My Disinheritance Gave Me What I Actually Needed
My dad disowned me last July. The news came in the mail. In a blocky script made wobbly with age — he’s 77 — my dad spent the first half-page of his letter listing flaws he’d seen in me since my birth: a tendency toward being a “drama queen,” evidenced by the tantrums I threw while learning to walk. A “problem with the truth,” exhibited when I lied about making a mess at the dinner table. He wrote about my selfishness, evidenced by offers I had accepted from him: the $200 checks that came most Christmases and birthdays; two family vacations and a gift of $10,000 each to me, my two sisters, and my stepsister in the 2000s.
Then the letter informed me that he was writing me out of his will. “If you insist to tell these stories as truth and put them in your book,” he wrote, “you will never get any more money from me.” He ended by saying he didn’t want to hear from me again. “If you continue on this path, this is the last you will hear from me,” he wrote. “I don’t want any contact — no calls, texts, emails, etc. & please do not attend any service for me when I’m gone. I don’t want any crocodile tears.”
I sat on my partner Matthew’s front porch on Detroit’s East Side, those two sheets of paper in hand, and stared at the crabgrass along the sidewalk. The letter was the first time my dad had made clear what I’d always suspected but, until the letter, had refused to believe: He doesn’t care what happens to me.
Six weeks before the stamped date on the envelope, Matthew and I had gone to interview my dad and stepmom in their tract condo outside Detroit. Matthew had come with me as part witness, part support system. We navigated freeways clogged with rush-hour traffic, then another 15 minutes of highways lined with strip malls. At the condo, my parents welcomed us with pizza, Greek salad, and breadsticks.
I had told them this would be the third and final interview with them for a book I was writing about the cash value of racism in America. Half of the book is a memoir about me and my family, and it attempts to reckon with the monetary benefits we’ve had access to because we’re white — our “white bonus.”
To explain what racism had gotten me in dollars and cents, I had to be honest and specific about the financial details of my life. To be honest about my relationship to my race, I also had to be honest about what my upbringing had taught me, as a white woman, about power and privilege and speaking up.
I started interviewing them in 2022. The first two interviews had covered my grandparents’ and parents’ upbringings. From the beginning, I had warned them that I would also need to cover the years of my upbringing. And I had told them I knew there were “hard things” that had happened in our family and that I wanted to talk about them.
As my dad cleared away dinner plates, Matthew and I exchanged uneasy glances. We had been together for three years by then, a pandemic romance that had struck while I was in Detroit reporting my book. Even so, we were each adamant about retaining financial independence from each other. It seemed like an easy choice when I could ask my parents for help in a pinch.
At first, we’d worked hard to keep our finances separate. On our first camping trip together, I made a spreadsheet that calculated a fair split of expenses. When Matthew helped build a Murphy bed at my place in Brooklyn, I paid him for the work; when I deep-cleaned the duplex he’d bought in Detroit, he paid me for that, too. When my lease on a tiny Detroit apartment turned office was up, I rented two rooms in the lower unit of his duplex, rather than sharing his apartment upstairs and chipping in for the mortgage.
Keeping finances separate made sense for Matthew, a writer and teacher, as he had felt painfully dependent on his ex-wife, whom he’d been with since college. That dependence on her kept him from seeking divorce; now, he wanted to build a financial life entirely his own.
For me, separate finances felt like a way to keep myself from being a burden — and from being left. As a kid, I’d watched my mom die slowly over nine years, and even at a young age, I could sense how much the costs of her care burdened my father. She had become disabled by a brain injury from a car accident when I was 7, prompting a lawsuit about which insurer was responsible for covering her care. Four years later, my dad placed her in a for-profit adult foster-care home willing to take her on for free until the lawsuit was settled. We won the lawsuit, but when the insurance company appealed it, the home’s willingness to wait ended.
“I got a letter from the care company saying, ‘You need to get her out of here,’” my dad told me last March. “That’s how we ended up doing it with Medicaid and getting divorced.” In February 1990, my grandparents became my mom’s conservator; my dad filed for divorce; and my mother, now destitute, moved into a nursing home that accepted Medicaid. That summer, state officials cited the home for providing inadequate care after a dementia patient choked to death during lunch. In November, my dad married one of my mother’s close friends.
By the time I was dating Matthew, I had mindlessly absorbed the lesson my dad seemed to offer: “Love” was a financial exchange in my mind, and a gendered one. Women were to offer affection, support, and validation. In exchange, we would receive money from men. If I didn’t keep up my end of that bargain, I had no right to complain. I should be prepared for whatever punishment a man — whether father or suitor — might decide I deserved, including abandonment.
The “hard things” I wanted to talk about had only blurred the lines between love and money more. Even when I started earning my own money in high school, I felt financially dependent on my father. His name was on my savings account and, as I understood it, that meant he had the power to empty it at any time — a fact that, at least to me, felt more like a lingering threat.
The summer after my senior year of high school, I waited tables at a local Big Boy, picking up as many shifts as I could. I had gotten a partial scholarship to New York University, but even after loans, I was still $9,000 short of making tuition, room, and board. My parents agreed to pay $3,000 a year, but I would need to pay for the rest.
