How Jail Healed Me (And My Son)

Guest Blog by Susan Hart Gaines

When I first learned that my son was in jail, I cheered.

It was five days after I’d seen him, wild-eyed, head shaved, emaciated. He was 23 years old.

We’d just had a cup of coffee at Starbucks where he’d been contrite about the latest brush with the police. Just five minutes later, he was sitting in my car on the passenger side, no longer sorry.

I looked around the busy grocery store parking lot, reassuring myself that I was not alone.

I couldn’t wait to get him out of my car. I was also poignantly aware that this might be the last time I see him. I feared for my safety and, just as strongly, I feared for his life.

By the end of the week, I thought, he will either be in jail or dead.

For so long I’d thought, “This can’t be happening. He’s the son of a doctor.”

As though being the son of a physician would somehow give us a pass on addiction and the dangerous road my son had chosen; that somehow, with all our access to treatment (he’d gone to countless treatment programs), therapy, good schools and anything else money could buy, my son would be spared.

Though to this day, my son attests to a peaceful, loving upbringing, being the son of doctor did not inoculate him against disease and the darkness that seduced him.

At times, he was as mystified as we were. “I know I have a choice,” he admitted to me one time after he moved out at age 15, years before jail. “But I just keep choosing this.”

When his phone went straight to voicemail five days after our tense meeting, I prayed he was in jail.

I did a Google search on his name and birthdate, holding my breath. Please please please don’t be in the morgue.

When his name came up connected to a county jail, I pumped my fist in the air, danced around the room and shouted, “Yes!”

For now, death had spared him again. I prayed that they’d keep him this time, one last chance to save his life — and possibly the lives of others, too.

He was moved to the workhouse at its maximum level of security. There’d be no leaving the facility for him for the next several months.

I’d devoted my life to my children, utilizing every school, psychological service, medication — everything to save my brilliant, beautiful boy. This relentless frenzy to save his life was about a mother’s love, I told myself. But now he was beyond my reach. I had finally come to the end of my illusion that I could fix it, that if I pleaded with him enough, I could save him. This was the PhD level of parenting, far beyond the “star charts”, rewards and punishments for good behavior; beyond grounding and taking away privileges. There were no more parenting books to read. They never had the chapter about my son, anyway. I could no longer advocate for him; this wasn’t school, trying to get a teacher to understand my “spirited child.” Now we’d come to the end of the line.

Jail was the biggest time-out ever.

It was my time-out, too. The only one left to fix was me. The only place left to go was into the darkest recesses of myself, into my deepest fears. If the measure of my success is happy, thriving children, then clearly I was failing my life’s work. But this logic proved to be arrogant when I followed it further. If they were doing well, as my daughter was, it would stand to reason by the same logic that I could take credit for that, too. In growing clarity, I learned one of the most humbling lessons of parenting: I could no more take credit for my daughter’s success than take blame for my son’s predicament.

This was his journey. I’d been damned and ultimately blessed to be his guide. Nothing more. Northing less.

I didn’t know if I could see him in jail. I thought I might dissolve into a sobbing heap; that I wasn’t strong enough to love him and not be able to protect him simultaneously.

“There’s nothing I can do for him,” I said to a friend, explaining why I wouldn’t visit him in jail.

“You don’t have to do anything,” she suggested. “Just bring God with you.”

God has been a lifelong, still-getting-to-know-you process. This suggestion gave me an idea to lean into, but absolutely no guarantees.

So I went, conjuring up as much as I could about God.

It was March. A dirty month of white snow giving way to garbage and rot. The skeletal trees leaning haphazardly over a half-frozen pond that I would drive by every week for the next several months.

I always went alone, except for the God part, always a relationship in progress. Jail would be my private purgatory and, eventually, my salvation along with my son’s.

While he was getting another chance at life, I was getting another chance at parenting. And at loving. I sat in the waiting area with all those other wives, mothers, sisters, friends, lovers, children, and an occasional man, my first thought was: I don’t belong here. It rushed up in me proud and arrogant, like a burp I didn’t have time to muffle.

But as I sat there in the jail waiting room, watching children play, grandmothers sleep, friends talking, laughing, quietly crying, all races and ages and economic levels — I realized this: I belong right here as much as everyone else in this dingy waiting area marked by smudged plastic chairs and a filthy floor. We are all here together, each and every one of us, because we loved someone back there behind bars. While there are many privileges of race and economic class, in this moment none of that mattered.

I waited my turn to see my son.

After what felt like an interminable amount of time, a guard shouted my name. We all lined up and entered a narrow hall lined with wooden stools that faced a row of inmates seated behind scratched Plexiglass. I quickly looked for my son.

His hair had grown, his face stubbled with the beard of a still young man. I sat before him, and picked up the sticky phone.

“Hi,” I breathed, looking at him through smudged glass.

We both teared up. Orange is not a good color on anyone. But even through the tears and dirty glass, I could see my son’s eyes, the clearest they’d been in years. There was the soul of boy I gave birth do. No smudged glass or crackling phone line could dim the light that was beginning to shine again.

Week by week, the skeletal trees began to sprout leaves. The garbage was swept away into a full-blown spring. I became friendly with some of the people in the waiting room. Each week, through the dirty Plexiglass, I watched my son’s body growing stronger, more vital. He’d flash his growing biceps, careful that other inmates not see that this skinny white boy was starting to come back to life. He worked out, read, wrote, and listened to new music. He gained some 40 pounds in the months that he was there, growing to a proper, but still slim, weight by the time he was released.

I had not given up. I’d surrendered. And in that surrender, I began to heal, reveling in the person my son was becoming, getting back in some ways the years we missed. Strangely, I began to look forward to visiting him. Jail had become my hallowed ground. In many ways, jail was his church, too.

My son is now 32 years old, married, a father to two beautiful children. He also has a very successful career — not despite his trials but because of them. He faced darkness and came out with a lightsaber. He chose life, and I am grateful every day that he did. I revel not in the illusion that I saved him, but in the greater gift of being his and my daughter’s mother; for the opportunity to work on myself during his jail time, readying myself to receive the bright young man who’d emerge from jail; for the chance to face my greatest fears in the starkest way; and for being finally brought to my knees. Humility has been hard-won. I am a part of the human race. One more thing I learned: when there is nothing left to do, there is only love. This is perhaps the greatest gift of all.

Susan Hart Gaines is lead coach and founder of Wild Hart Coaching, where she is passionate about helping physicians. Susan also works with the families of those struggling with addiction. By sharing her experience, strength and hope, she helps loved ones learn how to take care of themselves during the recovery process.

Please know that if you or a loved one is struggling with addiction, there is always hope. Click here to find out more about Dr. Karim’s approach to treating patients with substance use disorder.