The Mothers’ Plight

I ratted out my only son. In my defense, I was disoriented, terrified, and, as a 66 year old white woman and psychotherapist, had the privileges that resulted in having only interacted with law enforcement over traffic violations. 

They caught me off guard and intimidated me, just as they planned. It was 6:00 AM on Valentine’s Day in 2019 when eleven federal agents stormed my apartment, found me asleep in bed and demanded to know where my son was. They didn’t tell me why they wanted him, although they produced a one-page warrant that referred to his crimes by their penal code numbers. That meant nothing to me, obviously. Still, I heard the barn door of my own innocence slam loudly behind me.

Louie was 26 years old and had left three weeks earlier to attend a computer-coding training program in New Orleans. He hadn’t given me the address of his Airbnb but I had his cell phone number. The feds flipped from pseudo-kind to nasty when I told them that. “We know what kind of mother you are!” they yelled. “We know you ran downtown and rescued him from his elementary school on 9/11. You know where he is all the time!” Creepy, yes, but also a parenting compliment. On the other hand, if they knew that much about us, how did they not know that Louie was out of state? Why didn’t they track his cell phone, instead of making me reveal his whereabouts? Five years later, I still don’t know. 

By day’s end, I had secured a private criminal defense attorney, and Louie was being held in a Louisiana jail. My world as I knew it was shattered. It was Day One of a new era of lawyers, phone calls, shame, confusion, unrelenting worry, and alienation from my peers with “perfect” children. My own child was sentenced to prison for 14 years, where he remains today. 

***

In the aftermath of Louie’s arrest, my feelings were a chaos of terror and confusion. They were so consuming that I lost interest in my work and resigned my position as executive director of the national nonprofit I founded 15 years earlier. Within three years, I moved twice. I felt unsettled. Nowhere felt like “home.” I wanted to retire from my private practice as a psychotherapist but I needed the money for Louie’s legal bills, and the focus on others’ struggles was often a welcome distraction for me. 

Soon, I became curious about other mothers in my position. What did we share about the experience of having an incarcerated son and what was unique to me and my circumstances? I set out to learn, both as a curious mental health worker and as a mother who could use some guidance of her own. 

I joined several Facebook groups where I read the daily rants, prayers, and requests for support from other mothers. There was a hefty dose of Jesus in the posts, but I found second-hand comfort in what faith offered these women. It took me two years to recover enough to read the paltry number of articles about the topic in peer-reviewed journals. In them I learned that the struggle is real and long-lasting, and that, if mothers of incarcerated sons were not an ongoing subject for research, we were also not being offered adequate support services. Soon thereafter, I began volunteering to facilitate a support group for Jewish mothers of sons with life sentences. I now also lead a second group for families of prisoners. 

Every mother of an incarcerated child has her own story of “that day.” She knows where she was and what she was wearing when she got the news of her son’s arrest, the day her life changed. Each story is unique, of course, based on the woman’s particular family circumstances and social conditions, like race, class, and previous history with the criminal justice system. 

There are many of us: 1 in 4 women in this country has an incarcerated loved one. This is not surprising, considering that nearly two million people are currently living in U.S. prisons and jails. If it were a city, Prisontown would be the fifth largest in the country, only smaller than New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston. An overwhelming majority of these inmates are male and a disproportionate number are Black (roughly half are in for drug offenses). Of course, not every prisoner has a mother, not every prisoner is male, and not all mothers are intimately involved with their sons’ care, but there are hundreds of thousands—maybe even millions—of mothers whose lives have been defined by this event.

Mothers are often the most secure family relationship prisoners have, even for men who are married with children. Men rely heavily on their mothers for material and emotional support throughout the entire process of arrest, court proceedings, incarceration, and, hopefully, community return. I serve as Louie’s messenger, wallet, secretary, advocate, research assistant, purveyor of family news, link with his prison college program, and principal reminder that he has not been forgotten in the world. Some, building on sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s idea of the “second shift,” have referred to this motherwork done by people with incarcerated children as the “third shift”: the responsibilities we have that are in addition to our paid jobs and household/family commitments. For me, it constitutes a true part time job.

Mothers in this position live simultaneously in two time zones: ours and theirs. As one woman in a private Facebook group for mothers of incarcerated sons wrote, “I have learned several things on this journey with my son. I was sentenced to 15 years when my son was. I’ve been doing time with him. We have went from prison to prison. We have been stabbed, beat, robbed, and stabbed again. We have been addicted to heroin and overdosed several times. And we have cleaned ourselves up and successfully completed a drug program. I use ‘WE’ because my son is my heart, my son is my world. And as a mother, I feel his pain.”

