What I do know is that the lender’s investigation addressed the question of the debt in whatever way their process addresses it. What that means for my mother’s relationship to the lender is not something I have information about, and I have not sought it. She is responsible for her own situation in that regard.
I am responsible for mine. Mine is resolved, to the extent that it can be resolved at this stage. The account is off my report. The documentation exists. The process worked.
## The Family We Have and the One We Thought We Had
Something I have been working on understanding, in the months since the discovery, is the distinction between the family I thought I had and the one I actually have.
The family I thought I had was an imperfect one — I was not naive about that. My parents divorced. My mother had anxiety about appearances. My brother and I had an unspoken but functional agreement about how to exist in relationship with her. The family was complicated in the ways that most families are complicated, with specific patterns and specific histories and specific things we did and didn’t say.
What I had not understood was that within that imperfect family, there was something I had taken as given that was not given. I had assumed, at some level, that there was a floor. That there were things that would not happen, categories of action that were outside what my mother would do even in extremity. Not because she was a moral paragon — I never thought that — but because I was her daughter and certain things did not happen between people who loved each other.