Stepmother Dies and Sister Makes a Fuss About Dividing the Estate: She Gets the House, I Get a Pillowcase, and When She Opens It, She Cries

(From a reader submission, images in this article are from the internet)

Stepmother Dies and Sister Makes a Fuss About Dividing the Estate: She Gets the House, I Get a Pillowcase, and When She Opens It, She Cries

What does it mean to be family? In my own view, it means being able to share good times and bad, and when hardship strikes, being able to stand firmly by each other's side without leaving or giving up. Among our family of three, my stepmother and I did exactly that, while my sister had a very clearly different view from ours.

I was not my stepmother's biological child. Our family was a remarried and blended family. When my stepmother came into our home, she brought with her a little girl two years older than me. At that time I was 7 and she was 9, and just like that we became a family. From then on, she treated me as if I were her own, and we had a very good relationship. Deep down I relied on her very much, and I usually liked to cling to her and act spoiled. Although my father also treated my sister like his own daughter, my sister still believed I had stolen the motherly love that should have belonged to her, which sparked her resentment.

At that time we lived in a small county town, and the house we lived in was the welfare housing my father's work unit had allocated at the time. It was not large, just the most ordinary kind of two-bedroom, one-living-room apartment. Since my sister and I were both still young then, we lived together in the same room. At first I was very happy, feeling that I had a companion, and sometimes at night I would climb onto my sister's bed to show affection, just as I did with my stepmother. But she would always either push me with her hands or kick me with her feet to drive me straight off her bed, her face full of coldness.

In the year I was in the first year of senior high school and my sister was in the third year of senior high school, my father passed away due to illness. At that time my own aunt came and said she wanted to take me away, to finish senior high school at her home and then take the college entrance exam. In front of me, my sister said to my stepmother, "Mom, just let her go. It's good for our whole family. Anyway, she has nothing to do with us. She was never really part of this family." After hearing that, I cried bitterly, and that was the first time in her life my stepmother raised her hand and gave my sister a slap, saying that if she ever said that again, she should be careful, or she would disown her from then on. Because my stepmother firmly refused, in the end my aunt left alone. But the worry I had before she came was completely swept away, replaced by complete gratitude and peace of mind.

My sister did not do well in school. After failing the college entrance exam, she started working. She liked clothes, cosmetics and the like, so she became a salesperson at a high-end fashion store, and from then on put all her attention on dressing up, and she also became somewhat snobbish and vain. I, on the other hand, followed the conventional path, went to university, and later entered a state-owned enterprise and became a white-collar worker. Seeing the distance between us grow wider and wider, my sister felt unbalanced again. She believed that if my stepmother had sent me away back then, at least she would not have had to face me, and would not have been troubled because of it. So she also developed grievances toward her own mother and, year after year, did not come home.

In my stepmother's final years, her health was poor, and I was the one caring for her. My sister was nowhere to be seen. When the hospital issued a critical condition notice, I called my sister in tears, asking her to come to the hospital to see my stepmother one last time. She only said coldly, "My mom only has eyes for you, the successful daughter. You being there is enough." Just like that, the old woman did not see her own biological daughter appear before she died. But as soon as she died, my sister ran back to make a fuss about dividing the estate. On this point, my stepmother had already made arrangements before she died, stated in front of a lawyer and notarized. She left the old family house to my sister and left me a pillowcase. My sister laughed right then, utterly smug. But I knew that pillowcase was something my stepmother had been embroidering until her final days, and it was a token of her feelings. As for me, it did not matter whether she left me money or not. Either way, I could live well on my own.

Yesterday my sister came over to show off. I was in grief and did not want to argue with her, but she would not let it go. She kept saying in front of me that a biological mother is a biological mother, and that even at death's door she still worried about her own biological daughter. Seeing that I kept holding the pillowcase my stepmother had embroidered and grieving over it, she came over to snatch it, saying she wanted to see just what great love was hidden inside. In the struggle, the pillowcase fell to the ground, and inside there was actually a passbook with 60,0000 in it. When my sister saw it, she cried and made a scene, cursing my stepmother for being partial, and in the end she completely broke down, crying loudly nearby.

I think that ever since childhood she had gone astray emotionally. Our relationship could have been better, but now, with my stepmother's passing, I think the plastic sisterhood between us has also reached its end. She still wanted to fight me over that passbook, but legally she had no ground to stand on, and in the end she wiped her tears and left hatefully. I think she will still look at me with hatred, but I will set my eyes on the future. For people who do not like you, staying far away is enough. What do you all say?