We naturally think about what we’ve passed down to our children genetically, financially, and culturally, but the influence is actually bi-directional. We are not mere observers and hand-wringers to their struggles in prison—it actually changes our mental and physical health. The women in my groups have taught me that the primary causes of our torment are financial stress, grief, shame, social isolation, and self-blame. 

The struggles do not subside over time. Instead, the longer our sons are “in,” the more our physical health is in jeopardy. We are a diverse group, of course, and some mothers have more pre-existing stress and/or fewer personal and social resources to buffer against the harmful health effects of parenting a prisoner. Yet, all the women in my support group reported health problems that began with their sons’ arrests, including high blood pressure, diabetes, lost eyesight, and increased alcohol use. I, too, found myself drinking excessively every night, until I finally had to quit completely a year ago.

***

That Valentine’s Day was an earthquake to my system, and the effects have not dissipated. The original shock has settled into a “new normal,” but that is not the same thing as being OK. The foundations of my identity have permanently shifted, and the pain of the displacement has become a background ache in my life, much like a bad knee that hurts with every step, but not enough to stop walking. I keep going and the limp is rarely noticed by others. Six weeks after Louie’s arrest, I told one of my best friends that I had gone a full week without crying. “Maybe you’re finally over it!” she declared. “No!” I barked. “I will never be over it!” I have freedom and money and an adequate food supply, while my only child is confined and controlled. 

For a year after Louie’s arrest, I had a recurring visual image of the two of us on a diagonally split screen, the lower left in black and white, with Louie lying on a bunk bed in a tiny cell, and me in the upper right, in vivid color, living an interesting New York City life. I couldn’t allow myself to enjoy this life because every pleasure reminded me of his forced deprivation. (One mother in my support group feels guilty whenever she eats her son’s favorite foods.) And if my parenting was in any way responsible for Louie ending up in prison, I had no right to fun. Rationally, however, I knew that Louie would not want me to suffer in confinement along with him. It would only add to his guilt.

I’m culturally Jewish and a devout atheist, but a tradition from the Passover seder helped temper some of my guilt. The holiday is an annual retelling of God delivering the Jews from slavery by parting the Red Sea as an escape route and punishing the Egyptians with ten plagues, including lice, boils, locusts, and the killing of firstborn sons. At one point in the seder ritual, the plagues are recited aloud and, with each one, participants dip a pinky in their red wine and deposit the drop in a plate. Removing the ten drops symbolically expresses how pleasure in our own freedom is diminished by the suffering of others. This was exactly the metaphor I needed. Every time I had a glass of wine or cocktail, which was every day then, I began by removing a drop with my pinky. It was a private gesture, acknowledging my privilege and pleasure, alongside Louie’s captivity. It gave me permission to enjoy my drink, my life.

***

Prisons provide three free meals a day, but those free meals are neither nutritious nor adequate in terms of volume. Considering that prisons spend under $3/day per prisoner for food in most states, this is not unexpected. Prisoners won’t starve if their diet is limited to chow, but they will be unrelentingly hungry and malnourished. Purchasing additional food through commissary (or through the internal, illegal black market) is an absolute necessity for health and satiety.

I was stunned to learn that correctional facilities don’t provide basic supplies. Soap, toothbrushes, toothpaste, deodorant, shower shoes, pens, paper, aspirin, haircuts, and most clothes must be purchased through commissary funds or illegally bartered between prisoners. Louie’s first jail did not even provide him with a bowl or spoon to eat with. The cost to prisoners is artificially high—the same items cost a fraction of the price outside the razor wire fence. In one California prison, shower sandals—a necessity—are $7.80. On Amazon, prices range, but you can buy a pair for 49 cents. Finally, phone calls are charged separately, and in-person visits can require a substantial outlay of money, especially if they require flights, lodging, or transportation. I send Louie $300 each month and he spends it all on commissary food and supplies. Not every mother can afford this.

Angela, a married Thai-American mother I came to know through Facebook, watched her financial standing plummet since her son’s arrest. She had already quit her well-paid job in an accounting firm to look after her elderly father-in-law who moved in with her. She started working as a part-time bookkeeper for the family auto repair business. Then, her son was arrested. To pay legal fees, Angela emptied her life savings and 401k, and her husband sold two beloved classic cars. Her credit card is nearly maxed out from ordering quarterly packages for her son. Last month, she sent him $200 for commissary, rather than pay her $700 utility bill that is already overdue. It gives her “just a glimmer of comfort” knowing he has what he needs.

