TIES THAT BIND

E-mail    By Gwendolyn D. Seale    Bio/Address

and

  E-mail   Lawson Strickland Bio/Address

 

    Being in prison can be a surreal experience.  At one moment, it can take you out of your body; at another, it can focus you so deeply inward that you lose sight of everything else.  In either instance it can rob you, by turning you into something you aren’t or making you forget who you are.  It is a daily battle that many will lose.

    But you may not be the only loser.  Those that love you will also lose: your family or spouse or friends; that is, all the people affected by the tragedy that has become your life.  All who have lost in some great or small way will also lose.

There will never be any greater loss than that to a child.  A child loses a part of his or her own future with you to walls and wire and bars.  For all that is lost, this is the greatest.

Today’s prisons are crowded with parents.  Mothers and fathers, some who never cared, lost long before prison walls ever swallowed them.  Some who once cared but have turned away in despair and helplessness.  And some who still do care, who struggle every day, never forgetting the love of the child they left behind.

We are both parents.  Our experiences are different in what we lost, in how our children lost us and how we have dealt with that, but we have one thing in common: the pain that has come from the loss of our children.  This pain incorporates how we knew them and how we dreamed of a future with them.

In this experience of incarceration, this loss has been the one most painful for us.  It is the one hurt, among many, which ultimately we could never turn away from, whether we tried to or not, and even if we wanted to do so.

 

I.  LAWSON      

 

In 1992 I thought I had the world by the tail.  It was a good feeling, to be young and have everything spread out before me.  I was 22, married, with a daughter I couldn’t get over.  I loved her.  That little piece of myself who already seemed to be so much better than I ever would be, just by a smile.

I was right there when she was born.  RIGHT THERE in the delivery room.  Scared and proud, tired from just having come off twenty-four hour duty, yet wide-awake.  I held her right there.  My little girl.  For better or worse, she looked just like me.  We could have swapped baby photos and fooled all of you.  I named her Nicole.

I lost her six months later.  I lost everything.  My life as I’d known it, my hopes and dreams, my wife and daughter.  The future, or at least, THAT future.

I was charged, tried, convicted of murder and shipped away to Death Row.  The wife faded, which, to be honest, was no surprise.  Friends became long lost and the past aged into rose-colored halogen memories where even the bad times sounded damn good in reflection.  I shed myself of hopes and waited.  Not for something new to begin but for it all to end.  Case closed.

So it would seem.

But life isn’t so simple, even when you don’t have a future.  In fact, it becomes more complicated without a future because you feel compelled to create one and when you can’t, you turn to something that can.  It was the one thing I couldn’t get over: my love for my daughter.

We were in the Dallas/Ft. Worth Airport the last time I saw Nicole.  I had driven her and my now ex-wife there for a flight to Germany.  Our home.  I had 5 months left in the U.S. Army and then I’d be meeting them back there.  For years afterwards I wondered what would have happened if I’d gotten on that plane with them.  My daughter was asleep the last time I kissed her.

OK, most likely my ex-wife and I would not have made it.  Even in a Panglossian “best of all worlds” we would still be exes.  We were too young and immature and didn’t know what the hell we were doing. But one thing is for sure, I’d have always been a part of Nicole’s life.  That I know and that knowledge has driven me for the past nine years.

So I lost contact with my daughter.  Once divorce papers were signed and custody of her awarded to her mother, she just disappeared.  She disappeared into the world, the living, breathing organism of life  from which I was locked away and cut off.  Birthday cards went unanswered.  Christmas cards were sent in vain.  Plain old letters were out of the question.  It was hopeless.  Except for a few, a rare few occasions.

Every so often I’d get an envelope and in it would be a hand drawn card.  Beautiful children’s pictures drawn by my daughter’s hand.  Or there would be a few  photos.

