Perspectives - Guest Post

When Your Adult Son Is Incarcerated

Photo by Jose Francisco Morales on Unsplash

Check out this post from Black Sheep Mom, a great Substack written by Bridget Young, about being the mother of an incarcerated adult son.

---

Sorry I haven’t written.

The end of 2025 left me feeling, mostly, like packing up and leaving Dodge— and friend, this wasn’t an I-need-a-vacation thing, it was a “How quickly can I list the house?” kind of thing.

No worries, though.

I am happy to announce that I have (1.) Entered the new year with a five pound weight loss because, well, stress and (2.) I have (mostly) pulled out of that ugly funk with the help of good friends and very loud music.

And while personal crisis generally spawns some of my best writing, this time was different. For four weeks, I have had absolutely nothing to say.

---

The warrior in me has begun to find more strength in stillness and silence than my usual spinouts. Let’s call that progress. Raging Against the Machine has greyed my temples and strained my vocal cords, so much so that it is possible 2026 will be my white flag year.

If you have been along for any of the Black Sheep Mom story, you have witnessed my struggle to balance regular life demands with the experience of having an adult son in prison. My essays are raw, yes, but they are not nearly as raw as I know they could be.

I really haven’t told you the half of it.

It is far easier to flail and kick at the big bully in the yard than to look at the pains on my own face in the mirror. And while The Prison System deserves to have its ass kicked, I’ve used a fighting stance to keep from sitting still in some hard truths.

In the interest of starting new, I would like to take this first post of the year to purge some things, to get right, to be honest with you. These are some of the things I might not have said about having a kid in prison, and it’s time.

---

1. I am completely over it.

It is one thing to support a loved one through an arrest and trial or plea. Those matters are time-limited and you get swept up in the rushes of attorney guidance, next moves, and the hopes of leniency.

Prison is different.

The attorney vanishes. Months turn to years. Years turn to a decade. Same walls, same routines, and another year sneakily rolls over the calendar.

I look rather dumb when someone asks, “How is your son doing?” because there is nothing new to share anymore. He’s still sitting on a bunk. He’s still surrounded by drugs and violence. He’s still making it through one hour at a time, and mostly, he still isn’t home.

“He’s doing good, thank you.”

What I really want to say is that I don’t want to answer these questions anymore on a random Tuesday afternoon and I wish that my son was not in prison—so please excuse me while I go eat worms.

2. The phone calls and visits are a bigger pain in the ass than you know.

I completely understand why family members stop engaging with their incarcerated loved ones. I am not saying that I will ever stop, but I understand why they do.

I have to force a smile onto my face every time the damn D.O.C. number lights up my phone because the alternative is to say, “Hey son, you’re interrupting dinner again.”

‘Well, don’t answer the phone then,” someone says.

Sure, and tell me you don’t have a child in prison without telling me you don’t have a child in prison. He can’t leave a message. I can’t call him back. Often times he has waited in a long line to make that call, outside, in the freezing cold. He may not get that chance again for a few days.

So, I pick up and I smile and I keep serving dinner with the phone pinched between my ear and shoulder, making small talk over things I do not want to relate to.

Similarly, our visits are torture.

To read about them (HERE and HERE), you might get the sense that I live to get back into that visiting room. The truth? I dread it with an existential dread. From both sides of the fence, we enter into that locked cage with love but we are just going through the motions this many years in. There are only so many times you can comment on the weather or talk about the crap food. Every old family story has been retold at least twice and new ones have to be shared with a special care because he’s not been part of them.

We are now getting weird to keep a conversation going for three hours straight, “Would you rather have eyes on your hands or ears on your elbows?”

I sigh.

He sighs.

We both look up at the clock.

“Want something else to eat?”

“Want to play cards?

“One hour left,” he’ll say and stretch and then I dig around my brain for something really obscure to keep us going (“Did you hear about the art heist in the Louvre?”) and off we go again— another round of fuckthisplace and Godwhenwilliteverend.

3. I’m wearing out.

Anne Lamott once likened codependent parenting to running alongside your adult child in their marathon— with juice boxes and lip balm and sunscreen. Yup, that’s me collapsing in mile 26, still ferrying the Capri Suns for a grown man.

I have not yet let go of the backpack full of the plans and ideas that I have held for him all of his life, and prison has me dragging an additional 200 pounds of dead weight.

I have to take medication an hour before I visit because my nervous system is shot and I get panicky in there. Leading up to each visit, my sleep is always disturbed by dreams of prowling lions and a pounding heart beat at 3am. This. Is. Not. Normal.

The elasticity in the delicate skin under my eyes has finally worn to a translucent stained-glass of various purples. All of those sucker punches to the face, a decade of bad news beatings—the repeated trauma puffy and hardened on me like Conner McGregor’s ears.

No more caffeine because I’m jiffy enough.

No more alcohol because I’m depressed enough.

Also—no more alcohol because I can’t ask my children to not numb out on substances if I am doing it to deal with life. Mom: the machine, the battle-ax, the ballast. If she falls apart, the whole ship goes down and all of those juice boxes would be spilled out, falling to the bottom of the sea.

