Prison Baby: A Memoir (15 page)

Chatty? Friendly and jabbers?
My tiny-baby days. This is me before the mute, insecure, scared little girl who suffocated in melancholy.

My foster mother reveals more than I ever imagined I’d learn about my early years:

I lean back in the chair and sit in all the bigness of how love surrounded me in my early years. Tears seep from my eyes into the paper but I don’t want to ruin the page so I press a folded, dry washcloth across the bridge of my nose to catch the drips.

FOR SOME REASON, I never once blame my prison mother for her fight to keep me in prison. She wanted her baby girl. But what if she’d lost custody of me at birth? Or if she’d relinquished me of her own free will right away? Would I have felt less restless and on edge with an earlier separation, more secure, suffered less?

The documents help me understand that I can’t outrun my birth mother or the traumas of my first years. I guess a girl can love just so many mothers. I must’ve closed the door on Mother with too many before her.

On the next page, one of the last, a document reinforces the agony and brings to life the end of our short story together.

She is a deep imprint stitched to my back.

Inmate #’s Baby Girl Doe
? I’m unnamed?

In one swipe I lose my mother-source and my name. Why would they use this placeholder name, in most cases meant to protect the identity of a crime victim or a witness? I’m neither. Or maybe I am a witness. I did, after all, behold what few others have seen, even though I don’t remember it. Who knows what I witnessed? I can only imagine.

This telegram, more than anything else, sends me deeper into panic and sadness about the night I left her behind, the separation almost like a big, enforced escape at the crack of dawn. The telegram also helps one more piece fall into place about the mystery. Now it’s clear why I’ve vomited on airplanes, why the trapped diesel smell brings on nausea. It’s an association from infancy, a conditioned response, even though I love to travel and fly. Infants and toddlers gauge their environments by what adults convey, and I traveled with a stranger, the federal marshal, about to enter a void, the wide unknown, even worse than the void of the Hole.

THE LAST FORM, THE LAST PAGE in my baby book, closes one of the many open circles in my life, evidence of my prison mother’s continued love, in her handwriting.

My treasure, my beloved yarn toy, its journey to me with this prison authorization, like a ticket for precious cargo about to set sail on an ocean liner.

Six other separate requests follow, more proof of her continued love for me:

I wish I could see them.
Where are they? What happened to them?

The yarn toy, though, has followed me since the beginning, final evidence of our severed love. Her hands wound and wove every strand, the last indirect touch I have from my prison mother.

SOMETHING PULLS ME TO RETURN, and this time it’s not out of curiosity about my prison mom or desperation about my roots. This time it’s because I’m grateful for my freedom, my transformation. I’m also conscious that it could’ve been me who was locked up for the rest of my life. After all the hurt I’ve inflicted on others, I’m called to give back, to reach out where I’m comfortable and welcomed with open wide arms: women’s prisons.

It’s as if I’m on autopilot on a path I was born to stomp along. As if born with a job.

Untreated mental health issues can take a person down along with others around her. I lived it. Mental health support averted my future violence and curbed my addictions. In my previous life I tick-ticked inside, a time bomb ready to blast anyone in my path with the shrapnel of my anger. I hate to admit that if I’d refused to confront my disturbed self, I would’ve been a prime candidate for committing the kind of tragedy we read in the front-page news. The churn of fury so vast inside me all those years, it needed its own zip code, a rage in multiples of pi. I stood always on a precipice of you-never-know-when irrational violence, and it’s a miracle I didn’t just snap one day. A miracle I didn’t plot more and let loose on total strangers, or more against my mother and father and brother, or my teachers, or neighbors. Even worse, I’m not sure I would have felt remorse then.

I RETURN TO prisons, my birthplace, and address the inmates there. My story is a natural fit for the women, and I share what I’ve learned, how life is less about what happens and more about what we do with what happens. Not a new idea, just one that takes practice to believe and to live day by day. I use my life to show how we’re all more than the sum of our parts.

Aren’t we all more than the worst things we’ve ever done? It’s possible to fulfill this any time we choose to walk out of our history and begin new, whenever we want to transcend and triumph. I’m proof of this. Of course, we can’t do it alone, but if we search, we’ll find others willing to help. One of the best influences we can have on our communities and the world at large is to grow in self-awareness.

As I speak in prisons, almost every head in the audience nods, incarcerated and staff alike. The women smile, show me I’m meant to follow this vision. On occasion I’ll conduct a writing workshop with women in prisons, and in one of my first, in a high-security unit, an officer leads me into a double-paned, glass-enclosed classroom with a guard stationed outside. Twenty women lean over their blank papers at two long folding tables, the same tables they use in the mess hall. Everyone calls them “girls,” no matter if they’re seventeen or seventy. They call me Teacher.