Years apart.  Whole phases of growth apart, so that I had to imagine the continuity between them.  From diapers to suddenly STANDING, in a dress or on a tree lined path I recognized as being near her grandmother’s house, smiling impishly at the camera.  To an older child, eight or nine years old who is obviously going to be tall one day like her father.

The last one I received of her, years ago now, she is kneeling beside a beautiful husky and both she and the dog are looking at the camera.  She is smiling and obviously happy.  I don’t even know the dog’s name.  It’s not a puppy.  It is at least 2 years old and I know nothing about it.

What intrigues me most about these photos is I do not even know if she knew they would one day be sent to me.  I mean, was she posing FOR ME?  Or were these pictures just taken of a moment and only sent later to me as an act of kindness by my ex-wife?  Who knows?

There’s rarely anything written on the back of them.  No, “I love you” or “This is my dog, Max” or “This is the shell I found on my trip to the beach.”  None of that.

When there is something written, it’s only my ex-wife’s handwriting giving a date and the place taken.  Usually just the date.

Nor is there ever a letter.  Not from anyone.  No news on how things are, what Nicole has been up to, what major events have taken place in her life.  Never any funny anecdotes about spilled milk or mispronounced words, trips to the zoo or shoes put on the wrong foot.  I don’t know her favorite color or song or how she’s doing in school.  I don’t know if she’s learned to ride a bike or to roller-skate, if she plays sports or likes to read.

In essence, I don’t know anything about Nicole at all beyond what these pictures show.  Mere physical moments trapped in time that show WHAT she WAS at that moment but not WHO she IS.  And I get the feeling that she doesn’t know me any better from the few pictures I’ve been able to have taken and sent to her.  I get the feeling that we are both kind of in the same boat, just at opposite ends and the one in the middle who is doing the rowing, my ex-wife, isn’t talking.

All I know is that Nicole does know who her father is.  She knows her “Vater” (German for father) is in America and that he loves her.  She understands this in the vague way all children separated from a parent understand, or at least hope, that they are loved by that missing person.  But it has no practical value.  If you asked her where her daddy was, she’d tell you, “America”, and if you asked her if I loved her or if she loved me she would say, “yes, but in reality, I am no more than an abstraction.  I’m not there to pick her up when she falls or tuck her into bed.  She doesn’t worry about me when she brings her report card home nor does she wake me up at 5:00 am on Christmas morning.  Her mind, even now at ten years old, cannot possibly conceive of me, someone she has never met in a real way, in any true, concrete fashion, as a real person.  Most adults could not make that leap and it is almost impossible to imagine a child being able to do it.

So I am just an idea supported by circumstantial evidence.  The pictures I’ve sent, the cards and letters in my deteriorating German, and what she has been told by others.  She has no memory of me to dwell upon, only the mystery of me and I’m not sure if that has started to harm her or not.  If “Because he can’t, honey” is still a good enough answer to the question of “Why doesn’t daddy come and see me?”  Hell, I don’t even know if that question has been asked.  For all intents and purposes, I was nothing more than a sperm donor to her mother and one day that will hurt her, whether she recognizes it or not.  It hurts ME because I wasn’t just a sperm donor and at least I have the luxury of knowing that fact.  She doesn’t.

Nicole will never be an abstraction to me.  I held her.  I wiped her nose, changed her diapers, fed her, and rocked her back to sleep in the middle of the night.  I do have memories of times we shared when I was her “daddy”, memories she’ll never have.  All this stays with me, even if now she has become a mystery to me, too.

For years I dealt with this by trying not to think about it.  The old classic denial position: mind over matter.  You don’t mind, it don’t matter.  I’d think, “Yes, I lover her,” but I wouldn’t let it go further than that if I could help myself.  If I didn’t stop it, I’d get caught up in fantasizing about how I’d plan her next birthday party and what I’d get her.  How I’d teach her my love of reading and poetry and art.  How we’d be friends and I’d take her places on my shoulders.  How she’d say, “That’s MY daddy!”  We’d do homework together and watch cartoons.  I’d comfort her when she was scared and love away all her scratches and bumps.