My son is not dead, but he is gone. He’s not “gone” like when he left for college or coding school, where I missed him but knew he was pursuing a dream. It's more like the “gone” if he’d secretly enlisted in the military and went directly into combat, leaving me with limited contact and constant worry. In psychology, this is referred to as an “ambiguous loss.” For all mothers, the separation and diminished contact with our sons is a loss, causing intense and prolonged grief. 

Angela experiences the sudden and traumatic loss of her son as the “death of a life that I believed my son would live. The death of all the experiences I thought I would have with him. The holidays and birthdays missed. The memories that will never happen … It is a living hell. I am no longer myself. I stopped caring how I look. I gained over 40 pounds. My hair is graying rapidly. I am often sad and will cry out of nowhere thinking of my son. I’ve lost my only child. And he will not be the same person even when he gets out.”

Connie, who I also met on Facebook, is white, divorced, and 55. She lives in Louisiana with her grandson, the child of her incarcerated son. Her son was on track to become a professional bullfighter when addiction derailed him. Fleeing a traffic stop, he was arrested after a high speed chase by the police that ended with a head-on collision with another car, killing two passengers. She feels guilty about her complicated grief over her son because of the people who actually died in that accident. She says that people said, “At least he is alive! Where there is breath there is hope!” She wanted to scream back, “Yes, he is alive physically. Yes, I’m grateful for that. But, the hopes I had for his future and much more than that … there is no closure. There is no knowing he is in a better place and not suffering anymore. There is nobody surrounding me with casseroles and condolences. Nobody mentions his name. Nobody asks how he is doing or how I am doing … It feels like I’m mourning a son that is still here but everyone else forgot.”

***

In 1992, I was the first lesbian I knew to have a biological child outside of heterosexual marriage. I used a doctor and an unknown sperm donor, chosen for his height, blue eyes, and combined interests in science and art. I had a fantasy of being the cool single parent who exposed her spunky kid to art, exotic foods and social justice issues. I would be the Good Mother, the one who used her clinical skills to recognize the deepest truths in her child’s needs and made it her life’s business to meet them. I would do it with aplomb and pleasure and, of course, a healthy dollop of humility.

We come from the same stock but Louie was “different” from the moment he was born, hard-wired by some creative electrician. This affected both his every encounter with the world and his interpretations of it. My sister calls him “feral.” When he was four, he swore he had been born in the woods and he took to calling loudly out the car window for his leonine mother. I was neither hurt nor surprised by this, as I recognized his otherness. His nature determined my nurturing.

Single children of single parents tend to form a unique and intense world of two, one without that extra thick line between the generations. I was his only source of oxygen and the primary cause of his suffocation. My own mother knew little about my actual young life—she didn’t ask where I had been and I didn’t offer it up. When it was my turn, I memorized every Pokémon character and led us in drawing them all.

The fourth day of his fourth grade was September 11th, 2001, and Louie’s school was two blocks from the World Trade Center. I ran through the streets to save him. For the next 10 days, he accompanied me to my volunteer position, coordinating the return of pets to the residents who had to abandon their downtown apartments. Magazines and international news outlets featured stories about how the students in his class were faring. It was merely fascinating to others, but Louie experienced a terror that is only known in war-torn places. For over a year, I was uneasy whenever he was out of my sight and nearly didn’t allow him to go away to summer camp that June. Other families had long returned to their routines, while the upheaval continued for us downtown residents for a terribly long time. 

Parenting became more difficult in his adolescence due to his increased absence from home and, I suspected, drug use. It’s a blur now, but somewhere during high school, I lost him. I recognized that it was the proper time for separation, where adolescents trade their family (me) for their peer group as their primary reference point, but years of worry and a lifetime of trying to solve the mystery of his makeup made me hawkish in my observation of him. 

He went to college, several of them, studying art criticism and creative writing. He didn’t stay anywhere long enough to graduate, eventually landing back in New York City, looking for work while pursuing recognition for his music. His social awkwardness foiled most job interviews—he landed only part-time, entry-level positions that left me subsidizing his rent. He held a sign on a street corner to advertise an accountant’s services, he walked dogs, and he worked at Goodwill. His financial dependence on me was humiliating for him, adding to the frustration of the menial work. He became vulnerable to less savory options for getting money.

