This is the pattern that produced the loan. Not malice. Not a calculated scheme. The pattern of a woman who could not, would not, be seen to be struggling, who encountered a financial wall she did not know how to get over and who solved it using the tools that were immediately available to her — which included, because she had never sorted through those filing boxes, old documents with my information on them.
I have thought about whether, if she had called me and said: ‘Erin, I am in serious financial trouble and I need help,’ I would have helped her. The honest answer is: I don’t know. I did not have $28,000 to give her. I could not have taken out that loan for her legitimately. I might have helped her find resources — credit counseling, a payment plan with whoever she owed, some other path that didn’t involve my identity. I might have been able to do something.
But she did not call me. She could not call me. Calling me would have meant being visible in her difficulty, and that was, for her, the worst possible outcome. So she found a different solution.
Understanding this does not make it okay. But it makes it explicable in a way that matters for how I have tried to understand my mother since. She is not a person who wanted to hurt me. She is a person whose coping mechanisms are so oriented toward appearance-management that she made a decision that hurt me in order to avoid the thing that would have hurt her pride. That is a real distinction, even if the impact on me was the same.