I’d get caught up in dreaming all of that, feeling really good for awhile but then depressed long afterwards.  I tried to avoid it.  I tried to be more pragmatic, you know, “I’m here, she’s there, what can I do about it?”  But how pragmatic can you be when it comes to love?  You never can be when you truly care.  You are either in all the way or a mess and I was a mess.  At least where it came to my relationship with my daughter.  I was pretty pragmatic about everything else.

The problem is, I was an abandoned child myself.  My father left of his own accord, with generous help from my mother, around the same age in my life as I was pulled out of my daughter’s life, and it affected me.  Watching my mother go through relationship after relationship with men, I’d invariably adapt to one as a father figure and then lose him.  She was just dating but I was auditioning fathers until it reached the point where I was so far withdrawn that when she finally did remarry, I could no longer accept that man myself.  Therefore, I grew up alienated in my own family, alienated by my inability to commit one more time my immature emotions to someone, even though he seemed like a good bet for staying around.

I’d become an anti-marriage, anti-child demagogue by the tender age of 13, swearing to one and all that I’d never get married and never have a child.  I knew by personal experience that it was all a futile exercise!

But what did I know?  What does any 13 year old really know or understand?  I did get married and I did have a child not 8 years later, after I figured out what the whole girl thing was about.  Puberty has a way of changing young minds on certain subjects!

I never forgot how I felt, though, even when I was saying, “I do” and my bride-to-be was already pregnant, I never forgot how I had felt 8 years before and that made me swear to myself that first, I’d never divorce ― marriage was for life ― and, second, I’d always be a father to my child.  I’d never be MY father, who I still didn’t know and wouldn’t know until I was 28.  I swore it up and down and meant it.

It has been that need to be a father that has given me the feeling of failure.  Of having failed my child.  My ex-wife has remarried, so my daughter now does have a male figure in her life but that does not alleviate ME.  No one feels like someone else can be a parent to their child like THEY could.  Not with the same intensity and love and devotion and caring.  A substitute is never the real thing, and even if this stepfather could be, that does nothing for MY need to be more than just the biological father of note.  My daughter may be taken care of.  She may be in a good, healthy environment.  She may be receiving proper guidance and if all of that is the case, then I am truly grateful.  But it does not soothe my need, my emotional needs, to be not just he who has fathered, a sperm donor, but also he who is “daddy.”

In that struggle of emotions to at once be and to try to forget to be, I have dealt with that by not dealing with it at all which, of course, has gotten me nowhere.

It’s time that fades on you.  Not history.  History is always looking right over your shoulder, whispering in your ear.  You can do a lot of stuff with time and I’ve got plenty of it.  In 2000 my death sentence was vacated and I was re-sentenced to Life.  All the time I need….

So, you can gain time, like I did, or you can lose it.  You can save it or give it, take it, keep it, bury it or find it, all sorts of things with time but you can’t do anything with history.  It can’t change.  You’ve just got to live with it and hopefully learn from it because it’s always going to be there.  Time itself becomes history.  Re-writing it doesn’t help because even that doesn’t change where you are.

In places like this, it’s time that fades on you and with it, you sometimes do try to let everything else fade.  The things you can’t change or do anything about or make better.  Like your relationship with your child.  Like your need to be a parent.  You can try to let that fade and right when you think you’ve just about got it, history smacks you up-side the head to remind you.  By a surprise picture in the mail or a crayon coloring or a scene on T.V. or just a memory that you may be able to keep down for awhile but which will never truly fade.

People think history is dead.  It’s a very western concept.  No one fears history.  We fear the future because that is what seems so ambiguous.  But like I said, when you have no future then you really come to understand.  It’s the past you have to look out for.  That’s what you live with.

