I was wrong about the floor. The floor turned out to be lower than I had assumed. That is the information I am still integrating.
What I want to be careful about is not turning this into a story where I conclude that my mother is irredeemable or that the relationship is over or that I was foolish to have trusted her before. None of those conclusions feel accurate to me.
What I conclude, at least right now, is more modest: I have better information about my mother than I had before. That information includes something I wish I didn’t know and something I needed to know. The version of my mother that I carry now is more accurate than the version I carried before. And the relationship I have with her, going forward, will be built on that more accurate version.
That may be a diminished relationship. It may be a different one than what we had before, a relationship between two adults with clear eyes about what each of them is and isn’t. I do not know yet if it can be rebuilt into something with warmth as well as accuracy. I am not writing off the possibility.
What I am writing off is the version of it that required me to not know what I now know. That version is gone, and it was already gone before I found the credit alert, because the thing that made it impossible was not my knowing but my mother’s doing. She did the thing first. I just found out.