Prisoners

[Guest guest]

This is inspired by another thread about nada s adopting " other " kids

and grandkids. One thing noted there was about nada and prisoners.

My nada had a real infatuation with prisoners. She started out writing

to soldiers during WWII as a young girl. At some point, she started

writing letters to guys in prison. We are not talking friends who had

gone to prison, we are talking finding total strangers from a list and

starting a correpsondance.

That grew into visits, phone calls, ( for which she had to pay. ) At one

point her long distance phone bills were over 500 a month. In the

final years of her life, she had so much in unpaid bills that she had a

special phone service where she had no long distance and had to pay in

advance for each month.

She was engaged several times to guys who were using her as the place

they would stay if they got paroled, and then dropped her once parole

was denied. She was crushed. How typical BP!

When I was in HS, she dragged me for a visit to a man in Lucasville , Oh

prison for armed robbery. She brought a picnic, and was all over him,

smooching and making out like a teenager, and crying like the love of

her life was being taken from her when it was time to leave. Imagine

being 15, trapped inside a prison yard on a Saturday afternoon, watching

your mom behave like that in front of total strangers, with a total

stranger. Yea, thats how I want to spend MY saturdays!

She would send them money, on all sorts of pretenses. One told her that

if friends or family didnt provide money for soap, they never got to

shower! She believed it. Part of her financial struggles , especially

in retirement, was due to the fact that she poured so much down that rat

hole, thru the long distance, the trips, the flat out money spent on

them. That was a tough boundery for me, because I would not enable it

by giving her money, but she could play the victim and make me seem a

horrid person for not helping out my poor little old mother.

After her death, I ended up going thru her stuff and finding, among

other things, letters from a prisoner who called her Mom, and decribed

himself as her " son of the heart " . So wow, this post does tie into

the adopting other kids deal, too.

So guys, other stories about nada and prisoner? Or any insights on why

nada s had this attraction?

Doug