***

Once we have a child in the criminal justice system, our parenting is held up for public scrutiny, which we too often perpetuate with private self-interrogations at home. How much are we to blame for our sons’ crimes? This culture drowns mothers with advice and holds us to impossible standards. In our private moments, instead of exposing the unattainable ideals, we concur by condemning ourselves. That’s maternal shame.

I met Dian in another Facebook group. Her son's arrest followed years of struggling to identify and treat his mental illness. She is white, disabled and lives in Kansas on her SSI benefits, 20 percent of which now goes towards paying for calls with her son. She told me, “I absolutely blame myself for my son’s arrest. Not a day has gone by that I have not hated myself for not doing something different. The what-ifs have never gone away, I have just learned to live with them. The guilt eats away at me, and I don’t know that I will ever forgive myself.”

When harsh self-criticism hooks up with public disapproval, the two give birth to shame, that intensely painful feeling that our flaws have made us unworthy of love and connection. Jung called it the “swampland of the soul.” Fearing rejection, shame’s offspring are secrecy and withdrawal, denying mothers support at a time when they need it the most. Shame, like mushrooms, only grows in the dark. Letting in the light of care and empathy from others is the best antidote. 

Lora, another Facebook mother, lives in Missouri and opts for secrecy about her incarcerated Mexican-American son. “One thing I have learned is that you cannot tell everyone about your son because they will belittle you for what your son has done. They will also make you feel worse for crying, saying things like, ‘Well it's his own fault he is in jail.’ So I do not tell my friends about him anymore. I also tell people I haven't seen in a long time, or recently just met, that he just lives and works in another state now, and I leave it at that.”

Dian coped by withdrawing socially. She was always a loner but her son’s arrest has isolated her more. When her son’s crime became public, she and her family were subjected to death threats, obscenities, and accusations that she allowed the crime to occur. Within three weeks of his arrest, they left town. Two years later, they returned but were still not welcome. Businesses invoked their right to refuse service to her and her other children. 

I never withheld Louie’s arrest from family and friends. My personal shame consolidated around my professional identity—I feared that if my clients knew about my son, they would leave me, and that prospective new clients would never begin treatment with a woman who couldn’t “control her own son.”

How much do other people actually fault mothers for their sons’ crimes? Plenty! Mother blame is alive and thriving in our culture. No family is granted permanent immunity from legal trouble or addiction, but it is convenient and comforting for people to believe that if it had been their son, they would have been able to prevent the crime. People distance themselves from those who have not escaped hardship to accentuate the differences between themselves and the suffering family, seeking facts or factors where they can believe, “I would never do that with my own child.” Lately, high-profile prosecutions of parents of mass shooters and reckless teenage drivers have added legal teeth to this everyday parent-blaming. 

As a psychotherapist, I have contributed myself to the facile blaming of inadequate mothering for the social and emotional conflicts in their adult children, my psychotherapy clients. Why is someone the way they are now? Look to their early experiences with their primary caretaker, most often a mother, to uncover the answer. 

Fortunately, this maternal self-condemnation and the shame it engenders is neither inevitable nor necessarily permanent. The mothers in my online support group warned me in the first session, “We don’t want to talk about how we’re to blame! We worked that out in the first five years!” Another chimed in, “We don’t take credit for our son’s achievements, so their crimes are not our faults.” My own experience has followed that timeline, with release of self-blame and diminished shame. 

Long-term exposure to the gaps and inequities of the criminal justice system often shifts the blame from oneself to the public agencies and institutions. I suspect that is facilitated by self-incrimination fatigue, coupled with repeated subjection to the clear injustices in the carceral system. Helplessness breeds a kind of rage. And, it always feels better to have a target outside of oneself and one’s son to focus our anger on.

Janetta is a 51-year-old Black woman from Georgia with three children and nine grandchildren. “I’m basically an open book,” she told me. “I will never be ashamed of my son, just more so disappointed in his choices and actions. I have discussed his incarceration with many of my friends and family. It helps some people to hear it. My father was incarcerated nearly all my life and I feel like it may be some type of generational curse but I vow to break it. I love my son and will never be ashamed of him. It was his mistake not mine.” 

***

In the five years since Louie’s arrest, I have visited him at three different jails and one federal prison. I have experienced a range of visitation processing protocols, each one dispiriting, disrespectful, and infantilizing. I can’t wait to see Louie and then I can’t wait to leave. 

