Chapter 140

When a family member gets scammed, it’s not just money they lose. It’s respect, loyalty and trust. No one sees them the same anymore. 

For my mom, she had already driven a wedge between her and everyone else when she chose to dig deep into politics. Now there was another problem of contention with her financial responsibility. She had just proven to everyone she was not a reliable person. 

My cousin T1, like me, was furious with her for doing something so stupid and really wanted nothing to do with her anymore. He and I had a few conversations between all the budgeting talks and honestly, the talk went pretty dark. 

Now, I am not so self unaware as to not see what was going on here. We were victim blaming. But could you blame us? Fool me once, shame on you! But fool me 47 times and you’re now wondering what was wrong with the victim for going back. My mom had given 47 transactions of thousands of dollars without thinking much about the situation nor talking with anyone else about it. 

Furthermore, this was a cultural and familial thing. If you just skimmed over the first 100 chapters of this blog, you may have come to realize what kind of forces were molding me. Well, along those lines, the biggest issue I have found myself facing with my own value systems now is that I take things as they are. Just like how mom never cared how I struggled to get good grades back in school, only that I did get them, I didn’t care how she lost money, only that she did. T1 and I shared similar sentiments for the most part on this point. Our family was not sympathetic. 

An unsympathetic network that has very little time to work things out leads to horrible schisms. If our family had time to process all the things that had happened, maybe we’d be nicer and more sympathetic. However, interest rates do not move at the speed of emotional forgiveness. We had to rush because we just had to. For my mom, she’s seen the money disappear from her grasp almost half a year ago. For the rest of us, we were being hit with months and months of loss all at once. Speaking of this…

It pissed everyone off the most that my mom seemed like she was actually doing better now that the cat was out of the bag. She was past all her stages of grief and now in the acceptance phase. The rest of us were, for the most part, still in anger. This meant that whenever my mom would try and have a conversation, it always went poorly. 

One time during this fiasco, when she saw me at the table with a group call with T1, T2 and the extended family working out finances, she tried to help. She saw how distraught I was, brought over tea and then said to me.

“It’ll be okay. This isn’t the end of the world.”

My response? 

“What the f*ck do you mean? You’re the reason we’re in this mess. The audacity you must need to tell anyone ‘it’s going to be alright’ is ridiculous. This is all happening because of you and you can’t even be trusted to clean things up.”

Things were rocky. There wasn’t a single conversation I could have with mom without us yelling and honestly, that was starting to become almost a habit. Despite all the yelling though, things were still moving. By the end of the first week post-Halloween, my fiance and I, along with the help of a lot of our friends, had cleaned the house enough for a photographer to come by and take pictures of everything.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever had to very quickly sell a house but if you haven’t, I hope that you never experience it. Honestly, it’s not fun. There’s no time to organize everything nor go through everything. You do estimations of what is useful and what isn’t. For the most part, you end up just throwing everything into the garbage.

We threw out heaps and heaps of things. Most of which were old and beat up furniture. For whatever was still in decent shape, my mom tried to sell as many of those pieces as she could. Extra blankets and extra clothes were also donated accordingly. It was cathartic to see some things go, but the problem is, the void left by things was filled by a feeling of impermanence.

This house was everything my mom owned. She had used up all of my grandma’s inheritance and with all of the money she’s ever made in Canada to buy the house. It was the endgame. Now it’s gone. If something this stable could disappear, how are we to really trust anything else to stay tied down to us? Even if somehow in the future I end up buying a house, how will I trust that it will be a permanent thing? The fear of losing everything all at once is now a very real thing. For me, for the extended family, for everyone who knew of what transpired. It felt like a piece of reality had broken. 

Even with this baggage hanging over everyone, we kept moving forwards. The photographer came and went, our listing went up and after a few days, we held an open house. With all of that out of the way, everyone could finally take a breather. Even during the down times, we couldn’t just shut off. We needed to digest everything that had really happened. I still had a lot of hate but I calmed down enough to at least try and look objectively at everything. The first question that came up from this is…

How could I possibly have prepared for this?

It’s definitely a question worth considering. Am I responsible for my mom’s mistake? Could I have prevented it somehow? Maybe I could have talked with mom more or maybe I should have taken control of her finances earlier. I mean, sure, there was the whole ring wing radical politics side of things but is that a good enough excuse to pull away from your mom? 

Most of my friends told me that it was impractical to really blame myself for what my mom did. LP told me an objective truth:

“You did what a normal sane person could be expected to do. Anything beyond that would be an unreasonable ask.”

LP also gave me some other seemingly obvious advice. He told me that our family was victim blaming very hard but there should be a reminder that the worst actor here is the scammer. They were the criminals at fault. Had they not been around, none of this would have happened. 

It’s true. But how do you blame them? During my upbringing, these criminals were almost comedic villains. No one was stupid enough to fall for them and anyone who did fall for them only had themselves to blame. Beyond just that fact, you can’t see them nor catch them. We looked into every way possible to catch the bastards but nothing. Oh and the police? They were honestly completely useless. 

In the face of a calamity like this where those who are to blame have gotten away with it, it felt like our family had been hit by a natural disaster. An unfeeling force that didn’t care about you at all. I felt a lot of hate towards the world when this reality finally set in. The good I saw in my daily life got smaller and smaller. Even worse, they felt inconsequential. 

My grandma’s generation of wealth trickled down to my uncle and my mom. They used that money and wealth to come to Canada. Further down the line, when grandma passed and my mom got her estate, it was sold to allow my mom to buy a house. Our family had generational wealth. Sure, it wasn’t an outrageous amount but it was still our lineage. But it ended with mom. She blew it all away. I will be inheriting from my mom, absolutely nothing.

Speaking of inheritances. I never really thought about my inheritance until I had lost it all. Then I felt the loss immediately. What’s my daily paycheck compared to $700K being lost all at once by the family? What’s the point of doing anything and building anything for myself if there exists in the world forces that can render all of my family’s past efforts meaningless? In an unjust world like this, why go on at all? Life started to feel uninteresting. Nothing matters when you’ve lost so much.

I had plans and dreams of starting a family of my own with my fiance. A dream which included us living in a house of our own too. That dream, now, seems like a far far way away. With help from mom, my future family could have been off to a great start. Instead, now it’s just a pipe dream. All gone and still, my mom refused to give us more straight answers. 

That’s right, amidst all of the help everyone was offering to move on and reorganize finances and budgets, mom was still not telling everyone the whole truth. Questions still arise from everyone like “what wallet did they use for bitcoin?”, “what university did the Professor of Professor work at?”, and “how much of what you told us was the truth?”. The most frustrating thing of trying to get everyone’s act together was that mom was still withholding information. She was unrelenting in her lies even now and there was nothing I, nor anyone else, could do about it. 

The criminals? Uncatchable. The victim? Still untruthful. All the while, the world is on fire and you’re just trying to fetch enough water to not let it burn everything. 

At some point, it felt like powerlessness was the new norm. I’ve been in despair before due to academia but that was now just a droplet in the face of our current storm. This was despair in the real world. 

I never believed in anything like religion or god. My strongest belief, if you can call it that, is to do with my internal locus of control. In all aspects of life, I find comfort in having a feeling of control and knowing that my actions mean something. But right now? I had no control. Sometimes I feel like I don’t even know what I don’t even know.