My Secret Identity
Oh, I forgot to tell you the weirdest, funniest part of this whole thing so far. So, I’m talking on the phone with the banker, going over my credit report and she’s asking me about this charge and about that charge and there, on my credit report, is a loan of my mom’s and my mom’s Discover card (thank goodness my mom is also all about the timely bill paying).
But I explain that, because my mom co-signed on my first car loan and because she’s Betty [Our Last Name] and I’m Betsy [Our Last Name], our credit has been entangled for almost all of my adult life, though we keep repeatedly going to the credit bureaus and saying “This is her stuff” “This is mine” and they keep claiming to have it straight, this stuff still keeps popping up.
And then she says, “Oh, well, that’s probably because this credit bureau has you listed as aka Betty with this different social security number.”
Like I’m sometimes running around the world pretending to be a sixty year old woman!
Maybe my mom is trying to pass on her whole identity to me, as is rumored Marie Laveau did, so as to seem somewhat immortal or at least unnaturally long-lived.
It’s funny to me, too, because we find ourselves at similar life stages at the moment as well. She and my dad are also going to be buying a house in the next few years and are going to be moving at the end of June out of a parsonage and into secular housing. They’re very excited about the house that they’re renting until my mom retires. They sent me pictures of it last night. It’s very cute.
You know, my mom did have a run-in with Marie Laveau. Do you all remember that? When we went to New Orleans that summer and we took the cemetery tour? Remember how my mom had those spots in her lungs and the doctors didn’t know what they were? And how, there we were, walking through this concrete city of the dead in the hundred degree heat and my mom leans against this tomb, just to get some respite from the sun, and when she pulls away from the tomb, there are three red crosses for wishes granted, transferred from the tomb to the back of her white shirt. And then we moved to the front of the tomb only to learn that it was the final resting place of Madam Laveau.
My mom, of course, is not one to wonder at stuff like that.
But I am.
Filed under: Family
Is she the chick that beat all those slaves? Or is that someone else?
No, that’s Madame Delphine LaLaurie with the slave beating (and the still haunted house). Marie Laveau was the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans.
Aha. Thanks. When going from memory I’m always screwed when it comes to New Orleans. All the ‘ie’s and ‘au’s and Frenchness is hard for me to keep track of.
That happened to me once because my dad and I have the same first name (which I never use). All his accounts were on my credit report. I think it may have helped my score a little but we still had to get it taken off.
It’s sorta a pain having the same name as him, but it still didn’t stop me from giving it to my son too.