I do not have the complication in my life of a second marriage and stepchildren. That means my adult children do not have to worry about whether step brothers or sisters will complicate the inheritance of the worldly goods their father and I leave behind.
I mention that because, experience-wise, I was unprepared for a complaint in a Philip Galanes Social Qs column from a reader whose stepchildren have stopped talking to their father (the reader's husband of two years but partner of 20). The husband's children asked for and were granted access to the terms of their father's will. They didn't like what they saw--their stepmother (the author of the letter to Galanes) stood to inherit a chunk of the father's property and money--and that's when the silent treatment began.
Galanes answer is specific to the problem of the letter-writer and the tricky business over property. But most of his observations are general enough to hold wisdom for us all.
You probably don’t need me to tell you that your husband’s children behaved atrociously — both by counting their father’s money as if it were their own and by disrespecting your relationship of two decades. I am not shocked by this story, though. Inheritance often brings out the very worst in people.
The gist of the rest of his answer was a version of this basic truth: We love our children but what we do with our worldly goods is none of their business, until it is (and we're no longer here to hear the arguments). There's this caveat: If we are favoring one child over another (one, say, is more successful financially than the other), we would be wise to alert them to our reasoning, an issue that I discuss here and here.
credit: painting by Pierre Bonnard
