Hello, Im trying to understand what happened to myself and my family. We have suffered a profound betrayal from my mother and sister over two years ago.
I was the president of a family farm corporation and worked for my parents since I was 10 years old, I'm now 61. I literally work two lifetimes by the time I was 40. I built the company with my dad and worked 7 days a week often more than 12 hrs./day. I worked hard with the promise of good fortune.
After my father died, my mother took ownership of the company and died a few years later. One year after her death I received a copy of a living trust that I'd never seen. In it were me, my wife and two sons who were to receive collectively $950,000. My sister, who had a career as a flight attendant, never had anything to do with the family farm, a fruit orchard, but was also na med in the trust tof receive $800,000 of her own. The living trust drawn up by both my mother and father in 1995.
For reasons unbeknownst to us, six months before my mother's passing, she abruptly changed the trust, giving my sister everything, leaving me andy family with $250,000 in debt after years back to back of hardship in the fruit industry. We've been left with nothing. I'm in fairly good health, but with arthritis in both knees I'm at the mercy of my age with the prospect of starting over. We'll be lucky to even pay the property tax and keep our house and farm. There is no more orchard as I was forced to pull the trees due to labor shortages and other challenges within the apple industry.
My sister ended up with everything that I worked for over 50 years and has so much as made us her enemy. This was all done in secret. Mother lied to my wife and I
and and told us there was no money.
How could anyone be so cruel? How could you have a son work so hard, make every sacrifice, and do this to your son and daughter in law? My wife sacrificed years of her own time caring for my mother who had health issues and needed to be driven 80 miles to her doctor.
My problem is I can't seem to get it out of my head and need to figure out a way to come to a level of acceptance. Every time we can't pay a bill, everyday you get up is a reminder of what the sick distorted actions of others can do. This is a dark cloud that we are left with. My mother and sister felt none of what we go through and how it has ruined our memory of them. We were a close family, spent every Easter, every Christmas and every birthday together at my mom and dads. Then one day you wake up, questioning what was real and what wasn't. It makes everything seem fake. Was this a giant bait and switch? How could you screw with so.eine like rhis? It's like a sick joke. How will we ever climb out of the financial , mental and psychological storm we are in? Betrayal at this level will make the past, present and future altogether different than you perceived it to be. My greedy sister I can understand, she's just a mean, unhappy alcoholic. My mother sent me to her attorney without disclosing the trust to us and hade as the president sign it over. It was a trick! My mother sent us to her lawyer under the guise that I was to receive the orchard, but in fact we signed an unknown trust over to my sister. It's like my mother to us to the edge of a cliff and pushed us over. I can't think of a more disgusting act. It's more than the money, it's more about the lies a deceit in order to make the change. It's more ab I ut losing a mother. Who was she? My whole life is just one big lie. I sacrificed everything. I lost so much time with my boys when they were growing up. I was a slave working 70-80 hrs. a week. I was so in denial, my parents always wanted more out of me and I gave it up. This is so sick. Now, I wear the badge of failure in front of so many in the community and the fruit industry who see it as me failing . A perfect storm, sweet little old lady who know one would suspect could be so cold. I knew in my heart though that mother was as stingy with money as her daughter was greedy. I don't want to see my mother that way, but facts are facts. How do you forgive someone who hurt us so bad, not knowing that the facts come out after she died? They would have gotten away with it had it not been for a clarical error divulging the teuth. How does one stop obsessing over this? It's been two years and we're still in shock. I bounce back and forth between anger and shock, never really coming to acceptance with each challenge everyday. I finally got my 80 acres of orchard pulled with no money and the pest board down my back with threats. If mother and sister were after revenge, they couldn't have thought out a more devious destructive way to do it. I'm left with so many questions and no answers. Only one glaring fact, the "living trust". How ironic.