit right with me. It feels callous and calculating. And unnecessarily so.
Despite the machinations with their estates, you still get to decide what you want from them. There’s a version of this where you decide that these are people who are not worth knowing. They were brought into your life at a tender moment, and they weren’t kind. It may be most freeing to say, “I deserve better than this; I’m leaving this relationship in the past.”
Alternatively, you can say, “I want to have a relationship, and this feels one-sided. What can we do to change that?” And see what they come up with. But I honestly don’t know if that’s worth your time.
Lastly, if you haven’t read Ann Patchett’s gorgeous, perfect novel “Commonwealth,” you may want to pick it up. It’s about a blended family and some of the themes might resonate strongly with you in a way that feels cathartic.
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Send questions to R. Eric Thomas at [email protected] or P.O. Box 22474, Philadelphia, PA 19110. Follow him on Instagram and sign up for his weekly newsletter at rericthomas.com.
