I threw my father Don out of my life

An event happened just before Christmastime 2007.

I threw my father Don out of my life.

There were multiple reasons. I can’t cite them all without starting a book from childhood that would sink into depression. On the other hand, writing about it might heal my anguish.

Probably nobody will ever read this except me, but let me give some background information anyway.

Don was 83 and nearing dementia when I told him not to call again. Afterwards, I changed my phone number. I guess that makes me an abuser of old folks, but I am 57 and wanted relief.

Relief from what? Let me start.

On a grand scale my father Don holds himself up as the benefactor. He is arrogant about it. He let’s you know he has money which is ironic since he has very little by today’s prices.

Somehow money became the scorecard in my father’s life. I think he wanted money to show his parents they were wrong for favoring his older brother. Yes, my grandparents liked Don’s brother better. That must have cut to the bone as a small child, but my father never talked about his parents. Nor did he outwardly mention that they liked his drunk and irresponsible brother Bob better than they liked him.

Our family ran away from our roots. We moved far away from both sets of grandparents and rarely went to visit.

Over the years, Don proved himself and rose in the hard-bitten corporate ranks. I respected him for making good and wisely saving his money. But he diminished his narrow band of talent by continually holding himself up as the standard when he was so deeply flawed.

Absent were stories about his life or the lessons he learned. How can a father be a standard for his children when he doesn’t share personal experience? The only example his four children got was a glare or whack in the head.

After retirement, Don’s money bought him a nice house in the mountains far away from his scattered family.

For me, his new house was a toy and didn’t answer the basic question. What was his plan when he got too old to live there? Okay, maybe assisted-living plans are personal. On the other hand those plans affect the family. How could they not? But moreover, his late-life plan would put me in contact with my estranged siblings > who are estranged in part because of Don’s actions.

Good God, my father helped destroy the family. There was no trust among siblings because we were encouraged to turncoat each other and report every transgression. We grew up in an abusive family where my youngest brother took the worst emotional insults imaginable. To my embarrassment today, I piled on. How could that happen? Was I dumbstruck and arrogant by my father’s example, or was I just a vile person? The fact that I ask this question shows where abuse scars a person for life.

Don had four children. Three boys and a younger sister. I was second oldest. Not surprisingly, my older brother was the favored child. The blatant and unwarranted favoritism of the oldest son was how I finally figured my father’s parents favored their oldest son Bob.

The list of real and imagined slights and abuses in my family could fill a novel. But what caused the cake to fall was the issue of my father’s late-life plans.

The stage is now set.
Here’s how my father got thrown out of my life:

Over the years, whenever the family had problems, it fell to me to fix them. I was the one they called. I can get things done and I have a sense of fairness despite my short temperament. Plus I am fearless and willing to stand up to anything.

In retrospect, I should have stood up to my father when we were kids but down deep we feared he would leave. As young children, we had nowhere to go except to Mom’s festered drunken parent’s house.

Don finally left the family anyway but we were older and in our teens by then.
After my parents divorced, my father bought Mom a modest house and sent her a regular check. We all ended up on our feet and I owe my father a deep respect for that.

The deep-rooted problems came to a head after Mom died. She was the glue in everybody’s life.
My older brother was appointed executor of her Will and everybody was happy that the golden son was in charge until he stole most of the money from Mom's Estate. What a mess. The other three siblings had to hire an attorney and threaten my brother, and I was the lead guy for that problem.

Who could’ve guess that the oldest son, the college graduate, the CPA, the golden son who was showered with favors from my father, would steal money from his Mom’s Estate.

My father exacerbated the Estate debacle by sending additional money to my older brother to ‘hold’ for the other siblings. The money was supposed to be put into Mom’s Estate for equal division among the siblings when the Estate was settled.

Adding money to the Estate made no financial sense because the amount was less than the threshold for gift tax.

