How I Became the Other Mother

Teaching inmates wasn’t something I’d ever planned on doing. I just fell into it, stumbling into my destiny like a clumsy mama bear. I had no idea what I was getting myself into, but I wanted to help.

I had two adult children and an adult stepson who had been navigating the tricky terrain of addiction. I knew that good people made bad decisions. I myself had changed for the better after getting pregnant at 16, running away from home, and becoming a teen mother.

I knew about having a stigma, and what it felt like when you disappointed your family. I knew how to keep pushing forward when others doubted you and shook their heads, because that’s what I had done.

When I started volunteering at the Bullitt County Detention Center, I explained this to the men in the Substance Abuse Program, an in-house treatment program run by the Kentucky Department of Corrections. I told the inmates that I had finished high school, graduated college.

I looked at the inmates and I thought, But by the grace of my higher power, there go I. How easily I could have slipped through the cracks.

I bared my soul to those men. I told them everything. How I’d found a husband and blended a family—his child, mine, and the son we had together. How I’d forged a career for myself at a Fortune 500 company, one that I would eventually leave in pursuit of a greater purpose, which turned out to be teaching.

I was a mother, and a grandmother, with a history of mental illness and toxic relationships. I had undergone therapy, been on medication. I was in recovery from living with alcoholics and addicts, and I had many of the same symptoms they did. I had distorted thoughts. I was an enabler. I was codependent.

“I, too, am a work in progress,” I said. They were grateful for my story, and my honesty.

They clamored around me after class to slip me their notes and poems. They made group cards for me on Mother’s Day and Christmas. For some, I became the mother they’d never had—the voice of encouragement, of forgiveness.

I urged them to unpack their trauma and pain. We did this together, through the writing process. I told them it was okay to cry, and many of them did. I read parts of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning to them:

“But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.”

The work was hard, but it was good.

I gently nudged them to open up on the page. I praised their efforts. I smiled.

Then I made a book of their works to share with the world, and they loved me for it.

In that dull, gray, windowless classroom at the Bullitt County Detention Center, I looked around and I saw children—damaged children.

For waking them up, for feeding them the holy food of literature, for bathing their wounds in self-awareness, I became a better person, a better mother. The Other Mother.