Prison Baby: A Memoir (11 page)

Nick leads me into the house and perches next to me on the sofa. He reaches for a photo album and places it on my lap. “Our mom’s.”

My stomach flips.

“Her brother, our Uncle Tom, kept it hidden from me until you called.” Tears brim in his eyes. I blink back my own.

He leans into me, wraps an arm around my back, and opens the album. I gasp at the first page.

INSIDE, RIGHT OFF THE BLACK-CONSTRUCTION-PAPER photo album page, a lock of my baby hair and my baby picture stare at me. My mother kept a lock of my hair! I stroke it with my forefinger and swear I sense her love seep into me. It takes a while before I can turn the page, then I move on through page after page of photos of her, and a sense of belonging fills me to the core. I want to dive into those photos and live inside them with her.

By the time I reach the end of her photo album, one more puzzle piece slides into place—I have the hands of my bio mom, her smile, the fire in her black eyes. At last I look like someone else. But I notice differences, too. My eyes more almond shaped, my nose smaller and broader, my coloring darker. Still, questions burn into me: “What else am I?” “What about the other half?” My birth mother was Greek, I learn, but I’m clearly a blend of more. But what?

Nick steps away to answer the doorbell and brings an olive-skinned sixty-something woman about my height into the room. “This is our cousin, Sophie.”

Excitement of this union of new family bursts into hugs and smiles and more family, more connections with Martha, my prison mom, aka Margo, as I learn she liked to be called.

“I needed to see you,” Sophie says, “tell you about your mom’s plan.” She smiles. “Something your mother yearned for her whole life.” She looks from me to my brother and back to me.

I want to pry every bit of information out of her, my core desperate to know everything.

“Right before she died,” Sophie says, “your mother stood at the nursery window in the hospital, stared at the babies. She intended to hire a detective to find you soon as she felt better.”

The thought of her at the nursery window with hopes to find me almost topples me over, dizzy from sadness. It wasn’t just me, one-sided. She’d yearned to meet me and we’d missed each other. I can’t bear the crack in my heart. “At least she wasn’t in prison the day she died,” I say.

My mother died from throat cancer, I learned, but she thought she’d be able to kick it and leave the hospital.

Another cousin arrives, Madlyn, dark-haired and lean like me. She sits and clasps my hand in both of hers. “Your name, Madlyn Mary, it’s a family name.”

An image of Mother springs into my mind. I laugh. “My adoptive parents are Jewish,” I say. “Madlyn Mary, not quite a Jewish girl’s name.”

IT WAS A whirlwind of a weekend. I returned to Minneapolis carrying memories and stories from my new family and mementos of my bio mom. They gave me a silk scarf of hers, her diamond ring, and an engraved wooden cross, all nested in my jewelry box to this day.

A last patch of wholeness filled me after meeting my birth family, and the walls I constructed around myself began to crumble. I needed to do something as soon as I returned home. I dragged my suitcase from the back of my bedroom closet, opened it, and pulled out my pistol. I ran my fingers over the barrel. I hadn’t used it except to threaten people in a few heists, over a decade ago. It was time to let go of my past even more.

The gun’s weight in my hands haunted me. What would’ve happened if I’d continued on my old path, my life of crime, drugs, and self-destruction? Out of curiosity, not with a plan to use it, I checked the chamber: frozen. I rose to my feet, hurried outside to the dumpster, and tossed the gun inside. A piece of my dark past I was glad to discard.

For many years, none of us knew what to do after the reunion. We exchanged holiday cards and occasional letters at first, and I attended a cousin’s wedding. But I didn’t call often because I didn’t know what to say. Big life changes take time to sink in and find their design.

After a while, Nick and I began to call and text one another, and now we’ve slid into a family pattern of our own.

SOMETHING’S STILL RAW in me even after all the healing I’ve forged through. I’m still tender like an over-ripe raspberry balanced on a single-edge razor blade that’s going to get sliced no matter which way it rolls. And that’s me, shaky and raw, my insides scrambled and carved up.

I’m clean, I’ve straightened up, I’ve even begun to work out and use my body to rewire my brain. Most days I’m in the gym for a few hours, on my way to better and better health. Still, something claws at me. I’ve at last connected with my adoptive family, above all with Mother. I’ve met my birth family, and I know a little more about my birth mom, and still . . .

