My Mother Doesn't Write..

Mr. Borsch is back. He is not leaving the prison system, the stuff I got through the mail was wrong. So here is his story.

He is 19, and on his second bit in the prison system. His family was vaguely functional for years. His father stayed at home, for some medical reason I am still unclear about, and his mother worked. He was the youngest of five. His father didn’t really take care of the home as much as he required the children to clean and mow and cook to support the mother that worked. Then when Mr. Borsch was 11, he died. Gone. Not much in some ways when he was around, but he created order out of chaos.

The mom continued to work, but she couldn’t make chaos order. Things began to fall apart. Mr. Borsch stepped up to the plate and began to cook and clean as a pre-adolescent. He explains to me his older brothers were already leaving, and his sisters were, “being girls.” He kept the house running and then at 14 began to bring money into the household. He told his mother he was working construction. Actually, he was selling drugs. She was so desperate she decided to pretend to believe him.

School started to get out of control. His older brothers had set the tone through their violence and misbehavior. He described himself as being peripheral, and then beginning to be a force of fear in his small town school. He labels himself as a, “bully.” But as I push into this, he was, in part, protecting the geeks and freaks of which he was one. Preppy and Jocks were his targets.

So, at 12, he gets slapped into an alternative school. If he doesn’t get his homework done, he does three days in juvie. When he got pissed at somebody and flung a pencil at him, he was in juvie for three weeks over Christmas. He had just made enough money to bond his older brother out of jail for the holidays.

This last bit was Uttering and Publishing. He found signed, unwritten checks. He wrote them out enough to have the pseudo-father he was living with, his fiancé, and his mother and sisters had a mind bobbling Christmas, and then he came back to prison.

When they brought him into prison, his mother and fiancé were frustrated and angry. In the past months, his fiancé has taken up with another man. His mother made up with him in the jail, but now it has been four months since he has heard from her.

He explains when he lived with his girl, or lived with his mother, he made different decisions. To have somebody who cares and expects something from him helps him not to make stupid decisions. I can see this is a role I might be able to take on. In some ways it soothes me.

After vomiting this entire story to me over most of an hour he shares with me his current custody status. Some group, which he won’t give me details about, has betrayed him; they have, “stabbed me in the back.” He wants to know why people he cares about do this to him. We talk a bit, but I know that he is asking me if I will do the same. Promises are useless. Time is the issue.

He should go now, count is coming, and I excuse him. He doesn’t stand up. He has three pending tickets which is news to me. If they are all found true, he hits the point level where he rides up to a higher level of incarceration: he leaves.

Crap. Again. How do I keep getting involved with this story? He is so young. He has started to be less skeptical of where I come from, and now he announces his imminent doom. It is too early in the relationship for me to tell him that he needs to stay with me. I think we go there, but he is fragile and easily spooked. But I have no option. I stop to think how to phrase it. He watches me and tells me to just spit it out. So I do.

“if you come into therapy with me, I’ve learned over the year I’ve been here, the only way I can help you is to care about you.” I check him and he is following. “So if I do this, and you do something to get yourself ridden out, it causes me a huge amount of sadness. I can’t keep doing that. If you want to work with me, you need to stop collecting tickets.”

I watch him cross over from wary to becoming one of my guys. Can he stay with me? The moment of electricity sits. It is close to count and he has to go across most of the yard in the next ten minutes. I start to shoo him out and ask if there are more questions.

“If your son was in prison, and you were angry, but talked with him about it in jail and said you would write… what would keep you from ever writing him?”