Daughter is stung when parents read her letters
Dear Amy: My parents divorced when I was 10 years old. My paternal grandmother was the only constant during that tough time.
We wrote each other letters and, especially through my tumultuous early teens, she was the one person I thought I could pour my heart out to when everything around me was constantly changing (moving house to house, and town to town).
My father remarried when I was 12, and the relationship between my stepmother and me has had its ups and downs over the years so that may be tainting my feelings on this, which is why I am asking your advice.
My grandmother passed away in 2014 at the age of 92 (I am 44).
My stepmother informed me this past Christmas (two years after her death!) that she and my Dad had read all the letters that my grandmother had kept that I had written her as a child/teenager. She asked me if I wanted to have them.
I didn't know what to say at the time, except that those letters were written during some very hard times in my life and I didn't want to read them right now. I have no recollection of what I said in them, but I was embarrassed that my private thoughts and feelings as a child had been laid wide open for two people I had not spent very much time with in my life.
It's been a few months since this revelation and now I am very angry and upset.
Why would they read letters I had written to my grandmother without handing them over to me first?
Am I wrong to feel that my privacy has been invaded, in the extreme?
Did those letters belong to my grandmother? Should they be available for anyone to read after her death? Or should those letters have been given to me, unread, since I am still alive and I wrote them? -- No More Letters
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