4. I have lost hope.

Even during the writing of this blog, more than a few times, my son has gone through periods which made me question my faith and doubt his resolve. Old habits crept up, mistakes were made, shame spirals unfurled.

“I got jumped in the food line and beat up over old debts.”

How many times will I break the promise to myself not to pay those damn debts? I would love to tell you that my boundaries have always held, but they have not. As he racked up debts early in his ride, they landed him in physical danger, and if you think you could just ‘let your kid face the consequences,’ you have never stared at a dark ceiling considering the moment he dies under the blow of a 30-pound dumbbell to his head in the [prison yard] weight pit—all because you wouldn’t come up with $200.

That’s a decision tree I hope you never have to climb at 2am from your bed.

Another sanction, another misconduct, another bad cellmate, another wave of worry that he will never kick addiction no matter how well I write and advocate and love him and believe in him. There is a sinking feeling that we will spend our lives circling these same blocks trying to get to some elusive promised land into which we will never be permitted. The grandkids will never come. The drugs will re-appear.

In my weaker moments, this story ends badly.

Hope is only an option for me, not a state of perpetual being. Not yet, anyway. I have to decide every day what I believe about the road ahead and some days, when people ask me things like, “Do you think this is his last ride?” I waver.

Maybe we have only just begun. Maybe he will get tangled in something awful, catch a charge inside, and never come home. Maybe he will come home and be arrested again and again like a friend of mine’s son who is now on his fourth ride. I am terrified of what could happen every day that he is there. I’m sick of worrying that he’s not gonna be able to hack it on parole. I’m also sick to death of thinking about how we got here and why our lives aren’t different.

Maybe I just did a shit job as a mom and this blog is just apologetics.

5. I want my life back.

I haven’t always been a prison mom.

I was a sports mom, a working mom, a made-from-scratch mom. I planned regular birthday parties and vacations and graduations. Once upon a time, I never thought a thing about prison nor the people there. These days, I don’t plan one single thing in my life without thinking about both—

Prison is now my fifth child.

My loyalties are constantly tested, and the prison wins almost every time. Siblings are put on hold. My husband is often placed in the backseat—a perfectly good Saturday morning ruined by another desperate phone call or a date night scratched from the calendar because (of course) there are no other visiting slots available this month.

I want to breathe a full breath again, to take in a sunrise or a walk on the beach without thinking about how much my son is missing out on. If it is true that a mother is only as happy as her saddest child, I haven’t been happy in years.

6. I am pissed.

I am so angry that the teeth I grew from the calcium of my own bones, the ones that I ensured he brushed and made all of those dentist appointments for are now gone—thrown into some prison medical waste bin after they pulled the last of them.

Seeing old pictures of his beautiful, straight-toothed smile makes me want to punch a hole in a wall.

And don’t get me started on the money.

Tens of thousands to rehab and courts. Thousands more to JPay and GTL and Securus for disgusting bags of pig slop. Lost wages. Lost productivity. Sick days on account of those beatings I’ve taken to my face.

Last month’s costs included $86.44 on books, $464 on commissary, $32 on phone calls, $15 on JPay messaging stamps. I kept it to $200 on gas for two trips, $65 on vending cards, and $7.50 on picture tickets during visits.

Worse than the expense themselves is the toll of guilt for spending money on myself, the reflex of buying something for me and then immediately comparing that amount to his commissary request. I once ruined an entire pedicure knowing full well that he was in need of money for Ramen noodles while I sat there getting my calves massaged.

“Why don’t you get your priorities straight?”

“Must be nice, you selfish bitch.”

7. I lie.

Last week, someone asked me if all of my kids were home for the holidays. They don’t know about him so I said, “Yes, it was really nice. We played games and ate Chinese.” That was a lie. My oldest was not home. He did not play games nor eat Chinese. Did they need to know that? No. Did it still feel disingenuous? Yes.

I also want those lovely people who do know about him to be able to ask me how my children are without that look, the one that says I’m really just asking about the one in prison but don’t want to lead with that. I also lie to make it easier on them. And me.

“Everyone’s good.”

I have lied through his relapses for years.

I have lied that I am okay when I could not get out of bed.

And I have lied to myself, time and again. Some days, that is exactly how I have gotten through this journey. I pretend to understand things that I do not. I claim to know where we’re going, when I haven’t a clue.

8. There are many things that I will never speak out loud.

I am superstitious and I fear speaking things into existence. In fact, I have wanted to delete chunks of this piece to avoid manifesting some of the things I’m putting out here.

As a writer, there are words I will never offer for publication because I do not own the full rights to this story.

As a mother, I need to be able to look at each of my children—directly in their face—and know that I honored their lives as their own. To pretend that all of this is mine to sell to the highest bidder would make me the worst kind of mom I could imagine.

So, I start this year of writing knowing that the hardest work I will do is to tell my story passionately, and edit it as a mom. What I will leave on the cutting room floor is as important as what I publish.

The good news is that there is no law against reading between the lines, and there is no rule against asking me questions. I love your comments and DMs and I am honored that anyone takes one second of the day to hear about our lives.

To the mothers whom I have heard from this week with their own children inside, my heart is with you and our private conversations mean more than you could ever know. Please, please keep in touch.