I was trying to get out the door to a shift when my dad came home, already angry. I’d accidentally broken a figurine he liked. I remember telling him I had to go to work, that I had to get money for college. I remember him telling me I wasn’t going to college. When reached by the Cut, my father denies any recollections about what happened next, calling them “false.” The rest of my memory of that afternoon unfolds like a TikTok, each frame cutting to the next. Stars flood my vision. I fall to the floor. The burn of the carpet against my face. He walks away. I crawl the length of the house, up the stairs, into my bedroom.
A few minutes later, I hear him make a phone call that he now says he didn’t make: “This is Tracie’s dad. She won’t be coming to work today. She’s having car trouble.”
I remember I was crying in the bathroom when my stepmom came home. I remember understanding that he believed it was my fault, that I had gotten what I deserved, and that I wouldn’t go to college if I complained. The exchange, in my eyes, was clear: my silence for money. I told a few adults I knew, and they urged me to think about college. I kept quiet and went to school in the fall.
A year and a half later, in 1995, when I was a sophomore in college, we got into another fight, and he told me to get out of his house. (Today, he denies kicking me out.) I shoved what I could into a duffel bag and left.
Back in New York, I worked as many as five jobs at once while taking classes full-time, earning around $18,000 a year. Tuition ate up half of it, and I lived on what was left. I economized by not eating, and the malnutrition led to vertigo. I continued living with a roommate who sexually assaulted me because the apartment was cheap. I think I would have tried living on the streets before I would have asked for my dad’s money. I was determined to rely on nobody but myself.
I went back to my family in 2000, tentatively. Maybe, I told myself, it was unfair to judge my dad by his worst moments. And maybe it was unfair to assume he still believed that lesson — that love is only ever a financial exchange.
Which brings us up to last year, as Matthew and I finished dinner in my parents’ condo. I fiddled with my notebook as my father did the dishes. I had changed so much since those hard teen years, but had my dad?
In this anxious pause, my stepmom began chatting about their finances. She left the dining table, then returned with a thick binder. It was the paperwork for their will and trust, she explained, fanning its pages.
They had announced that they were creating a trust in 2022, which surprised me. My dad sold lawn mowers; my stepmom worked for the county. Money had always felt tight. Even when my dad inherited money from his dad, a banker, and my stepmom inherited money from her dad, an engineer, there’d been no discussion of an inheritance for their own kids. The conversation with the binder was the first time they’d put numbers to it and made it real.
My share, based on what they told me, was around $350,000 — more than my net worth. As the number registered in my mind, a panic began to thrum through me. It felt as though my parents were telling me their price. The inheritance, a payment for my silence. My father hadn’t changed at all.
When we finished discussing the trust, I nodded and thanked them. Matthew squeezed my hand on the table. I started with easy questions. I asked about the history of racial violence and school segregation in Pontiac, Michigan, the city I was born in, and nearby Ferndale, the school district for my parents’ first home. I asked about how my grandparents and parents had built their middle-class wealth. With each question, I was getting up the nerve to ask about the hard things.
I told my father I loved him, and that I had forgiven him for the things I found hard. Then I asked what he remembered about a “20-minute physical fight” between us the month before I started college. “I remember it happened; that’s about all,” he said. I nodded and looked at my notebook, numb. For years, my dad, that fight, and its aftermath were all I could see. Now it seemed clear that my father had never seen me at all.
I might have stayed numb if my stepmom had not said that she didn’t think I was “ever in danger” as a kid. When she said those words, a wave of fury crashed over me. The room narrowed to her face.
I began to recount the fight, what I remembered as truth, speaking fast and sharp. In the recording, my dad waits 56 seconds before interrupting me.
“I’ve had enough of this. Get out,” he says. Chair legs screech on vinyl plank as he pushes back from the table. My stepmom is silent. “This is bullshit,” my dad says. Less than a minute later, the door shuts behind Matthew and me.
As Matthew drove us back to Detroit, he put his hand on my knee. “I am so fucking proud of you,” he said. “You held it together so long.”
It’s been more than a year since that conversation, and I don’t think I’ll ever talk to my dad again. In the letter, he calls my memories a “fantasy.” In November, he and my stepmom sent a letter calling me a liar, peppered with legalese that seemed cribbed from the internet. I think often about Maya Angelou’s observation that when someone shows you who they are, you should believe them the first time. My dad has been showing me who he is for years. The difference, now, is that I believe him.
Matthew’s shown me who he is, too. In the wake of the interview, he made time for me to rant and swear and cry. He brought me daisies, which were my mom’s favorite. When I lamented how I’d lost my cool with my stepmom, he did not pander to me; he agreed I could have done better. Then he pointed out how hard the task had been. He gives me room to be the kind of person I’d hoped my dad was: someone honest enough to take responsibility for my failings and willing to do my best to improve.
I’ve found that’s true when it comes to sharing money, too. With the disinheritance, Matthew and I realized that we’re in this relationship for the long haul — and we’ll be better off pooling resources, at least a little. Last December, we opened a joint checking account for groceries and travel and agreed to use it for expenses in both Brooklyn, where I’ve lived my adult life, and Detroit. We are comparing our savings and retirement accounts, and organizing our budgets so we can manage our spending efficiently. This summer, we’ve begun to tell each other our fears about sharing our money, however petty or absurd. By being honest, we hope, we can make sure we each feel safe — and see risks as shared burdens instead of weaponized leverage.
Together, we are building the opposite of what my dad offered: a life where care is the ground rule and money a tool we use to follow it. We don’t need a lot of it to get by. We just have to see each other and work, in good faith, together.
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