HOW DO FAMILY FEUDS HAPPEN? THREE FIRST-HAND ACCOUNTS

‘My father died before we got to heal our rift’

Writer KATE MORRIS reflects on the conversations she wishes she could have had with her late father

We are driving, just the two of us, at 100mph. I am about seven. There is loud music blaring, possibly Carly Simon or Donna Summer, and the speed of the car both excites and terrifies me. Being with my father on my own is rare, he is never home from work before bedtime. When he stops to pick up a hippy-hitchhiker, I am anxious but thrilled.

Although my father never actually terrified me, he could be quite alarming – banging the table to emphasise a point, or shouting, swearing and laughing very loudly. He smoked and drank and was ‘dark and handsome’. As a teenager, I liked the way he wanted to know my opinions about politics and current affairs, and really listened to what I had to say.

When I declared I wanted to write, in my early 20s, it was he who bought me my first computer and encouraged me. He often took me out for dinners in sophisticated restaurants and urged me to invite friends. He dressed in a white suit at one of my book launches, and several people asked who he was; he was having a cigarette outside when I gave my speech.

But when we both got married (him for the second time) and had children around the same time (me in my 30s, him in his late 60s), our relationship changed. Our regular lunches dwindled. He stopped wanting to take me to groovy restaurants and insisted on meeting in a grimy café.

I had always gone to him with a problem and he would always, somehow, sort me out. But when I called him tearfully about something, during the first few years of my marriage, he said he wasn’t the right person to talk to. His reaction was devastating. The world no longer felt so safe. I realise now that he was dealing with being a father again and he was forging a different life.

We both retreated and communicated mostly by text. He was living in the country and came to London less and less. I would visit him occasionally but he never came to us. Then, about five years ago, I was having lunch with a cousin when she blurted out that my father had breezily informed her that he was not leaving anything to his first three children (which included me) in his will.

The news made my heart jolt and plummet. I felt sick and betrayed on so many levels, not only that he’d told her and not us, but also being left out made me feel erased and expendable. I was far more aggrieved by the idea of not being included than I was about not receiving a legacy. It seemed inappropriate and grasping to question a parent about a will and so I didn’t. It wasn’t until six months later, when I realised it was impossible to ignore what I’d heard, that I confronted him by letter, but he would not confirm whether what she’d said was true or not.

I decided to stay away from him, mostly because I was hurt. At times he would email me snippets from articles he thought I may be interested to read, but we did not talk or see each other for two long years, apart from once, for just five awkward minutes, when he’d dropped my children home after a Christmas outing.

It was August 2017, and I was away in Morocco celebrating a friend’s birthday, when my mother called at 7am to tell me my father had died quite suddenly of a heart attack. He was 85, but had not been frail or unwell – to me, he had always seemed invincible. I was deeply shocked and stricken, both that he was gone and that we had not repaired our rift.

I read at his funeral, and broke down at the burial, not only because I would never again hear him calling me ‘Katie darling’, but also because I had not seen him for so long.

In a way, our estrangement meant I began grieving his loss even before his death. The only way forward was to remember the good times we’d had. I was grateful that, when he’d sent me an invitation to a family party, due to take place a month after he died, I’d accepted.

I had hoped we would start to re-establish our relationship in some small way, and I was relieved he died knowing I was coming.

There are times, though, that I am sad and indignant. I want to ask him why he didn’t leave us a letter explaining his decision to leave us out of his will, not even to be named, and feel frustrated that he’s not here to answer. Other moments, like writing this now, or hearing music that reminds me of him, I crash down and weep. I wish his death had not been so untimely. I wish I had kissed him goodbye, and that he’d said, ‘I’m sorry for hurting you. I love you and always will’ and that I had replied, ‘I love you too.’

‘I’m seeing a psychotherapist to help me deal with my mother-in-law’

KAREN*, 30, struggles to cope with her husband’s overbearing parents and fears that she could one day lose her marriage because of their interference

Growing up, I’d always seen a healthy relationship between my parents and their in-laws. Even now, I see the love and care my mum shows to my dad’s mother, who is in a care home. Mum runs her errands, handwashes her clothes and, on the few occasions she’s had to go to hospital, it was my mum who sat alongside her in the ambulance.

This kind of loving in-law relationship was all I ever knew and I didn’t think much of it. Until I met the man I chose to marry.

There were ominous signs right from the beginning. In the early days of our relationship, Adam* and I would be out on a date, and his phone would ring half a dozen times. Each time it was his mother, calling to chat about, well... nothing at all. I picked him up on it straight away, but he insisted you should always answer a call from a parent. I began to find it exasperating. I’d often be sitting alongside him on the sofa, hearing how his day had been via the phone conversation with his mother. Then came the day he answered the phone during sex and I realised I was dealing with more than the average smothering mother-and-son relationship.

Part of their closeness came from the fact that Adam had carried on living at home rent

free until his late 20s. He was stuck in suspended adolescence. Even after he moved in with me in 2017, he saw his mum and dad’s house as his true home. Whenever I went away, his default was to return to them.

In many ways, Adam’s loyalty and steadfastness to his parents is part of the reason I fell in love with him. He genuinely cares about people, he’s not argumentative and he’s shown me love like I’ve never experienced before. I wasn’t going to give up on our relationship for reasons I couldn’t control.

However, his mother’s overbearing behaviour soon extended to me. I started getting multiple phone calls from her, asking about our plans. Whenever we met up, she would comment on my clothes and she even started navigating me towards a career path I wasn’t remotely interested in. It wasn’t long until I was booked on my first family holiday with them to Ireland. They had generously offered to pay for us, but I couldn’t believe it when they booked the entire trip without even asking if the dates suited. I started to feel like we weren’t in control of our own lives.

