A story by Kolyn X. Mattson from 2024
It was a lot for me to handle. I know there are places that handle it worse than Maine, but Maine could handle it better. How can the state expect a felon to get a job and better themselves if nobody is willing to hire them or house them? It’s an endless cycle of trying to help themselves and places not wanting to help them because of their history. People play the hand they’re dealt, and life hands some people a shit hand. My mom was dealt a shit hand.
I think she knew the raid was going to happen. I was thirteen years old when the house was raided, back in 2017. That summer my brother was spending a lot of time at his dad's house and I spent a lot of time at my sister's. Because he and I weren’t home very much, Mom took liberties, as if she didn’t have kids. She got involved with a man from New York who I believe to this day has still not been caught for trafficking. We lived in section 8 housing in Fairfield and other people who lived in the house were addicts. There were always cops surrounding the house because of where it was located and the number of addicts living in the neighborhood.
It happened during one of those brutally hot weeks in August when the nights were so hot and humid it was uncomfortable to sleep. It was a Sunday morning and I was sleeping in my boxers with just a top sheet. I fell asleep playing Mario and I still had my Nintendo DS in my hand when the cops burst into my room, threw my arms behind me, cuffed me and told me to shut up and sit still. I was dead asleep, I maybe weighed 120 lbs, only 5’5”, and I don’t know how they thought I was a threat. My brother was only eight years old and they thrashed him awake shining a flashlight in his eyes. He went to swing at the cops and I yelled, “Don’t fucking do that! They’re not here for you, they’re here for Mom! If you swing at them they’ll take you too!” There were k-9 units and at least a dozen cops, local police and cops from the DEA in the house just for my Mom. My mom was yelling at the cops to leave us alone explaining we were just kids. Eventually, they uncuffed us and told us to sit against the wall.
My mom started abusing substances around the age of fourteen. At the time of the raid she was thirty-four, so she had been using for two decades. My brother and I knew nothing. I knew other family members were in prison for drugs. Some of them were incarcerated for growing marijuana before it was legalized. I knew about substances but I didn’t know what to look for. I knew my mom needed to smoke weed before she ate dinner. She had a lot of with mental health struggles because of how she was raised. You got to love generational trauma! One of my aunts, my mom’s sister, was taken away as a child by CPS because she was so badly abused.
Because I was thirteen, DHHS gave me the decision of where I went. We sat down in a meeting with a whole bunch of people and they told me my options. My only reason for wanting to stay in the Waterville area was because my brother didn’t have an option. Everybody in the meeting was telling DHHS to not place my brother with his father in Waterville. DHHS told us even though he’s a bad dad, he’s not unfit and he held 50% custody. I decided to go live with my mom’s aunt and uncle. They were the relatives I would only see at Christmas and lived all the way in Waldoboro, a town I had never been to before.
The first three months we had weekly check-ins with a caseworker. Every week when the caseworker came down I would tell her to please check on my brother. She only ever had scheduled check-ins with my brother and I knew he wasn’t okay. I kept telling the caseworker to go there for a surprise visit but nothing happened. I told her I was good in Waldoboro, it was a fresh start for me. I was in a safe place, but she needed to please check in on my brother. He was sleeping in a hallway getting screamed at all the time by his father who called beer “medicine.”
I didn’t get to see my brother as often as I wanted to. His father didn’t drive and I was too young to drive. I was doing my best to make a new life for myself and trying to adjust to my new home and school.
My mother was incarcerated only for a year because at the time the prison was overpopulated and it was just a drug charge. She was on probation when she was released and stayed in a sober house for the duration. When my mother was released from DOC oversight, she had the choice to come to Waldoboro and get away from all the people she was getting in trouble with, but she ended up moving to Augusta. Augusta was almost worse for her. She never got away from the area and she kept relapsing. I don’t fully blame her. She always said she didn’t need help and could “pull herself up by her bootstraps” but that was bullshit. My aunt and uncle were always offering her a place to stay, trying to get her out of the Waterville area, but she never took them up on it. She never got out of the Waterville area.
Once she was off of probation she was never able to maintain sobriety. She would relapse, tell me about it and instructed me to not tell my brother. I was only fourteen years old and I wish she had let me stay ignorant to her substance use. I didn’t want that put on me. To my knowledge she would just go “cold turkey” or go back to the suboxone clinic. There were so many times she could have come to Waldoboro and been with me but she used my younger brother as her excuse for not leaving Waterville. She was always bouncing around between apartments because most people don’t want to rent to a felon and because of her felony she could no longer get section 8. She couldn’t keep a stable job because most places don’t want to hire a felon. I couldn’t hold her lack of steady employment against her because she was always trying. She always worked odd jobs and tried to find something stable. Her odd jobs would be doing things like cleaning out hoarder houses. She had fines when she was incarcerated which built interest and she could never make enough money to pay them off which meant she was never able to get her license back. Because of her unsafe housing situation, it seemed like every time she had almost saved enough, somebody would steal all her shit and she’d have to replace her phone and everything else.
She was dealing with all this crap from 2017 until she died in 2024 when she was sold cocaine laced with fentanyl. Seven years of dealing with this bullshit. I wish DHHS had done a better job for my brother. A week before she died his uncle was murdered, mom died on September 5, and then his father was arrested on September 12. DHHS didn’t get involved with my brother until sometime in November. Thankfully his grandfather loved him and took care of him and gave him a home.
Even though I went through everything I went through, I was able to get myself through school with straight A’s and got involved with extracurricular activities. I’m a first generation college student with academic scholarships. Today, I’m a Mitchell Scholar with so many opportunities. Up until my mom’s generation, nobody in our family had even finished high school. These events changed the trajectory of my life. I don’t know that I would be where I am if I hadn’t experienced what I did and got moved to a new community with a fresh start. There was a lot of support in Waldoboro because there’s nothing to do there but fish and drugs. I had five friends in Waldoboro who were children of addicts and it was something we were able to bond over. In Fairfield, I was basically ostracized because nobody wanted to interact with me after my mom’s arrest. Part of me felt selfish for being glad my mom was arrested, especially knowing my brother got the shit end of the stick. He never got out of Waterville and had to deal with his father and the negativity of where he was.
When my mom passed I was able to mourn her a lot faster because I had already been mourning her for seven years. I was told addicts overdose, it happens, especially if they never get out of the area they were using in. I think if it had been anything other than an overdose it would have been a lot more difficult.
Because of my experience being the child of a person incarcerated I will never touch any of the substances she touched. I have so many people in my life who have lost their kids because of drugs and I don’t want to ever put someone else through that.
