agonyaunt | (no subject)

I’m a financially comfortable but lonely widow in my late 60s. My son and only child, “Christopher,” has been extremely distant ever since he graduated college, and especially since he got married. He didn’t even have a wedding to invite me to, and I’ve never met my 7-year-old granddaughter in person. I always just quietly accepted this because I didn’t want to be one of those parents who complain about their child cutting them off and who everyone assumes are abusive monsters. But when we spoke on the phone this past Christmas, I worked up the courage to ask him why. I was shocked when he told me he and his wife have always felt that I don’t care about them, because I’ve never helped them financially.

Christopher and his wife are both college graduates with decent jobs, and they get by all right, but it’s true that money doesn’t go as far as when I was their age. My granddaughter needed a surgery shortly after birth that they are still paying off, along with both their college loans. They live in a two-bedroom apartment, they’ve never taken a vacation, and they can’t afford even a dog or cat, though Christopher says his daughter wants one badly. She goes to a public school that does not challenge her and where shootings are a constant fear. They want to send her to private school but can barely afford to save for college. They also wanted to have another child but can’t afford to, and given my daughter-in-law’s age, that will soon be moot.

In a way, I can see how this might seem unfair. I had to work for only a few years between college and my marriage, but Christopher’s father left me in an excellent position. I own two homes: the five-bedroom house that Christopher grew up in and a smaller, three-bedroom beach house. I have two precious French bulldogs, who each cost more to keep healthy than a typical child. I buy a new car every other year, go on cruises once or twice a year, and have never had to shop at Walmart—all without touching my principal.

But I’m shocked that Christopher and his wife have chosen to resent me for these things, rather than to simply ask for money. Not that I necessarily would have said yes, but I would have appreciated having a choice! Meanwhile, my daughter-in-law comes from a poor immigrant family, yet they have a very close relationship with her parents, who watch my granddaughter every day after school. Apparently if you can’t afford to give them anything, they won’t expect it!

Now I feel like I have a choice. Would I be rewarding my son and daughter-in-law for being greedy and materialistic if I offered to pay off their debts, maybe send my granddaughter to private school, or even help them buy a house in a better school district, in return for more-frequent calls and the occasional visit? Or should I just write them off and leave my estate to the church?

—Dismayed at a Distance

Dear Dismayed,

It would be a shame to write off your son. Money issues are rarely just about dollars and cents. Money holds symbolic value for all of us, and to your son and his wife, financial support could be tied to emotional support, care, or even love. It’s easy to characterize them as greedy and resentful, but consider another explanation: Maybe, given all their struggles and your relative ease, he feels unimportant and neglected.

Money is a resource, and it seems to be one that’s readily available to you, so I can see why your son is interpreting your lack of financial help as a lack of care. He and his wife might not expect the same from her family because they support them in other ways, using other resources, like time and child care—both of which are immensely valuable.

I’m not saying this assumption is right or wrong, merely that there’s a major lack of communication between the two of you. You obviously care for them and have sympathy for their circumstances, but he doesn’t seem to know that. Also, you mentioned that your son distanced himself from you after college—that’s a long time to go without knowing why things weren’t great between the two of you.

It’s time for both of you to get to the bottom of this estrangement. Before you make any decisions about what to do with your estate, talk to your son without holding judgment or making assumptions. Ask him why he didn’t reach out to ask for financial help. Ask what that help would have represented for him. Ask how you can be a part of his life in the future, beyond helping out with money. You worked up the courage to ask why he doesn’t talk to you anymore, and you were shocked at the response. There’s probably a lot more here to uncover. Figure out what care means to him and what he needs from you to feel it. Chances are, it’s about not just money. Tell your son you care about him, you want to have a relationship with him, and work up the courage to keep digging.

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That last part doesn't sound that strange to me; it's a common arrangement to leave the estate to the surviving spouse during their lifetime. Assuming my parents have any estate to leave, I don't expect to receive my share when the first of them dies; I'll only see it after they're both dead. Same was true with Spouse's family; his dad died nearly twenty years before his mom, and the kids didn't inherit anything until after his mom's death.

That's fair! I have the sense that wealthy families often plan to leave parts of an estate in trust for kids, but the family here may not have hit that level of planned wealth transfer, and the LW's husband may not have known his wife is in fact a Disney villain.

Yeah, everything went to my mother when my father died, and we had a similar “she’s wealthy, I’m struggling financially” dynamic.

That makes sense. I could see doing that if I were in the wealth bracket of "we have so much money and assets that the surviving spouse will not have to sell the marital home to fund the trust".

(But also, if I were in that bracket I would be helping out with grandkid's medical expenses!!)

This is very much going to expose my my upper-middle-class white suburbanite Connecticunt (spelling intentional) background, but there's definitely a difference between being wealthy vs "well-off"/"comfortable" (or at least, there is in my part of the country/state). I was several years into my 30s before I realized I was "the rich friend" in my adult friend group, because my social experience growing up was exposure to a lot of people growing up the same as me - most of us had a father who worked full-time and a mother who either didn't work or worked part-time just to have something to do. There were private music lessons, dance classes, sports, Scouts, heavy involvement with church or community social groups, etc. It was very Little Boxes - we were all made out of ticky-tacky and we all looked just the same.

I had a couple of friends whose parents owned beach houses that they rented out to college students for the 9-10 month academic year so that it was available for friend/family house during the summer. I had other friends who went on big family vacations (roughly two weeks) plus a few smaller trips each year. I would sometimes get annoyed about how many dang kids we had in my family because my friends in 2-child families got to do much more than I did in my 5-child family. My parents did eventually get a Marriott Vacation Club timeshare (starting cost ~$25k/year), but they did that when us older three were 24, 22, and 21 so they didn't really have the same dependent costs anymore.

That being said, the vast majority of my hometown friends still took out at least partial student loans as a means of learning financial responsibility. There were other friends who were told "We will pay for 4 years of college but that's it" and ended up needing to take out loans if they changed majors, failed a couple classes, etc. My family and our social group may have appeared wealthy to many, but it's definitely not a term we thought applied to ourselves.

(Of course, we also lived in the eastern half of Fairfield County, CT, so there was REAL wealth, excessive wealth, just half an hour away)