We open with an informal talk session. We chat and laugh, and some cry. Then they begin to set their thoughts down on paper, and most times no one knows what to write. The women shuffle their pages as I fire out story-starter ideas.

On the second workshop day, they write about their parents. One inmate blurts out in the middle of the workshop, “When I was six I tried to run away from home because a neighbor, a friend of the family, forced me to eat human waste and no one did anything.”

I ache for her.

The women feel safe telling their stories in this circle. A corner of their filters drops—they know I won’t judge.

The woman goes on. “Then my mother pointed her pistol and shot at me. She pulled the trigger, and I didn’t know if the gun was empty or not.”

My life hasn’t been so bad after all, I think.

Another woman looks straight ahead, listening. She’s the self-proclaimed in-house prison preacher and always quotes Bible verses to get everyone else into her religious groove. She’s also the queen of plucked eyebrows, arched to give herself a surprised look. A clunky cross hangs on her neck. “Sounds like a crazy woman,” she says about the inmate’s mother.

The woman goes on and on. “My mother whipped me with coat hangers, extension cords, or twigs off trees. Did I already mention the crow bar? But she didn’t ever shoot when she held a gun on me.”

I’m taking this all in, letting the stories roll.

Another woman, sprawled in her chair, interrupts the woman’s story about her mother. “You think God’s watching over? I’d say your spiritual bubble is gonna bust.”

Just then a woman turns to me and says, “Hey! You’re talking to a bunch of women with low self-esteem.”

I said I know, but I haven’t been the one talking. They have.

Once the group settles down, I say, “Now write a list of things that make you mad. Not only what’s pissed you off in here but also in your own lives.”

That’s all it takes. Everyone dives in. No one’s ever asked them before to detail what makes them mad. They all scribble page after page and rack up lists of unjust events.

Then I suggest they pick one event from their list and write a story about it. It gets wild then! Topics like war, hunger, injustice. It gets big. They go around the tables and start to read their stories. They cheer and hoot—until the preacher woman’s turn.

Her list turns out to be what’s important to her: “God, guitars, women, and cowboy boots.”

“I just got outta thirty-day lockup,” she adds, “for stealing someone’s cigarettes and then lying and picking a fight about it.”

She says she’s also angry I’d had to cancel two earlier workshops. I tell her she would’ve missed out anyway because of her lockup time in segregation.

The women fall silent. No one has ever talked back to the preacher woman.

It turns out she had more lockup time than I had with my scheduled workshops. She never shows up again in one of my workshops.

THESE PRISON WORKSHOPS show how redemption is made possible by hope. Hope alone won’t solve anything. Yet without hope, nothing’s possible.

I take myself into a bigger dream, visiting prisons in New York, California, Connecticut, on both coasts, North and South. I zigzag around the country, and women line up to fill metal folding chairs in prison gyms, and we shake hands, hug if allowed, and dig deep into our souls. Their openness moves me like nothing else I’ve ever known.

Back home, Mother’s condition has stabilized but she’s still in and out of chemo treatments. I feel guilty I’m enmeshed in the depths of everything prison and prison mom. She’d take it as betrayal, yet I couldn’t love her more or mourn losing her more. The timing, though . . . I have no control. I haven’t told her or anyone in my family what I’m up to.

I TRAVELED FROM prison to prison, across the country, to lead basic writing-skills and creativity workshops with incarcerated women, thrilled to witness hidden talents emerge. It took me this long before I was comfortable in front of people. At last I stepped out of my solitude.

Four months into my prison tours, I received an envelope from the Federal Bureau of Prisons. I opened it and pulled out one of their internal newsletters. Right on the front page, there I was. I stared, horrified. No one had asked my permission. I became their poster girl for the “bad girl gone good.”

The article revealed my rough beginnings and credited my return as a speaker and writer working with female inmates as the first program of its kind in the federal prison system. I clutched the paper, semiproud of my origin. I didn’t think I’d ever boast about it. However, I was no longer ashamed of my birthplace. It was just a location—unique, but still just a place and still loaded with the emotions of my story.

Yet, it’s a place I was private about. Not secretive, but protective about judgment from others. Every piece that touched my life had the potential to stir prejudice and heated opinions: prison, inmates, the Appalachia Mountains, the South, Jews, adoption, foster care, race, addiction. All these threads in the web of my story, all ripe for passionate and sometimes negative judgment. I felt safest when I stepped away from judgment.

Most of all I was protective of my mother in prison, her addiction, her street life, her crimes and many sentences, even her victories and accomplishments, as well as the details of our time together. She endured what no mother should ever face. Some mothers decide to relinquish their babies at birth. Some, as much as they later lament the decision, feel like it was their best option at the time.