My past and my daughter’s past are only connected for a short period of 6 months that abruptly ended in 1992.  Like a river that split into two different streams shortly after birth.  I can’t go back upstream to that beginning.  I can only hope that somewhere, in a future I am only just beginning to mentally toy with again, our two streams will rejoin to create a new past.

The future doesn’t scare me.

 

II.  SUBJECTIVITY AND GWEN  

 

Men often have a tendency to try, intellectually, or sometimes physically, to beat problems into submission.  They have a habit of not getting involved with problems by trying to keep them at a distance while they hammer away at them.

When feeling too assailed, they throw up defenses like a city under siege and hunker down.  If a problem breaks through those walls and corners them, they are then liable to act out negatively, fighting the problem but not really solving it.  Blame it on evolution or genetics or plain old hard-headedness, whatever; men are all the same at some deep, fundamental level.

Women, just by nature, seem generally to take a different angle on things.  They don’t see a different problem; they see a problem differently.  Women tend to be more in tune with what a problem is, on a more emotional level, and some women are more in tune than others.

A woman, more often than a man, will FEEL a problem.  She is more likely to become subjectively involved with a problem and communicate better with others about it to solve it in a constructive way.  A man wants to isolate it and skewer it upon the point of his objectivity, but sometimes a problem’s hide is just a bit too tough and you need a little subjectivity.

If you can’t keep a problem at bay by beating it with a stick, then you may have to let it crawl on top of you and get involved with it.  Get IN it and from there, figure out how to work your way out.

When you can get a little subjectivity, you can begin to see how all things are tied together, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, and how working in one area of your life is to work in all areas.

Life passes history from generation to generation and because of that, a thread woven into your past becomes woven into your child’s past and their child’s past.  On and on.

We have talked about what it means to be an incarcerated parent.  How it feels.  We have a good deal in common. Gwen is a divorced parent and her child, Tori, is a daughter.  Tori is the same age as Nicole; they were born 8 days apart.

Gwen does not have a life sentence but she does have more than enough time to serve for it to count.  More than enough for it to affect both Tori and herself substantially.

People say that talk doesn’t change anything and that may be true in the context of changing the physical aspects of being an incarcerated parent, but we believe it can change how you deal with that from something negative to something more positive.

You can create a dialogue to address better how you feel, how you have been emotionally affected and what that means not only for yourself but your child as well.  We are not offering up any grand hope of revealing the meaning of Everything with answers provided but we have come to the conclusion that today, there are a lot of FAMILIES dealing with this problem and there needs to be some talk about it.  There needs to be a little subjectivity all around.

If people can stop avoiding and begin to discuss how they feel, how this issue has affected them and their children, they may come to see they aren’t alone.  They may come to find that instead of pulling in, they can begin to try to reach out.

Hundreds of thousands of PARENTS are locked away today, for whatever reason, and this may actually be the first time they’ve ever had a chance to sit down and think, really think, about what it means to be a parent.

This is not a time to be running away from that and it is more than just a subjective, emotional issue.  It is also a rehabilitative one.

Rehabilitative in the sense that in a parent-child relationship, the responsibility falls upon the parent.  The responsibility to support, educate, and guide.  The responsibility to learn from one’s own mistakes and try to pass that wisdom on.  The responsibility to get one’s life together, as it’s not just your life anymore but the child’s as well.

The rehabilitative effect of developing a real parent-child relationship and its concurrent responsibility can mean the difference between a successful reintegration into society for an offender or a plunge into recidivism.  The difference between a child who “falls through the cracks” or one who grows into a successful adulthood.

Beyond the obvious positive benefits for both the child and incarcerated parent, society in general benefits.  Our penal systems benefit, our social welfare systems benefit and our communities benefit.

 

ABSENT FATHERS AND SINGLE MOTHERS    

 

As for all single mothers that find themselves incarcerated, Gwen’s situation as a single mother is what makes it all the worse for both herself and Tori.

When I was taken from Nicole’s life, she lost her father but was left with a mother.  When Gwen was taken, Tori lost BOTH.

