202002 - Holding On While My Son Slips Away
I raised him with everything I never had, but I can’t stop outside forces from pulling him in.
Letter ID: LON-202002
Dear London,
Some days I look out across this city and wonder how someone can feel both so close to their child and yet so far away from them at the same time. I raised my son, Justin here believing I could give him the type of start I never had — a safe home, his own room, a family who loves him, enough support so he never had to feel trapped or limited. I thought that would be enough.
But somehow, somewhere, he slipped through my fingers.
Justin is seventeen now. The kind of age where you’re old enough to make your own choices, but still young enough to break your mother’s heart without meaning to. In the past two years he’s been stabbed — the kind of wound you don’t forget, even when the skin closes. He’s been arrested in drug houses in Camden. And recently, without a word, he travelled all the way to Glasgow with older boys I barely know, boys I am certain are exploiting him.
I only found out because the tracker on his phone pinged somewhere in Leicester, and then hours later he’d crossed the border and showed as being in Glasgow. I sat in his room that whole night, staring at his empty bed with his trainers still lined up underneath it, asking myself what kind of mother doesn’t even know her son has left the city.
When the Scottish police found him, he was asleep in the living room of a drug user’s flat, exhausted I imagine, from trying to live a life that doesn’t belong to him. They arrested him, but there wasn’t much on him to charge. A social worker had to bring him back to London as the police didn’t want to release him back onto the Scottish streets. He came home, and life just… continued. No big shock. No turning point. Just the same silence and occasional looks between us.
What hurts the most is that he has every chance not to choose this path. He doesn’t come from poverty or chaos. We live in a nice flat. He has a stable home, a positive older sister who’s proof of what’s possible, and I give him what he needs — maybe more than I should. And yet he gravitates to boys who seem to carry darkness with them, boys who pull him into worlds where the only rewards are scars, quick cash, and misplaced loyalty.
Is it the streets? The music? The lack of opportunities that feel real to him?
Or is it something deeper — a need to prove himself, to belong somewhere I can’t reach?
Last summer the council found him a work placement at Stepney City Farm. I thought it might give him purpose, something steady to hold on to. But I had to wake him up and take him myself the first two days. By the third day he quit — “farm work is not for me,” he said. He’s seventeen and spends most days inside, sleeping too late, scrolling endlessly, barely speaking. There is so much life outside his bedroom door and yet he doesn’t step into it.
I am tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep.
I am scared in a way that sits right behind my ribs every hour of the day.
I don’t understand why he keeps choosing this life — or maybe it’s choosing him. I don’t know how to pull him back when his pride won’t let him admit he needs saving. Some evenings he sits at the kitchen table and for a second I catch a glimpse of the little boy he used to be — gentle, funny, curious — and I want to grab that version of him and hold on tight. But then something shifts in his eyes and the distance returns.
I wonder if I’ve already lost him and just haven’t let myself say it out loud. I don’t mean lost as in gone — he’s here, in his room, door closed — but lost in a way where I can’t reach the part of him that listens, or dreams, or believes he deserves more than boys twice his age using him for risks they won’t take themselves. I keep thinking there must’ve been a moment I missed: a sign, a crossroads, an opportunity to pull him closer before the world pulled him away.
I don’t have a neat ending to this. No lesson, no breakthrough, no tidy moment of clarity. I’m still here, in the middle of it — loving him, fearing for him, trying to hold steady while hoping he comes back to himself. I suppose writing this down is just my way of saying I’m still fighting for him, even when I don’t know what the fight looks like anymore.
With love, fear, and hope,
Stacey
Occasionally we shape real stories into letters, so every voice is heard.
Source: Shaped from a real conversation/interview
Photo credits
Images are sourced to enhance the reading experience and do not depict the original writer.
•Main Letter image: iStock.com/BGWalker