PART 2 My parents told my kids “NO MONEY FOR TICKETS”, while giving them out to neighbors…
PART 2
I spent months after that living on rice, beans, and instant noodles to pay it off. And you know what? That decision is what saved me.
Because I realized if I could grind that hard for my kids, I could grind hard for us, too. I started taking bigger contracts, raised my prices, organized a $30,000 wedding, and pulled it off perfectly. My mom heard and, to her credit, said, “Good for you, honey,” then quickly changed the subject.
My sister rolled her eyes when I mentioned I was saving for a condo. “Dreaming doesn’t cost anything,” she snorted. While they were busy dismissing me as a failure, I was building a business.
They just didn’t stop tormenting my kids. No birthday invitations, forgotten school concerts, family trips for everyone that somehow never included Lizzie and Mikey. And then there was Dreamland Park, the last straw.
By the time the Dreamland tickets appeared, I already had a nice thick dossier. Thirty-five documented episodes, dates, times, witnesses, screenshots of chats where Olivia called my kids “those two” and discussed how to see them less often. Statements from neighbors who watched my children be excluded again and again.
It wasn’t a family misunderstanding. It was a system. Things really snowballed after my grandma, Grandma Faye, passed.
Faye deserves her own story. Everyone else saw a sweet old lady with lemon cookies. I knew the woman who, in the early 1960s, walked out on a harmful husband with a small child on her hip after he hurt their toddler so badly the child died.
She told me once, “He took my child from me. I put our lives in one bag and left for my mother’s. They all whispered behind my back, but I worked three jobs and bought my own apartment.
Then I married your grandpa. He took Victor in like he was his own.” She was a survivor and a shark in the best way.
In the ’90s, when everything was falling apart economically, she was buying apartments. “Crisis is just another word for opportunity, Anna,” she’d say. “People sell for pennies, and later they regret it.”
By the time she was done, she had three rental apartments in decent areas, a little house out near the river, investments and savings, and a collection of mid-century antiques. Altogether, about a little over a million dollars. Her will said it would be split equally between four grandchildren: me, my sister Olivia, my brother Alex, and our cousin Andrew from Seattle.
Around $275,000 each. Not life-changing billionaire money, but not exactly pocket change, either. But Grandma Faye was nobody’s fool.
She’d watched how my family treated me after the divorce. She saw who hugged my kids and who made faces. So she added a clause.
In her will, she wrote that any heir who was found to be cruel toward the children of another heir could be declared an unworthy heir under our state’s probate code. Their share would be taken away and added to the share of the heir whose children they’d hurt. Legally airtight.
And yes, she made it very specific. There had to be proof. Photos, videos, messages, a psychologist’s report on the harm caused, attempts to resolve things peacefully.
She even had our estate attorney, Maryann Cole, help polish the wording so no one could wiggle out in court. I knew about that clause. I was also the executor.
“Anna is responsible and has a degree in economics,” Grandma Faye told Maryann. I kept my mouth shut. I honestly hoped I’d never have to use it.
Then Faye died. I found her one morning in March. I’d come over, like always, to make her breakfast and hand her meds.
She looked like she’d just fallen asleep. The funeral at church was nice. Candles, hymns, a pastor with a very moving voice.
At the repast afterward, held in a community center banquet hall, all four grandkids spoke. I told stories about baking her lemon cookies. Olivia talked about summers at the lake house.
For a couple of days, Faye somehow managed to make us look like a normal family. I, idiot that I am, thought, “Maybe this is it. Maybe a death in the family changes people.
Maybe they’ll rethink things.” Two weeks later, we met at Maryann Cole’s office for the reading of the will. She laid everything out clearly.
Appraisals on the properties would take about a month. Cashing out some investments, maybe two. Paperwork with the county recorder’s office, another three or four.
All in all, up to a year. And as executor, I’d be running the show. At my request, Maryann said nothing about the unworthy heir clause.
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