If prisons were designed for rehabilitation or, god forbid, healing, family visits would be understood as an adjunct therapy, encouraged because family connection is essential for mental health. Instead, visitors—who are mostly women at Louie’s prison—are perceived as extensions of the inmates and, therefore, viewed with the same suspicion. The visitation processing protocol strips us of our individuality, our behavior is controlled, and clothing is tightly regulated. We have to learn to be obedient to the authorities if we want to visit our sons.

In that first jail, after passing all the stations of the processing cross, we walked single file to an elevator that took us up to the visiting room where we were each assigned a filthy plastic chair, arranged in a single row around the perimeter of the room. After the door locked loudly behind us, the prisoners were brought in through a second entrance and Louie sat down next to me. This is an impossible setup for a conversation, as we were not allowed to turn our bodies to face each other. We could only turn our heads or risk expulsion. At the end of the hour, the guards reversed the process, we lined up for the elevator, exposed our stamped wrists to a black light, and filed back to the locker room. Other mothers smiled after the visits, but I found it all just depressing.

Thirteen months after Louie’s arrest, the pandemic isolated and locked us all down. As the prison began to respond to the emerging crisis, visits were discontinued for two years. Our communication was reduced to letter writing and a limited number of monitored and recorded phone calls. From March through August 2020, I wrote 133 letters to Louie, each one screened by corrections officers before being delivered to him. This was my sole strategy to long-distance-parent my son through the pandemic, reminding him that he was loved and remembered. I used words to chisel a hole in his facility’s stone walls so he could stay connected to the world outside as the rules and science unfolded and refolded, both in New York City and in prison. For a limited time, there was some overlap in our experiences of lockdown.

Letter #8, 3/22/20 NYC

“I’m going to tell you something you already know. When all the daily structures are removed, the ones that both shore us up and confine us, we change. At first, I fretted and railed against the removal of my structures. But this morning, something changed. I felt a kind of peace, a sense of being fully present. I lay in bed and faced the dog, nose to nose, and petted him while we looked straight into each other’s eyes. I have nearly never slowed down enough to do this. I usually pat him quickly on the head and jump out of the bed.

“That’s why this pandemic reminds me of 9/11. In those days after the towers fell, we were exuberantly alive and aware. We understood what mattered, and it was not wealth or good grades, but connections with neighbors and ourselves. Unlike what the govt predicted, we did not loot and kill, we banded together to help each other. People were desperate to find ways to help. We invented jobs at Pier 11 for people who needed to DO something useful.

“I wonder if that is true in jail. Do you feel stripped down to your most raw self and do you view that self with more love than before? Is there, alongside the rage that flares, an urge to help each other? Is every shape-up just transactional or does it feel like the “barber” gets something more deeply satisfying out of it? Do you feel like you have come to understand what is important in a life that supersedes the things that money can buy? Have you come to think about connections with others in a different way, meaning have you wanted something different than the freedom of being solitary in the woods? “

In Louie’s current low-security prison, I can visit without an appointment and stay as long as I want. Visits are precious to inmates for the time away from the unit, and visitors bring clear plastic pouches filled with dollar bills to purchase food and drinks from the vending machines. The food is totally unappealing—frozen burgers, prepackaged in cellophane, but it is far better than chow and the inmates look forward to it. I stay about three hours and he’s always disappointed when I leave. I just can’t stay longer. I just can’t. Most mothers wish their visits would never end.

So we sit, unnaturally still, facing each other in our plastic chairs, talking while he eats. In our previous life, we would interact while doing things together. We have always gotten along best when we discuss ideas, but intellectual banter doesn’t fit well with visits. I am reluctant to share positive tidbits from my life, for fear it is taunting, so I ask questions. I’ve softened the pain at his plight by taking an anthropological interest in the culture of prison life. I am fascinated by the postage stamps that are currency, the “hustles” people employ to earn stamps, the “cars” that designate one’s social group, and the seating arrangements at chow. Louie hates these questions, reminding me that prison life is the movie Groundhog Day, meaning that nothing changes, and he doesn’t want to discuss it. Visits aren’t easy.

Louie and I have another five years to go before he is released to a halfway house and parole. After all those awkward visits without distractions, we are closer now than we have ever been. He tells me he loves me at the end of every call. I know that he appreciates how I’ve stood by him and supported him throughout this ugliness. One day, after telling him about my groups and this article that I’m working on, coupled with his viewing the tattoo I got to honor my relationship with him, he said in his most scornful and accusatory voice, “You’re obsessed! This has become a part of your identity!” You bet it has!