Gwen was raising her daughter on a daily basis, whereas my daughter never knew me.  She was a  real, physical, living and breathing component, the MAJOR component, in Tori’s life with the same going for Gwen.

Gwen was never an abstraction to Tori, a child who had already lost her father.  Tori’s father had never been a daily part of her life.  She has been to visit and spent holidays.  There are phone calls and cards occasionally, so her father is not so much the mystery to her that I am to Nicole, but it was Gwen who was raising her.

The one who did pick her up when she fell, who did tuck her in every night was Gwen and that is an important distinction between Gwen and me and our respective children.

I was only a physical part of Nicole’s life for a few short months before being swept away.  I never knew Nicole as a personality.  I never saw her walk or heard her talk or noticed the way she liked to sit or do any of the things that distinguish a person.

Nicole hadn’t yet begun to develop into an individual “Nicole”  but Gwen knows an individual “Tori.”

Gwen knows how Tori acted when excited or sad or hurt or happy, how she ran in the house and had to be told to stop or admonished to eat her vegetables if she wanted dessert.

So, where the bond between Nicole and me was severed before it could ever develop into a mutual understanding of who we both were, in Gwen’s case Gwen and Tori have been cut off from a bond that had grown deep and very personal.  Very real.  A bond with many more memories for both of them, a longer history than mine and Nicole’s.  The break of that bond had to cut deeper and it did.

While Nicole was left with one parent and no memory of the other, Gwen and Tori, as single mother and daughter, were the centers of each other’s lives, causing the knife of separation to cut equally both ways.

I have been left to dream about what could have been, to make up moments in my mind from a stockpile of generic images of father and child.  Nicole and I lost the possibilities and probabilities of what could have been.  Gwen and Tori lost realities they experienced every day.

Nicole never had to get used to not knowing me or having to know less of me.  She has been left only to learn about me but Tori did know Gwen.  She depended upon Gwen, as her sole parent and provider, to be a daily part of her life.  Now she has had to face the fact, at a young age, of Gwen’s becoming less of that.  Tori has lost a parent in a more substantive way.  One that mere monthly visits cannot fix.

 

THE PAIN OF BONDS MAINTAINED

 

Naturally, there are men and women who receive frequent visits from their children.  The free mother or father brings them, or a brother or sister.  Often it’s a grandparent.

I’ve always envied these inmates.  They are being allowed to KNOW their children, to be a PART of their lives in hourly installments.  I’ve always thought, “I wish I could see Nicole like that…to talk to her…hear her talk…have a picture taken with her.”

The men and women we see come back from visitation always seem a little excited at first, then quiet.  Often they will go to sleep if rules permit, as if they were sleeping off something.  No one ever talks about it.  Neither of us has ever had a conversation of any real depth, beyond the superficial, with another person in prison, besides with each other, about being a parent, about how being separated from our children affects us.

Most inmates are just not too enthusiastic about talking about their families. It’s often not wise to be going on and on to your cellmate, who you do not really know. But even among men and women who have become friends in adversity, people who have come to trust each other with just about everything else over the years, there still seems to be a large degree of silence.  This leads us to believe that the issue of being an incarcerated parent is one that a lot of people are trying to ignore.  Some, assuredly, because they would not be a PARENT anyway, even if they were free to shoulder fully that responsibility to their children, but many more, we believe, because they just don’t know what to do with it and trying to do something often leads to a lot of pain.

It wasn’t until we discussed this that I began to see exactly what it was I was envying.  How painful it is for Gwen to be able to have the visits she does, that infrequent contact, with Tori.  A pain from which I have been insulated.

While I was cut once and deep enough to scar, that scar has been allowed to develop and harden.  I can try to ignore it but Gwen was cut deep too, even deeper than I was by that initial separation and her wound, as well as Tori’s, has never been given a chance to heal.

