inheritance in through the looking glass.

I will never see any of the money that my family invested for me when I was a child.

In itself, that's okay. I have a decent job. I have no student loans. David and I are living well beneath our means. I don't need it.

But I can't even begin to explain how powerless the whole situation makes me feel. Suddenly, I am a teenager again. Trying to make plans, always with conflicting information about what sort of funds may or may not be available to me, based on the unpredictable, irrational whims of my father. Often choosing to limit myself and make no decision at all, just to erase the stress of uncertainty. With college this is not an option. I stick to state schools and keep a Navy brochure on collegiate options filed away, knowing that no offer of support is ever certain. My father takes me to the bank at eighteen to close out a savings account that my grandmother had open in my name. Thousands of dollars, taken out in cash. I never see it again. When I head to college, having secured a full-tuition scholarship, I save nearly all the money I earn and often consider how long it would last me if I needed it.

It wasn't so much the lack of support as it was the uncertainty of support. Recently David recalled that I always relied on others for lunch in high school.

"Why was that?" he asked.

"I guess they just didn't or wouldn't give me money consistently."

Two years ago my father told me he was filing me as a dependent on his tax form. I said no. I was making less than twenty-thousand dollars and had been paying all of my own expenses for over half of that year. Legally, I was not a dependent. And logically, filing as his dependent would have been far more detrimental to me than it would have been beneficial to him. He intimated to me that he did it anyway. I filed as independent and left it to the IRS auditors. I celebrated that this was my last financial tie to them; my last burden.

Then he uses my social security number to close out a mutual fund my mother had opened in my name, sends the check (my mother's name listed as custodial over the account) to his address, and sends me the tax forms. He claims the money was saved for all of the children and that I was only entitled to a portion of it. I'll never see it. Basically, I'm a victim of financial identity theft and the perpetrator is my father.

I'm in the process of filing taxes for "income" I'll never see, paying for the premium version of the tax software to file the proper form, and feeling very, very powerless.

What's my inheritance? A fear that all of the love that I ever experience will be conditional.