Only she

I know I've been a little mom-heavy here in the ol' journal recently, but seriously, she is driving me and my sister up a collective tree. Last night I had a conversation with her that was less fraught than most (that is, she wasn't yelling incoherently) but in the same conversation she asserted that:

- She has no money and therefore no estate, and therefore no need to see an estate lawyer of financial planner before she marries
- She has plenty of money and therefore can spend gobs of it on a wedding if she wants to
- Spending money on a bus to ferry relatives from Virginia to Pennsylvania so they can come to the ceremony doesn't count as spending a lot of money, because it's a good idea!
- Her husband-to-be's plan of limiting the budget for the wedding to $3,000 is an excellent one.
- She doesn't intend to stick to that budget because it's far too small.
- She doesn't want to sell her house and move to Pennsylvania because it's colder there, and anyway she loves her house.
- Her husband-to-be wants to sell the house so they can live in the Pennsylvania countryside. How they will reconcile these two opposing desires, we have no idea. Cage match?
- My sister and I are "money-faced." (Apparently it sounds better in Tagalog.)
- Husband-to-be's family are mostly composed of immoral money-grubbers, but they won't be able to touch her money even if they get married. This despite having no actual idea what happens once they are married and he becomes...her heir? Closest next-of-kin? Automatically entitled to half the house and so could pass it on to his kids if mom dies first and then they force us to sell it so they can get their half? Which would go against mom's desire that we keep the house? We don't know. She doesn't know either, and doesn't want to ask.
- There is no difference between a wedding in Pennsylvania and a wedding in Virginia, because that's just silly.
- Getting married is about love, not money, therefore seeing an estate planner or financial adviser is a waste of money. (This from the woman who matter-of-factly calls herself a high-maintenance woman with ABSOLUTELY NO IRONY.)
- All of this makes her tired. Why do we want to make her tired?

My sister and I have no real expectation of an inheritance from mom. Our assumption all this time has been that the house would finance her retirement once she was older, and anything we inherited would be stuff like pieces of furniture and the Le Creuset pots we intend to fight over. We're not exactly money-grubbers, either of us. However, the last thing either of us want is some sort of protracted legal brangle where suddenly Husband-to-Be's six kids sue us over some part of mom's estate and end up forcing us to do things we don't want to do. And frankly, the only reason we have a bit of a dubious view of this guy's kids is because HE HAS TOLD US THEY ARE HORRIBLE PEOPLE. Seriously. He's the one telling us they're leeches, while at the same time feeding his martyr complex by bankrupting himself to give them money (apparently he put 26K on his credit cards to put an son-in-law through rehab, and then the guy went to jail as soon as he got out for doing...something, and now he's out of jail and babysitting the kids and OH MY GOD DO WE WANT TO BE INVOLVED IN THIS FAMILY'S DRAMA? DO WE?)

So. These are a few of the things my sister and I have been dealing with.