Gwen and Tori keep getting cut over and over again on that same spot, visit after visit, year after year.  Each time Gwen has to watch Tori walk out of a door barred to her, each time she has to hang up the phone on a daughter silently screaming for so much more.

You can’t ignore that.

I didn’t truly understand all this before.  All I could do was focus on trying to ignore what I didn’t have, not on the consequences for both myself and Nicole if I did.

Sometimes when Gwen writes, the pain is a tangible part of her letter, hidden behind her joy.  I can FEEL it.

Subjectively.        

 

III.  GWEN

 

I have served five years in prison, separated from my daughter.  I was a twenty-six-year old mother of a child I adored.  More importantly, I was the mother of a six-year old child who adored me.  I miss the little girl I left behind and have since lost. I miss the intensity of the bond we shared, a bond that communicated emotions with a look.  I miss her touch and her eyes, especially when she laughs.  I miss her voice.  I miss her need.

I sometimes cry at night for no particular reason.  The reasons are no longer individual.  They are so numbered that I get lost in the overwhelming  enormity of them  all and I break down.  The wearing away by continual pain, a slow, daunting erosion of the soul.

I came to prison determined to salvage the closeness of the relationship I shared with Tori, my only child, but my fight to remain actively involved in her life, from which I am so removed, has seemingly been in vain.  So much has been lost.  My struggle now is accepting that the closeness I desire, what I once had so naturally, is no longer possible to the degree that both my daughter and I need.

With that, I’ve stumbled over the harsh realization that the people I once thought could not live without me actually can.  Sometimes letting go seems less painful, yet I renounce that as an option.  I can’t, I can’t let go of her in my heart, therefore I can’t let go with my mind.

The loss of control over Tori’s life and what occurs within it has been the monster of my nightmare.  I have no control or influence over how my child is raised.  I no longer decide what she eats or views on television…or how she gets her hair cut…if she will receive braces…or if she will be seen by a counselor or a doctor for reasons I feel are important…or should she be retained in school…or how she should be disciplined…or what she will be taught about religion…or will she be allowed to visit with her estranged father when he pops into her life…or what she will be taught about sex and drugs… 

Someone else controls my daughter’s world and her perception of it, whether I agree or not.  Someone else makes all the decisions now.  It is they who select and purchase the clothes she will wear, her gifts at Christmas.  It is someone else that soothes my child when she is sick.  It is someone else who holds, consoles, rocks, and listens to my child.  And when she cries for me it is no longer my embrace she feels, it is the embrace of someone else.

I used to get photos of the special moments in her life that I was missing.  I now get a couple of photos of her a year.  With time, all things fade.  Dedication.  Remembrance.  Devotion.  They all fade with time.  You become forsaken by the people in your life in whom you believed.

I call home to speak to Tori twice a week.  My calls must be collect, and at close to twenty dollars a call, my family pays a small fortune every month to give us those ten minutes every 3 or 4 days.

Tori says if we hang up before the ten minute time allowance expires that she feels guilty.  I understand because I too feel that guilt, like letting go before she is ready.  And even after 5 years, she ends every call asking when will I call back.  I assure her that it will be in three days.  “I miss you, Momma,” she says and I know she does.  I profess my love for her for the remaining 60 seconds of our call.  I hang up each time with an emptiness I’ve never known before and to which I will never become accustomed.

I am one of the fortunate ones.  I see my daughter during weekend visitation for a few hours every other week.  These are precious moments we share.  These are the moments that carry me on, one week to the next.  I live for the time we spend together. Each time I see her she has grown noticeably.  Her eyes never change though.  I can still see the little girl I left behind in my young lady’s eyes.

I stroke her golden hair and skin continually throughout our visits.  I indulge in the feel of her weight in my lap, her arms around my neck.  I breathe in her scent with the hope of taking a piece of her back with me.

These are the things that make my struggle worthwhile.  It is love that drives me to push on.  It is knowing she has not forgotten me, knowing she has not forgotten us.  Her dedication, remembrance, and devotion have not faded.  She shares my pain.

