It isn’t in a trust. I suppose there’s nothing I can do, but thank you all for your advice.
You know, I understand the angst and frustration that's all a part of being 16, but that remark is really uncalled for. "This country" has laws pertaining to being a minor vs. being an adult for good reasons. It sucks that you have a mother that would steal money from her own daughter (and I say that without knowing the circumstances or her reasons for taking the money), but that's not "this country's" fault. Be grateful you don't live in a country where disrespecting one's parents is punishable by stoning.
You can buy a good fire/waterproof safe with a combination lock for about $30. Get one, and you won't have this problem in the future.
Every day I see my little brother, I thank God for the legal differences between a minor and an adult. I simply feel that both the laws and the culture of this day and age, while they pay the utmost respect to the differences between a 6-year-old and a 60-year-old, fail to fully appreciate the differences between a 6-year old and a 16-year-old, no matter how precocious the latter may be.
While I burden myself with no illusions that any country at the time would treat me much better, I have grown very sick of watching the magical number of '18' be dangled over my head as the universal threshold for some Litmus test of maturity. I can promise you that the college I attend has many 18-year-olds more immature than I with many more rights than I.
The safe is an interesting, if curious idea, but I think you underestimate the bitter resolve that runs in my family. Sparing the fact that I no longer have $30 to buy one, (and lack a sense of irony sufficient to warrant stealing a safe with nothing in it) she'd carry the whole thing away if it wasn't nailed down. If it *was* nailed down, she'd wait for me to leave the house and pry up the nails. One way or another, I just know I'd come home one day to find it ripped apart with power tools in my garage or walk in my room to find it's door swaying gently in some poetically convenient breeze with a stethoscope dangling overhead.
This culture and legal system need to stop thinking of maturity as an on-and-off switch, but a slow progression that stands at very different places for very different people. And if anyone truly thinks themselves to be free of the sin of immaturity, let them cast the first stone at every 16-year-old college student in the world. We need to stop looking down on people and saying something like "I understand the angst and frustration that's all a part of being 16" and start looking people in the eye and saying something like "I understand the angst and frustration that's all a part of being robbed blind".
Because, let's face it. It doesn't really matter how old you are. If someone had the right to take all of *your* money due to an arbitrary legal oversight, you'd be a wee bit hostile too.