I also did not stop the process because I was afraid of what the process might cost her. And this is the thing I want to be most honest about, because it was the hardest: there were moments, especially in the first few weeks, when I thought about what a full investigation might mean for my mother. I thought about the word that kept coming up in my conversation with the lawyer — the word that describes what she had done in terms that go beyond a civil debt dispute. I thought about what that word might mean for a fifty-nine-year-old woman who had never been in any kind of legal trouble, who had spent her entire life managing appearances, who would find the visibility of that word catastrophic.
I am not going to tell you that thinking about it was easy. It wasn’t. I thought about it and I felt it the way you feel things that require you to choose between two kinds of real. And then I continued the process anyway, because the alternative — stopping the process to protect her from the consequences of her own choices — was its own kind of harm. To me, in the most concrete sense. And also, in a less concrete but still important sense, to both of us: because a pattern that you protect someone from facing tends to continue.
I did not set out to punish her. I set out to resolve my situation. Whether those two things overlapped at any point in the process is not something I can fully account for, and I will not pretend I am certain of my own motives in every moment of this. But the goal I returned to, every time I had to decide whether to take the next step, was: what do I need to do to get this account off my credit report and establish that it was not mine? That was the question. I tried to answer only that question.