I mourn with deep regrets the impact my absence has had on her.  The consequences are obvious and I fear they will follow her into her adult life, deep scars of childhood.  Scars inflicted unintentionally by a mother.  That is a burden I bear, a guilt I live with every day in the face of consequences I am helpless to avert.

Occasionally Tori will ask me how much longer I will be gone.  I simply can’t bring myself to mutter the truth…that it could be six more years.  That she, herself, could be of drinking age before I return to her.

I tell her I don’t know for sure.  In the loss of my own hope, I try to encourage hers.  Every year we hope it will be the next.

How am I to help her deal with the emotional void our separation has caused in her, the very void that urges my tears at night?  I am left to observe as an outsider while the issues in her life evolve.  What was once hurt has become anger.  With her sadness has come humiliation and shame.  I have watched her emotional descent begin the year I was removed from her life, unable to stop it.

It began with emotional withdrawal, then academic withdrawal and finally social withdrawal.  And though she pretends that she is unaffected by all of this, I see the destruction.  She is angry at me for abandoning her, hurt because of her love for me, and the growing understanding that I had no choice in leaving.  She suffers extreme feelings of guilt for the anger she has.  She is unable to understand the rising conflict between these two emotions within herself and is reluctant to share with me the bad feelings she has.  Feelings that will poison her if left to fester in her tiny soul.

Tori’s self-esteem has  been shaken.  She no longer seeks the attention on which she once thrived.  She is intimidated by the challenges that present themselves, as if she doesn’t have the strength to accept another loss, preferring to give up rather than take the chance.

She fears abandonment now by the other adults in her life, afraid her love is not enough to keep them there with her.  The fact that she woke one day to find the most important person in her life gone has brought the realization that nothing is certain.  A frightening discovery for her at such a young age.

At the start of this journey, Tori cried a lot, too, but time has tried to form a callous over the pain.  It’s a form of survival, a natural protection that deadens the pain.  But with the deadening of the pain comes the sacrifice of the joy as well.  We become numb to feeling anything beneath the surface.

When I look into her eyes, I see my own pain.  I so easily recognize her suffering, and my longing to ease her of that overwhelms me.  Her pleas for my return scar me to the core of my soul.  Her offers to sacrifice her own freedom to remain with me inside the confines of this prison bring me to my knees in defeat.  All she wants is to be with me and that is what I cannot give her.

I have prayed and my prayers eventually turned into pleas.  I have prayed that I be returned to my baby, making this request a thousand times but the response has always been the same…silence.  In the midst of this silence I have watched my daughter suffer, leaving me to pick up my cross and push on, fighting like hell to help Tori bear the weight of the one she carries as she struggles into tomorrow.

I attempt to assure her of  “a day after” but the bond we once shared has not been severed, only strained, and she senses my own uncertainty, my doubt.  I am losing my own faith and she sees through my feeble attempts.  She sees that I no longer believe myself.  That I have had to sacrifice belief for acceptance.  It has come at a very high price.

I watch as the cracks spread slowly across Tori’s soul at such a tender age.  How much weight before she will collapse?  How much longer can she endure?  How much longer before our bond is truly severed?

I have failed her fundamentally.  I have robbed her of the security of being a child, the naiveté and innocence of that period in one’s life.  I have denied her the privilege of being raised by a mother, her own mother, and being loved on a daily basis with hugs and kisses.  Days at a time pass in Tori’s life where she does not hear from me the three words which were so much a part of her daily life before: I love you.

I hate myself for what I have caused in her life but even easier than hating myself, I hate the “certain somebodies,” society’s finest. The “certain somebodies” that fear my child will taint their fine offspring because of where I am.  The “certain somebodies” who now refuse to allow their children to attend my child’s birthday parties.  The same ones who now refuse to invite her to their children’s birthday parties.  The “certain somebodies” who call themselves Christians.

