‘It was me, honey. All of it was me’: My mother’s dark confession made me vomit for days and took me to the brink… then I discovered the other victims

‘There’s been some mistake,’ said Kristin Collier quietly, as she was sitting opposite the grim-faced bank clerk.

It was 2008 – just a month before she graduated from the University of Michigan – and she had never seen a credit report before. But she knew this one, with its rows of unfamiliar numbers swimming in front of her eyes, couldn’t be hers.

There were the details of two massive student loans from two different banks. Then the credit card bills – one for Victoria’s Secret, another for a gas station.

Some debts were as low as $400, others as large as $40,000. Together, they totaled more than $200,000.

If she believed she had been a victim of identity fraud, the clerk told her – with a strong emphasis on the word ‘if’ indicating that he did not believe her – she should contact the police.

But, first, Collier, now 40, called her mom.

Pouring out her fears and confusion, hoping for the reassurance that everything would be OK, that they would work it out together, instead, the phone line went very quiet.

‘Honey, I’m so sorry,’ her mom said after an awkward silence. ‘It was me. All of it was me.’

The debt, which, with interest, would eventually soar to $400,000, would haunt Collier for the next 15 years as she navigated the legal system, bankruptcy court, and a multitude of collection agencies.

It plagued every area of her life, its impossible weight overwhelming romantic relationships and crushing her physical and mental health to breaking point.

And for a long time, there was the unshakeable hint of doubt – that maybe it had all been her fault after all; that she only had herself to blame.

‘When my head was able to clear a little bit from the initial shock,’ she told the Daily Mail, ‘I thought I should have had a larger hand in understanding the funding for my degree.

‘My parents filled out FAFSA [Free Application for Federal Student Aid] on my behalf. I really didn’t have an active role. So I thought, maybe if I’d done that, I would have had more knowledge earlier.

‘If I had pulled my credit report earlier, maybe none of this would have happened.

‘I had the sense that, if I had done everything “right,” then this wouldn’t have happened to me.

‘And that felt really bad to think that I might have prevented it.’

But, in her upcoming book, What Debt Demands, she also explains that she had every reason to trust her parents.

‘My mother managed everything because that’s what she was good at,’ she wrote. ‘She’d worked at a bank since she was 16, moving out of the teller window and into an office where she approved, created, and dispersed debt to people in the form of automobile loans.’

Later, after her mom was laid off at the bank, she took a new job managing medical billing at a dentist’s office.

Money had always been tight, she said. Sometimes checks bounced. Often her university bill was paid late.

But she added: ‘I thought of these snags as painful, singular events, linked to one another, but discrete from everything else. We’d move through it and be on the other side.’

It would be several weeks after that first discovery of the debt – and many fraught phone calls – before she would get answers to some of her most pressing questions.

Why so much money?

Where did it all go?

‘We were going to lose the house,’ her mom told her at one point.

‘I was always going to pay you back,’ she repeated time and again.

But even Collier knew her parents would never make enough to pay back the debt in their lifetimes.

Then, about six months later, her mom was suddenly arrested and charged with workplace embezzlement and healthcare fraud.

Horrific though this new information was, it started to give Collier some sense of clarity.

‘I learned that my mother had a severe gambling addiction and had borrowed money from many of her family members, maxed out all her credit cards and, then, when all the credit lines had collapsed, she’d taken money from her employer.’

She was sentenced to two-and-a-half months in prison. And, with only Collier’s father’s earnings to tackle the ever-growing mountain of debt, the possibility of clearing it seemed even more unlikely.

The stress, unsurprisingly, took a punishing toll on her health.

‘I was terribly anxious all the time,’ she said, ‘both from the totally empty bank account, and trying to do this constant tallying of what I could afford or couldn’t afford… just constant calculation in my head. It made me feel kind of crazy.

‘And I was getting calls from debt collectors… which was really horrifying and scary.’

Working every possible hour on top of her teaching job left little time to take care of her physical health, and she started to exhibit a range of disparate, seemingly unconnected issues.

‘I lost a bunch of weight, partially because of anxiety, and partially because I had really bad stomach aches.’

She was constantly throwing up – sometimes for days at a time.

Once, terrified she was becoming dangerously dehydrated, and unsure if she had enough money in the bank to pay for a cab, she walked several miles to the hospital, ‘where I puked so hard in the waiting room that I sh*t my pants.’

Whenever she consulted a doctor, she would be prescribed a new antibiotic and the symptoms would eventually clear. But before long, new – and at the same time strangely familiar – symptoms would flare up.

‘I had a bunch of UTIs and kidney infections, and it just felt like all of my body systems were collapsing,’ she said.

At one stage, she was diagnosed with a stomach ulcer. But she never received clarity on many of the issues that came and went, as her body grew increasingly thin and frail with each mysterious breakout.

Meanwhile, there was no escape from the constant calls from debt collectors – at work, with friends, in the park. Nowhere was safe.

For most of her 20s, she feared she might never get through it.

‘I remember thinking, “How can I keep on living like this?”‘

She never contemplated self-harm, she stresses, but did begin to fear that anything resembling a ‘normal’ life – with a home of her own, a family, a hopeful future – would be eternally beyond her reach.

‘It felt like I was going to have to live with it forever, and that it would make it impossible for me to afford to buy a home, or to do some of the normal things that I imagined people in their 30s or 40s did.’

Meanwhile, as she took practical steps to manage the debt, some advice was more helpful than others.

‘I saw several lawyers before I found one who could eventually help me,’ she said. ‘A lot of folks were just saying, “You just have to keep on paying.”‘

She eventually used the bankruptcy process to get rid of some of the debt. But she explained: ‘Student loans are protected, so you can’t actually declare bankruptcy on student debt – it’s really hard to get out of.’

Seventeen years on, she is now free of the fraudulent debt (though she is still paying off a couple of thousand dollars of student loans).

As for her relationship with her mom – that’s still a work in progress.

‘We are still in touch, and we still have a relationship,’ Collier said.

‘We’re both still really impacted by what happened, and are navigating that with a sense of hope that we can continue to heal and become closer in the future.’

She added: ‘As bad as these debts have felt for me, I think they felt totally awful for her too, and they’re the biggest source of regret and shame in her whole life.’

Her mom has read the book, she said, and, unsurprisingly, has mixed feelings.

‘She said that she thought the book was really beautiful and really hard to read.

‘I have the sense it doesn’t feel good for the world to hear about some of the most painful moments of her life, but I also know she’s really proud of me, and she understands it’s my story to tell.

‘And I think she wants it to be a part of a conversation that brings relief to other people.’

What Debt Demands: Family, Betrayal, and Precarity in a Broken System by Kristin Collier is published by Grand Central Publishing on November 18