My Son Writes Me From Jail

To tell me I am a monster

Medea, a figure from Greek mythology who kills her children, as depicted on

Often, he says that I am ruining his life by talking to his lawyer, to the jailers, to his treatment providers, to the housing authority, to his landlord, to anyone that has anything to do with him — that I am turning these people against him by telling them he has a major mental illness and is incompetent. Recently, we went though many, many rounds of him emailing me from jail to tell me I was a horrible monster for talking to these people and influencing them maliciously behind the scenes, to which I would respond that he was mistaken: I’m not talking to them.

“Delete yourself,” he kept urging me. “Tell them not to talk to you. Tell them you are no longer my emergency contact. They won’t talk to me because they’re talking to you.”

“I’M NOT TALKING TO THEM!” I would scream-write back. “Stop saying that I am!!!”

I’m an old woman and he’s had this illness for 20 years, so it’s perplexing why it took me a dozen emails (at 50 cents apiece; but that’s another story) to figure out how to stop this vicious conversation cycle. But one morning, I finally got a bright idea.

“Okay,” I responded. “I deleted myself.”

“Thank you,” he replied, and immediately calmed down.