The Kindness Project

I’m old, 64, my step dad has been my father figure for 55 years and is now in his mid 80s. He never once gave me any money but we did hunt and fish together and made good memories. He has no other kids and he and my mom are on and off “dating” and have separate homes as they can’t successfully live together. They were married, then divorced, then dating/ living together/ whatever the hell they are for the past 25 of the 50 total years. Mom always made less money and they never had joint accounts. So now I’m helping him with his will and setting up a trust and he tells me he has an account for each of my 3 kids. Cool, thanks, I’m very thankful and pictured a few thousand for each of the kids. Now last weekend I’m talking to him and he lays it out, there’s 200k for each kid and 400k for me. Plus his paid off house. So I’m really struggling because, that’s insanely generous and I had no idea, but, for the past 50 years we’ve all struggled at times and my mom always paid more than half of everything they/we did. He tells me he screwed up and he’s sorry he was a miser and he wants to make up for it. So on one hand, thanks but also where was the help anyone needed in the past decades. My mom is still cooking him dinner every night with groceries she buys with her social security and he’s just blithely letting his retirement money go into his accounts. He bought a 60k dollar truck last year and he didn’t finance it, just bought it outright. I thought he had a loan on it. Who watches everyone around them they supposedly love do the “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” for their entire lifetime and then at the end be sitting on a million five. I should be over the moon happy he thinks this much of me and my family but I can’t get over the entire lifetime of hiding money. Yeah man, we’re tough because we struggled but, we didn’t need to.

Chief Theresa Kachindamoto became known as the ‘Terminator of Child Marriages’ after ending over 3,500 unions in Malawi HelpingOthers