Three years ago, I was living in Chicago, working as a radio producer. I had health insurance. There was a sheet of paper hanging above my desk that listed everyone's extension. Seeing my name there felt like proof that I was a responsible, on-the-ball adult. Or at least it did until the afternoon that Dorse, the woman down the hall in human resources, called me into her office and told me the government was trying to garnish my wages. She handed me a stack of forms that had just been faxed over, detailing the thousands of dollars that, until that moment, I had no idea I owed.
I am currently $64,707 dollars in debt, none of which I actually borrowed. As best as I can figure, my mom first starting signing my name when I was 18. She took on at least five credit cards as well as about $50,000 in student loans. I thought my parents were paying for my college, but it turns out my mom would take out the loans every three months, under my name, for a couple thousand dollars each. Which was fine, except that once I graduated, my mom seemed to forget about the loans entirely. She never paid them back or alerted me of their existence so that I might have. They now amount to $58,607 because of the interest that accumulated during the seven years that they weren't being dealt with.
That day at the office, I braced myself to call my mom. I tried to convey why I was upset, but she didn't understand, which was precisely what was so upsetting. She promised she would take care of everything, sort it out, pay it all back, which I knew would never happen and wasn't even what I was really after. I just needed her to agree that this was a big deal. Then we could move on from there.
There's a letter she sent me a couple of weeks after our conversation. It's written on loose-leaf paper, and the edges are all ragged as if it had been torn out in a hurry. My mom says that she's so happy to be sending documentation showing that the loans have been completely paid off and that my negative credit has been erased. Then in parentheses she writes, "Please keep in special drawer — don't lose."
The papers she's referring to showed that she paid off one of the loans, for a little more than a thousand dollars. She never made a payment again, and my credit is still as bad as ever. But at the same time, some part of her recognized a need for organization and a system and a special drawer to keep it all in. Maybe she thought the mere act of conceiving of these things was enough, and once she did that, the rest would work itself out on its own.
My mom and I haven't spoken in a while. It wasn't an agreed- or planned-upon split; there was no final slamming down of the phone. We both just sort of stopped calling for longer and longer periods. Now, two years later, I'm still not sure if I gave up on her or she gave up on me.
The only person in my family with worse judgment than my mom's is my dad, and that's because he trusted in hers for so long. They finally divorced three years ago. My dad says that he and Mom didn't once sit down to discuss the bills or to plan for the future. The money stuff was left up to her. When I asked my dad if he knew about the loans, he told me, "I frankly just must have had my head in the sand."
He and I have had many conversations about my debt, each of which has frustrated me in a new and confusing way. The last time I asked him why my mom took out thousands of dollars of loans in my name, without my knowledge, and then never paid them back, he promptly answered that it was because of the cold war. "The early 90's was a confusing time," he said. "We didn't have this invisible enemy that we were fighting against anymore." When I asked how did any of this pertain to me, and what the hell was he talking about anyway, he tried to elaborate. "This is before the dot-com boom, of course. You've heard of the dot-com boom, right?"
What seems to have happened is that my dad's real estate development business slowed down right when I was about to go off to college. Or, according to his time line, right about when the cold war was ending. So my mom started taking out the loans . . .and stopping paying the bills.
When I talk to my dad about this period, his voice changes a bit, and the pauses get real long. He tells me: "In the Depression, when things went bad, the parents called the kids up and said you can't go to college. We never said you weren't going to college." I try to tell him that I understand this, that everyone hits on hard times, that I appreciate how much they cared about my education, that it's the whole not-discussing-it-with-me-first-so-I-might-have-done-something aspect that I'm hung up on. But to him it's all the same.
My dad and I are currently chipping away slowly at the loans, enough so that the government doesn't come after me, but not enough to make much of a difference. He has suggested many times that we just leave it alone for seven years and see if it disappears. Recently I applied to graduate school and got in, but I most likely cannot go. Because of my defaulted student loans, I can't borrow any money at all. The only real credit card I've ever had was a student Visa that my parents gave me when I was 18 and told me to use for books and supplies. I used it mainly to buy clothes. I've been living a cash existence ever since. The worst part about my debt is that, since I had no idea it existed, I wasn't able to enjoy getting myself into it.