Why not simply give each child the money?
Why give it to the older brother to ‘hold.’ Well, it’s because my father likes to tell his children we’re no good. He wants us to see that money is being withheld since we’re dolts [unlike my older brother who is merely a thief].

You can see how my father battered relationships between siblings by playing one child off against another. It’s ridiculous that he injected himself inappropriately, but horrible that he did it over Mom’s final affairs.

And get this: while the Estate debacle was in full swing, my father called me saying that he didn’t want my younger brother to get any of Mom’s money. How crass was that? Certainly if he told me, then he told my older brother the same thing.

My father wanted to supersede Mom’s wishes. He thought her money belonged to him since he supported her for so many years. And he used the Estate to inject poison on my younger brother because my brother was born brain damaged. My father hated the disability and constantly chided my brother for being weak. The very fact that my defenseless brother survived under the harshest emotional abuse proves that he is stronger than any of us. My father was wrong.

Returning to the story, two years passed and Mom’s Estate was still not settled. The Estate was nothing more than selling the house and auctioning-off the belongings. These things were done, so why was it taking so long to split the proceeds.

My older brother was a CPA but telling lies and stonewalling. Each time we called he accused us of not caring about anything except Mom’s money.

Finally it was obvious that I had to remove Larry as executor of the Estate. Solving the problem was complicated since the involved parties lived in different states. After another two more years of wrangling, I got a lawyer with help from my sister. The lawyer settled the estate within a month and charged us a sizable portion of Mom’s modest life-worth.
 
Solving Mom's estate took four years of listening to my older brother, Larry Haynes yell and scream over the phone. What a disgrace. And then he kept all the money my father gave to him to ‘hold for us’ plus half of the Estate. He took it all. The rest of us got $11,000 each.

Now ask me what kind of memory I have for my mother’s passing?

It was so embarrassing. I never spoke a word to my father about what my older brother did. Why didn’t I speak up? Because my father wanted the oldest child to have the money. That’s how raw our family is.

I told my sister that we’d just take our lumps and forget it.

I never told my youngest brother what happened because it would heap insult on him at a time when he was living in a partially heated room in back of a crack house in Chicago. My younger brother lived on the verge of homelessness and my father didn’t want him to have Mom’s money. My father wanted to bring my brother to his knees because my brother never yielded.

The whole thing was hard to swallow, but I was busy with my own life. I was willing to forgive my older brother. I honestly think he was doing what a favored son would do with a pile of money in his hand and kids to feed at home.

But guess what? Can you imagine some way to make the theft of your Mom’s Estate worse? Oh yes, it’s possible, and my father led the way.

Shortly after the Estate was settled, my father came up with another big idea. He gave my older brother more money to ‘hold’ for the siblings. Can you believe it? My father set up a Trust to benefit the four siblings and handed the whole thing to my older brother. Put it in his name. The rest of the siblings had no name in the trust.

No sooner was Mom's Estate settled, than my father created the Trust issue. And in both cases he gave my thieving older brother money to ‘hold’ for the siblings.

Instead of making each sibling an equal Trustee, the entire thing was handed over to my older brother carte blanche. And to make matters worse, the Trust papers were filed in my brother’s home state which put the money out of legal jurisdiction of anyone except him.

That’s when I told my father point-blank about the theft of Mom’s Estate. My sister told my father too. It didn’t matter. My father feigned disbelief. What could he do at that point? He'd already handed the money over to Larry.

What an insult. My father feigned ignorance but that cemented proof that he supported the disgrace of Mom’s Estate.

My father’s arrogance enraged me. I knew we would have financial irregularities with the Trust just like we had with the Estate.

Sure enough, within a couple years money started disappearing from the Trust. It was hidden inside multiple transfers, but I could see. Still, that wasn’t the strange thing.

The strange thing was that my brother kept sending financial statements that revealed the theft. Of course he’s a CPA and those guys like to show off their handiwork but why not phony-up the books? Later when the Trust came due, he could just blow us off. Why reveal the theft? I think my brother enjoys watching people twist in the wind. I think he was going to twist us in the wind forever just like he did with Mom’s Estate.

