hugs. What made you decide to go to that particular meeting?

Have you read Infinite Jest? It goes deeply into AA culture.

I'm grateful to be you today, too :-)

That sounds horrific. At least she's getting some help now, it sounds like.

There was just an article in Bust magazine about women with kids in prison -- er, women in prison, who have kids -- and about how some of the nursery programs, where a woman with a young (under one year) kid can keep the child in jail with her in a special nursery ward and get parenting-skill training, are the first exposure many of these women have had to good parenting. Guards will come around and yell at mothers when they're being careless or zoning out with their kids. A lot of the women who also had older kids said they were actually better bonded to the younger ones now, even though they were in jail.

It was tremendously sad, but it was an interesting approach.

That's so sad. For her and the children.

What made you decide to go to that particular meeting?

The Meeting Secretary is a friend and invited me to be speaker. It has to be cleared with HM Prison Service beforehand, and I had to produce my passport as ID before being admitted to the prison. It's not an open meeting you can just pitch up to and go in.

I said to her that if she can it would be nice for her to have a quiet minute at 8pm each night, because, all over the UK at that time, people in AA meetings are having 'a moment of silence to remember why we are here and to think of the still-suffering alcoholic, both inside and outside of AA'.

She is just a kid. And when I heard her story, I realised that it is truly but for the grace of God that I am not incarcerated somewhere for something I did in blackout.

It was good of you to be there for her. I'm sure she appreciated it. What a sad story.

I have an older half-brother on my birth mother's side (all my siblings are half-siblings, come to think of it), who was in and out of jail for a lot of his life; he had a lot of problems with drugs and alcohol, too, both he and his wife, who also spent time in jail. They lost two of their kids to foster care (they were later adopted by the foster parents; good thing, maybe, though I wish it were different).

He said he added it up once, my brother, all the time he'd spent in prison, and it came to fourteen years. He's about 48 now, and doing better, last I heard, but it took a long time; he's lucky he got the chance, I suppose.

I'm glad you're here too, essexjan.

And but for the grace of (insert deity of choice) there goes my mum and most of the rest of the family.

Wow, EJ. Thanks for sharing.