Two questions haunt me: “What am I?” “What race or races am I?” I’m sick of checking the Other box. Sick of my answer,
I don’t know
, when people ask what I am. As a teen when I tired of people asking me my race, I’d respond, “Hundred-yard dash.” Besides this play on words, the answer gave me my own race to belong. Wherever I go, people think I’m one of them. I’m sick of this too. By fitting in too many places, I feel like I fit in nowhere.

And then there’s the prison. How is it possible anyone is born in prison? Even though I’ve grown to accept the fact, sometimes it still doesn’t feel real.

Even when I try to ignore and push away my uncertainty about race and about my birthplace, a feeling of isolation floods me. Too often I feel alone in my story because I’ve never met anyone with a story quite like mine, and often I still forget.

After I meet my birth family, I bury my lingering uncertainties with work. Always an entrepreneur, an idea person, I continue a freelance life and work as a writer-in-residence in public schools. A million ideas swirl in my head and a mountain of energy burns and bring me back to my true creative nature. I also dabble in real estate investment and buy and sell a few commercial properties.

The risk and adventure I craved during my years on the streets shows up in my entrepreneurial work. It takes risk to shape an idea and implement it into a business, the same risk I knew on the streets. It takes guts and courage to believe in your own ideas and bring them into the world. I’m best at the idea part and not the best at the business end of things.

But I plow the most energy into my relationship with Mother.

ONE DAY SHE CALLED. Frantic, she asked, “Can you meet me at the Mayo Clinic?”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“I’ve been diagnosed with . . .”

A pause gripped around my lungs and cut off my breath.

I heard her breath catch.

“I’ve got ovarian cancer.”

“Oh, Mother.” I stumbled backward and somehow managed to stop the phone before it slipped from my hand. It couldn’t be. Mother never got sick. A strong, healthy, seventy-something woman, she swam laps, gardened, snowshoed, worked out in aerobics classes every week.

She and my father drove from Chicago and I met her at Mayo, about an hour south of Minneapolis. While doctors explored whether her cancer was advanced or not, I stayed with them for three weeks in the hotel, weeks both desolate and precious, which gave us both a gift: time together and the intimacy to grow closer. We’d lost two decades and needed to make up for all the years of my childhood when I pushed her away.

Later in the hospital, I pulled a chair to the side of her bed, held her hand, and stroked her pale skin. She turned to me and smiled. “You know, we wanted to adopt more children, at least a third child, but you were so troubled and difficult, we couldn’t handle more.”

Oh, thanks for sharing, but not really
. Did I need to know I prevented a piece of her dream, her vision for a family of three kids? Then my heart swelled—she’s shared this secret with me, trusted me even after all those years of broken trust. But soon the good feeling shriveled from shame. What other problems did I cause? What achievements did I prevent in her life?

After week seven Mother headed back to Illinois to begin chemo. I called her two or three times a day. Month after month after month I flew in to visit and bring her fluffy socks, bathrobes, magazines, all I could to comfort her. What gave the most comfort showed by the glisten in her eye, the smile on her full lips—her daughter sitting at her side.

She waited these thirty years for her daughter. A mother’s endurance can hold a fierce love, even if the link is not by birth. At last we both embraced the bond, but saddest of all, it was towards the end of her life.

I BELIEVE CERTAIN things happen for a reason, even if the reason is obscure or painful. After twenty years of letters to plea for information to the prison where my birth mother was sentenced, where I was born, the warden calls and invites me to visit the prison. The gates open with a warm welcome for a private tour. The timing couldn’t have been worse: Mother’s on her deathbed.

Prison is my birth country, a land I yearn to visit the way people adopted from Korea, India, China, the Philippines, various African nations, and every other country abroad yearn to visit the places of their birth. Most people at least hold a curiosity about their roots. Even non-adopted people seek their homeland.

I’m headed home. My mother country, prison.