After the trip, they kept badgering us about taking another joint holiday, until one day Adam said we’d been booked on a five-day trip to Spain. I didn’t know the dates, nor did I know where I was staying or what we’d be doing. I was baffled; I’d never come across behaviour like this. Adam said this was how his parents had always done things, but it was a turning point for me. I told him I wouldn’t be going and left him to break the news.

From that point on, I made the decision to distance myself. I agreed to see them at big family occasions, but the relentless pressure of their demands and expectations was making me anxious. Adam told them firmly that they had to back off, and yet still they expected us to join them for dinner and days out, and were offended when I refused.

The situation came to a head recently when they booked yet another trip – even though we’d barely spoken in months. It prompted a huge row between me and Adam. I told him I wouldn’t be going and that I felt hurt, ignored and disrespected. ‘I’m always going to be competing with them,’ I said. ‘I never feel I’m your priority.’ Feeling horribly caught in the middle, Adam moved out for three nights to get some space to think.

I know the situation is hard on him, but I can’t ignore the toll it’s taking on me either. That’s why, six months ago, I started seeing a psychotherapist. It’s helped me realise I can’t control his family but I do have power over my own actions, and that means not putting myself in situations that cause me stress. Now I only see his parents every few months – any more risks a full-blown rift that could spell the end of my marriage. Adam regularly confronts his mum about how their behaviour makes me feel, and she’s well aware they are driving a huge wedge between us. After each conversation, she eases up on us, but only temporarily. Adam doesn’t try to defend her – he’s resigned to the way she is.

To try to help, Adam has deleted me as a contact from his mum’s phone so she’s now unable to call or text me directly. I’ve got to accept his parents probably won’t change and their controlling behaviour could get even worse should we start a family. For now, we’ll have to find a way of dealing with them together, in a way that won’t split us apart.

‘My siblings ghosted me over our father’s will’

MEG*, 51, cherished the bond she had with her family until their father’s death tore them all apart

‘If it’s hurting you all the time, why do you keep doing it?’ It was midnight and, rather than preparing for bed, I was bent over my husband Pete*’s laptop, in tears, reading a Facebook thread between my older brother David* and one of my childhood friends. An innocent exchange on the face of it, making plans to get their kids together for a summer picnic, but it broke my heart. My muchloved brother had stonewalled me and my children, but was here breezily chatting to a woman he barely knew. Pete was right: reading this stuff hurt me so much it could be classed as an act of self-harm.

I grew up in a rural community in the north of England, the only child of my father’s second marriage. My half-brother David and my two other half-siblings lived 20 miles away [with their mother and new stepfather] and, although I saw Dad’s ‘first family’ infrequently, their existence overshadowed my childhood.

My father’s divorce had been spiteful, so much of my childhood was spent at lawyers’ offices or being warned by my mum that we needed to economise because Dad had such hefty child maintenance to pay to his first wife. I often felt the sting of my half-siblings’ jealousy that I lived with our father. They would complain that we got to travel while they rarely took holidays abroad.

Despite these tensions, I forged a loving relationship with David, the half-brother who was closest to me in age. Even though he was a teenager and I was a little girl, we’d play board games during summer get-togethers at our grandparents’ house. He was always generous with his time. When I went away to university, it was David who drove me there in his clapped-out Peugeot, and David who acted as chief usher at my wedding in 2001. Being an only child could be lonely and while I was never jealous of my half-siblings – their house seemed manic and full of arguments – my relationship with David meant the world to me.

The day after our father passed away in 2011, David picked me up from the train station. With Pete stuck in the US for work, David was by my side through the burial, and as the first arrangements were made to execute Dad’s estate. My mum had died a year earlier and I was in pieces; when my legs collapsed under me at the wake, David lifted me off the floor and steadied me.

However, the mood changed within days of the funeral. After a few cursory exchanges about the reading of the will, David and his siblings suddenly excommunicated me. I was never told why and for months, as I grieved, I tried to message my half-sisters and David, but received no response.

At first, I thought the silence was a feature of David’s mourning: he’d never been emotionally demonstrative and I speculated that the shock had made him retreat from anyone who reminded him of Dad. But as the silent months stretched into years, it slowly dawned on me that David and his siblings must have taken umbrage over money. I’d inherited my mum’s share of the family home I grew up in, which had been held in trust for me until my father’s death, while we’d all taken a smaller slice of my dad’s half. It was devastating to me that my half-siblings – David, especially – were willing to sacrifice the bond between us over the terms of a will. Terms that were beyond my control.

In 2013, after those midnight tears, I followed Pete’s advice and blocked David’s Facebook account, resolving to give up on my birth family. It hurt too much to reach out, again and again, and be rebuffed.

David and I have met once since Dad’s death. I was in his home town with my daughter looking at the local university, and had messaged him on impulse. To my shock, he responded to my email and we met the next day over lunch in a hotel. The meeting wasn’t what I had hoped for. We made small talk, the atmosphere was heavy with things unsaid and, as the bill came, David made no pretence of paying anything towards it; a small gesture that confirmed money had been the issue all along.

Every year when David’s birthday dawns I’m on the brink of emailing him my best wishes but I hold back. I’ve held out too many olive branches. These days I focus on my own kids, and do my best to stop my family history repeating itself a generation on.

Kate Morris with her charismatic father