Another seven years of this bullshit and guess what happened? Suddenly my father called asking if I would solve the Trust problem. Geeze, could it be that my golden brother finally outraged my father?

Obviously, whenever a problem exists I am the one who gets the call. This was doubly abusive because it meant my father knew I was a go-to guy, yet he always treated me like a dolt. He even had the nerve to tell me that he gave the Trust to my older brother because I didn’t know anything about investing. For crying out loud, I built my house from the ground up and ran my own business for twenty-five years. How stupid am I?

Let’s move on. Resolving the trust problem took another three years, plus an out-of-state attorney, plus six thousand dollars in lawyer’s fees, plus innumerable hours of work by me, plus help from my wife. Finally my older brother rolled over and said uncle.

I beat the shit out of my older brother for my father. I threatened my brother and his CPA partner and their families with public disclosure over the financial shenanigans. I was a total SOB bare-fisted gutter ball. My brother must have thought I was a pushover after we said nothing about the theft of Mom’s Estate.

Yes, I ball-batted my brother and let him twist in the wind for a while, but I destroyed a relationship with him because of my father.

I demanded that my father intervene and help repair the damage done to our family.

How did my father honor my request? My father refused to help repair the damage. Do you know why he refused? Because he was playing the game. And playing the game meant not satisfying me because that would make me important. What a crap way to treat your family.

In reality, I sat a trap for my father. By asking him to mediate the problem he caused, I saw him for the first time in my life. My father showed that he cared more about being the center of attention than he cared about his children. I saw it like a shining beacon.

My father wants to be the center of attention. You see how it works? My father gives something to one sibling and withholds it from the others. The others have to confer with my father about his intention. He is pulling everybody’s string and insulting us while doing it.

How empty must a man feel when he destroys his whole family to get attention? My father must have had a childhood void of feeling, but forget that, a man has raise himself above the past.

At this point I was fed up with my father. But I always harbored hope that some day our family would come back together. I figured the key was my attention-seeking father and that maybe we could rally around his final years.
 
I wanted a clear map from my father that laid out his late-life plans. What did he expect? Where would he go? What about his belongings?

With this information, I could call each sibling and open a dialog. With that, each sibling would have a common point that might let us move forward together. I wanted this glimmer of a chance to repair the family.

I wanted a chance to help repair me.

I asked my father point-blank about his long-term plans. My father was evasive and said entrusted some things to my sister. The selfish jerk wouldn’t share with me.

Ok, he selected my sister. I don’t want to talk bad about my sister but she’s an irresponsible alcoholic. Her car is wrecked on one side. Her driver’s license is suspended except to drive to work. Maybe my father thinks she will be the rescue-ranger from 400 miles away without a driver’s license or working car.

So here it is. My father did it again. Instead of sharing his plan with everyone, he selected one sibling while refusing to include the others.

That was the last straw for me. I had been fighting my family for eighteen years with the Estate and the Trust.

I didn’t want any more problems.

However I knew with my sister in charge, sooner or later my phone would ring and I’d have another problem to fix.

There are so many things that come up with an aging parent. How was my infirmed father going to sell his house? How was he going to move to another location? Who would make sure that his needs were met? Who would handle the checkbook? What was I supposed to do if my father gave everything to my older brother again? What the hell could we expect if my sister had to choose between my father’s needs and her next drink?

The situation had grown idiotic.

Since I am the problem solver, I needed a solution.

No stupid old fool is going to cause me problems.

My father needed to ‘sober up’ and get his affairs in order right now because I was not going to bail his ass out.

That’s why I threw my father out. It was not just the abuse. It was his mismanagement and manipulation that caused it. But throwing my father out meant that everybody else got thrown out too.

My family is gone from my life because I finally realized that my tiny dream of family unity would never happen.

I am sad, but I got off the merry-go-round and the freedom feels good.

Gene Haynes