When my mother said she had been making the payments, I think she genuinely believed that this was a mitigating factor. And in some narrow technical sense it was — a loan in default would have been worse than a loan being serviced. But what she did not understand, or could not let herself understand, was that the existence of the account at all was the problem. An unauthorized account that someone else is quietly paying off is still an unauthorized account. It is still not mine. It is still a commitment made in my name that I never agreed to.
I tried, once, to explain this to her. I said: ‘If I had agreed to co-sign something with you, and you had been making the payments, and I found out about it later — that would still be a problem. Because you made a decision about my finances without my consent. The fact that it was being managed doesn’t change that the decision wasn’t mine to begin with.’
She said: ‘But you wouldn’t have lost anything.’
I said: ‘I lost the ability to choose. That’s not nothing.’
She didn’t have a response to that. I don’t think she had ever framed it that way before, and I’m not sure the framing fully landed even in that moment. But I said it, and saying it out loud helped me understand it more clearly myself.
The choice — my ability to decide what commitments to make with my own financial identity — was the thing that had been taken. The $28,000 was the vehicle. The choice was the actual theft.