First draft - feel free to make suggestions.

Where to start, where to start? I guess the beginning is probably best. In the spring of 1972, your father showed up at our home in Novi. You were 3 and Michael was 6 weeks old. He told my family that he and your mother were having trouble getting along. He asked my mother if she could keep you and Mike “for a little while until Pat and I get things worked out.”

We never heard from your father again. A few weeks later, your mother called my mother and said that she “couldn’t deal with” you and Mike and that she was going to put the two of you in foster care. My parents met with my grandparents and they decided that there really wasn’t anything they could do to stop your mother. My mother felt very strongly that they had to try to keep you two out of foster care, so my grandparents struck a deal with your mother. They would pay her weekly so that you two could stay with my parents, me and my brother.

Yes, you read that correctly. Your mother accepted cash from my grandparents to stop her from placing you and Mike into foster care. She agreed to see you two on weekends, and I am sure you remember how infrequent those were. Your own parents wanted nothing to do with you, but MY parents took you in and raised you and your brother as their own.

I guess it was hard to entertain men when you had two small kids around…

When you were 12, we took a trip to Florida. My mom located your father in the Keys and asked if he wanted to see you and Mike. To say that he was less than interested would be an understatement. We drove to meet him. He was late. Really late. When he arrived, he just sort of looked at the two of you like he had no idea who you were. Which he didn’t. Because it had been 9 years since he saw you last. He stared at the two of you for about 20 minutes, then turned around and left. That was the last any of us heard from him until he became sick and moved back up north and into my grandmother’s basement.

Of course, we all now know that he moved to Belize, knocked up any woman who would let him in and had a grand old life – still not once contacting you or your brother. As we also know, once he recovered and left my grandmother’s basement, he stayed in the area, had yet another family, but still no contact with you or your brother. Oh, sure, you two saw him once or twice while he was sick, but like you, once he had used my grandmother for what she could give him, he checked right back out. A theme not uncommon in your life.
When you graduated college and moved to Alaska, you were still close with my mother. When your brother got married, you had recently suffered a miscarriage and you lost your damn mind when my mother had the balls to ask you how you were feeling. The nerve of the woman who raised you to be concerned about how you were feeling after suffering such a loss. I mean, what kind of a bitch inquires as to how your are doing in a time like that? What kind of awful human being actually reaches out to you to see if there was anything you needed?

Why did you lose your damn mind like that? Why did you tell her that she had no business asking you such a personal question? Was it because by THIS time in your life, your own mother was dead and gone and you were just pissed off that it was MY mother who raised you and loved you while your own mother was not the least bit interested in you? Were you pissed off that SHE survived, while the woman who gave birth to you died? Why were your chastising words the last words my mother ever heard from you?

You have stayed away from my family for the past 20 years. Please continue to do so. They way in which you conducted yourself after my grandmother died was appalling, abhorrent and atrocious. IF you had been there at the end of her life, you would have known that she didn’t want you to find out that she was in the hospital, that she didn’t want an obituary and that she didn’t want a celebration of her life.

You see, when a person dies, what one should do is respect the wishes of the decedent. But you, you have only ever been concerned with your own (invented) traumatic childhood and how you can exact revenge on my mother. The woman who raised you. Like her own child. Truth be told, she favored you over the rest of us. Because you look just like your father – her brother, whom she idolized until he turned into a womanizing, alcoholic piece of shit. She did everything for you, and in return you shit on her. You texted her demanding items from my grandmother’s house to which you weren’t entitled. All you had to do was ask, and those dolls would have been yours. But, no, you couldn’t even have the decency to give my mother your condolences on the loss of her mother – something to which you surely could relate. Instead, you began demanding things and threatening her if she didn’t give them to you.

You won’t get a thing from the house. You told my mother that your child has several of the dolls already. That’s all you will receive.

You have cut yourself out of my family. Please keep it that way.