Even though I’ve been raised with middle-class opportunities, I’ve felt exiled and paralyzed, deprived of my homeland. At last I’m headed to my motherland, a location up until now I’ve only imagined, a place elusive and bizarre but never real. I’m about to replace the impressions of prison promoted by television, movies, and public opinion with my own personal and private images. As difficult as it might feel for others to understand, I’m about to enter a world I’d always imagined as my place of comfort, a nest. While this contradicts the usual association with the word “prison,” a part of me connects the word and the place with love and safety. For any adult, we know it’s not true. For me as an infant, though, prison was the first place I felt loved.

It’s taken me into my thirties to exchange a trunkload of dope for a BA in economics, a clean record, and in my garage, two collector’s Vespa scooters alongside a classic MGB (not the same one from my drug runs on Highway 101). Legitimate money from several businesses I’ve founded fills my bank account, although not often with much to spare beyond living expenses.

ALDERSON NESTLES IN the Appalachian Mountains. Muddy Creek and Wolf Creek run nearby, streams named like characters in my life story. Morning mists cover the prison each dawn with a shroud of fog. Hummingbirds dart through willow trees and hover above fields of lobelia. In Seattle, Mother would attract hummingbirds to our garden with tubes of honey dangled outside the kitchen window. “Legend links this little bird to a miracle,” she’d tell me, “the miracle of joyful living from life’s difficult circumstances.”

The night before my prison tour I stay a mile away at the Riverview Motel, its address: Rural Route 2, Box 0. My headlights hit the motel sign:
We Hardly Exist
. Exactly how I’d felt for most of my life.

The Riverview connects to the town gas station, which shares a wall with the grocery store, its shelves lined with cans of Spam, big jars of pickles, pink eggs in a jar, pickled pigs feet and snouts, sardines, potted meat, and Yoo-hoo chocolate soda. Not quite the gourmet delis in Seattle where Mother used to fill her grocery basket with capers, virgin olive oil, and Bibb lettuce.

Four miles outside the prison gates, set back from a hairpin turn on Highway 21, rounded granite forms itself into a five-foot-high hunched stone. Weeping Mother, the locals call her, stumped like a pestle without its mortar. She stands isolated, attentive in the field.

I approach the prison gates, my legs in a wobble. Clouds dip in and out of the horizon then open to blue sky. Two federal officers dressed in dark-blue uniforms eye me through the wrought-iron bars. One officer nods to her colleague, who opens the gate. I wonder if the prison kept my earlier documents, the letters I’ve written year after year, the times I appealed for facts about my birth, for details about my prison mom. Always I’d close my letters with one question:
Can you tell me what race I am?

“This way,” one officer says.

She flanks me as we walk to the main prison building, a red-brick, two-story rectangle.
Is this what it looked like when they transferred my mom here?
Her sentence began in the Medical Center in Lexington, Kentucky, then called the US Narcotics Farm, where the rehabilitation method for addicts and psychiatric inmates was known as the “Lexington Cure,” as if addiction could be cured rather than treated as a disease. They transferred her to this prison when the authorities learned she was pregnant. I’ve never understood why they didn’t know she was pregnant when the court sentenced her.

Footsteps crunch behind me. I shoot a glance over my shoulder. The tall officer follows us a few paces behind. A horn blast pierces the compound and makes me jump. The officer at my side says, “Three o’clock inmate count.” The inmates race to their cottages.

I’m back where I matter.

The officers escort me to the administration building across the compound. Six two-story brick colonial buildings sprawl around the campus-like prison in a semicircle.

An inmate sweeps the entryway and her movements mesmerize me. Did my mom stand here on these steps once, hunched over a broom? I wonder. Or did they relieve her of any work duty because she was pregnant?

Lost in my thoughts, I stumble and bump into an officer at the top of the stairs at the entrance. Inside, another inmate in a t-shirt with her inmate number inked on the front lugs a string mop and swabs the faded tile floor like a sailor.

We reach the control center and the guard stops. “Wait here.”

I nod, my feet glued to the floor. Three officers surround me. The buzz of foot traffic casts a spell on me. Five administrators line up to slide their clip-on plastic badges into a steel cradle embedded in a steel ledge framed by a bubble of bulletproof glass around the control room. Inside, three guards inspect name-stamped aluminum tokens in exchange for badges, keys, memos, radios, and authority. Other guards behind the glass monitor moments of freedom and stare at a row of closed-circuit TV sets.