Sins of the mother upon the daughter.  Mothering from prison has broken me more than bars, more than anything else could.  It is a calamitous existence Tori and I share.  There are days where I can no longer see tomorrow.

 

IV.  US

 

Here is an example of the difficulty of this problem.  There is a man who has a child he has never met, who he has had everyone tell that he is dead.  The guy has a life sentence and apparently has no hope.  He says he feels it is better if her is “dead” than for the child to have to face the reality of a father in prison for murder.  His being “dead” seems a less psychologically damaging prospect.

We must assume this is based upon the presumption that the child will never come to question one day who his father really was, how he died or where?  That this lie, now woven into the child’s life will have to be externally maintained.  But what if this man does get out one day?  What if an appeal were successful or a pardon board were to show mercy years down the road?  Will he suddenly be resurrected?  Or will he, even in his freedom, still remain “dead” to a child, now a man but forever his son?  Would not the lies told be more psychologically damaging if discovered than the truth could ever have been? 

It seems a bit irresponsible, a sort of rationalized abdication that serves the parent more than the child.  This man says that parents who drag their children through their incarceration do so for their own selfish reasons, without the well-being of the child considered.  We are sure that there could be considerable debate over this but we CAN’T see how lying to a child is ever in that child’s best interest.  We just can’t see it.

Of course, neither Tori nor Nicole has been told everything in exact detail but they have had these tragedies in their lives explained to them in ways compatible with their age.  In responsible ways, ways that could grow and develop in meaning as their ability to understand has grown and matured.

Being a parent does not stop at the prison walls.  It is not something taken away from you, with everything else, at the front gates.  It is something that endures, just as a child’s need endures for the love of a parent.  A need only exacerbated by absence.  What does it all mean?  What CAN you do?  Locked away and helpless to do anything in your own life, what can you do in that of another?  You can’t wake up tomorrow, jump into your car and decide, “Hey, I’m going to BE a parent now.”  You are stuck and the fact remains that until you are set free, if ever, you will remain stuck.  This is the dead-end where most of us find ourselves.  This is hopelessness.

But what is stuck?  What is REALLY stuck and what is only given away?

No relationship between a parent and child, separated from each other, is ever as optimal as one where the parent and child co-exist on a daily basis, but what is stuck here is your body.  Not your heart or who you are:  a parent.  Not what you care about or worry about or what is important in your life: your child.

These are things we give away in fear and apathy and desperation.  We give away what we care about because of that sense of hopelessness that envelops us.  Sometimes it does seem easier to try to bury something and move one, even if we will end up paying more for it later.

What endures is love and the responsibility for it and to it.

The idea of being a parent contains within it the obligation of raising that child.  That obligation is not voided by less than perfect circumstances.  Prison is not a sanctuary within which we may shed ourselves of responsibilities.  Prison is about responsibility.  Prison cries for a child’s future as contemplated by the parent locked within it.

We cry for the lives lost, for our children, those hopes and dreams lost in years and in the changes between one picture and another.  We cry for mistakes that ripple out from us to lap upon the shores of so many others.  Mistakes that cannot be allowed to wind through the fabric of the future.

Parental absence, emotional loss, abandonment, crime and incarceration.  Children scarred by parental failures, left to perpetuate them from lack of guidance, to loss of self-esteem, the cutting of ties that bind stronger than time and space.

Whether we write or not, whether we hold their small hands across visiting room tables or not, whether we are alive or “dead” to them in ways they cannot fully understand yet, our children are incarcerated WITH us.

Prison implies rehabilitation but in this world, rehabilitation comes from within.  Stonewalls, iron bars and razor wire offer only the props.  How you reach beyond them will affect not only you but the futures for which you are responsible, those of your children.

You may find that it is not what has been taken but what you must struggle to give that is most important.  That you have not forgotten your dedication, your remembrance, your devotion.

 

Ties that bind.

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