Prison Baby: A Memoir (16 page)

Mothers in prison struggle with so little access to resources and emotional support, and in general, society looks down on inmates as second class, especially women. I hold the highest respect for my prison mom. She’s not here to say, “Tell it, tell it all, baby.” This is as much the story of both my mothers—Margo and Mother—as it is mine. It’s my pocket of truth, one I don’t want tainted by public opinion or publicized into sensationalism.

About this time, other radio interview requests poured in about my prison tours and birthplace, about my birth circumstances, along with inquiries from several literary agents and editors, who encouraged me to weave my life story into a book. I’m not a tell-all kind of person nor was I interested in putting one more motivational book into the marketplace. I loved to read them. I just didn’t want to write the one I was asked to write before this one.

Yet I tried. I sat for hours with pen in hand, but words do not fly in on wings. Still, I came up with the one sentence that tipped my world: Secret letter reveals heroin-addicted prison birth. But the rest of my story was jumbled in my brain, and I didn’t know how to untangle it.

I withdrew from the dialogues with agents and editors but then several film producers heard about “the woman born in prison.” The last thing I wanted was any part of a film about my life, so I retreated even more. Why would I want to relive pain and loss? I wasn’t ready to claim my criminal escapades in public nor the fear, rage, and insecurities that punctuated my life’s every moment for most of my days.

OVER TIME, WITHOUT pressure from strangers to write my story, a light goes on. I’m less and less afraid of the dark corners, less terrified of my own story with its twists and turns. I’ve grown to understand how secrets don’t destroy us, but the keeping of secrets can kill us. It takes more energy to keep up an act and hold in a secret than it does to face the truth.

Maybe it’s time to share the pieces I want, the way I want.

IT’S A FEW weeks into Mother’s first chemo treatments. A month before her eightieth birthday, I visit her and can’t shake the heartache, can’t bear how her sturdy body has withered into a pile of limbs. I plan a surprise birthday party, even though any notice of her, especially an elegant, catered bash, and in her condition, is the last thing she’d want. She’s from a generation of women who always want to highlight others. But I hope she’ll appreciate it, even in her illness. Dad assures me she’s okay.

Mother, now weak and frail, weighs just under a hundred pounds. I feel it’s her last birthday, our last together. Some years before she’d said: “When I am eighty, I don’t want just a night out to dinner.”

But I know my father doesn’t have it in him to plan a big celebration, and even if he did, this is my present to make up for the resentment I carried about Mother’s past birthdays, and for the birthdays ahead we’ll never share.

I need to make up for all those years I hated Mother’s birthday parties because I wanted the parties to celebrate a different mother. I must show Mother my enduring love. And I need to plan this all by myself.

My father brings Mother to Minneapolis where I’ve rented a huge formal dining hall. She inches into the room packed with sixty-plus people: her siblings and nieces and nephews, our New England family, and friends who flew in from around the country. I’d even located her dearest college roommate, who showed up. What an emotional moment, two old women in reunion after a lifetime of separation. They embrace one another like schoolgirls.

Mother and I, along with Jonathan and my father, sit at the head table. Everyone is amazed by the bond Mother and I built after our estrangement, and they’re surprised, too, at my effort to host this elaborate event. Sadly, they’re also surprised my mother is still alive. She’s a bag of bones in her red silk dress, the sash wrapped around her waist to hide her colostomy bag. The toasts fill the air, a spectacular send-off for what comes next.

AFTER A YEAR of chemo, Mother’s bedridden, and in-home hospice care covers her around the clock. I can’t stand what I learn—hospice means limited time, six months or less.

I continue to fly to Chicago every weekend. I’ve become less and less nauseated when I fly, but airplane air can still make me a little queasy. Whenever a plane begins its descent and I prepare to land, panic blows up inside me, and I feel as if I’m in trouble, have done something wrong. The only way I’ve come to understand this is as a body memory—the physical symptom doesn’t appear related to any physical cause in the moment. It must relate to my first flight, where I imagine I sensed all the anxiety about my future.

I CREDIT-CARD DEBT my air travel to Mother’s bedside, weekend after weekend for many months. I massage her feet, read to her. I hold her bony hand, the hand of the woman who reached for mine while I pulled away, the hand of the woman who stood by me all these years. I nestle at her side and we nap together. On one visit, I lean over her hospital bed, set up in my father’s study opposite his teak desk, and brush wisps of her chemo-thinned white hair off her fevered brow, the way she mopped my little girl forehead when I bent over the toilet, nauseous, my forehead hot with sweat.

“Sorry,” I whisper in her ear, beside her in bed.

She turns.

It’s too much for either of us to name what we’re sorry about.

“I love you, Pet,” she says.

I swallow. I no longer hate her words of love. I revel in them. We weep together. I cry with guilt over all those years of rejecting her, how I injured her spirit. Her tears, I imagine, are also for all of our past losses.

My mother’s rich olive-colored skin is now beige and draped, like wet masking tape stuck on a stick. Her once-muscled forearms rest like twigs on her bedcovers. She’s too weak to reach for me, never mind a full embrace. It’s been over a month since she’s mustered enough strength to meet me at the airport or even dial the phone, so I don’t expect her arms to lift and welcome me anymore.

But the eyes, her full brown eyes, still shine, clear with her love for me. They speak their own language even though she’s spent from dying and her face cannot manage an expression. Not one glimmer in her eyes speaks of death around the corner, of her apprehension or relief or maybe fear. Maybe not fear.

My hands volunteer themselves. One runs its fingers through her few silver wisps of hair. My other hand caresses her back, finds its own rhythm, and my fingers ripple over most every vertebra and rib while I stroke with repetition from the nape of her neck down to her waist.

My mother’s hands used to fret. Her busy fingers knit the air. I understand why from those years of my agitated youth, my extended youth to thirty or so. After we bonded, though, devoted daughter and mother, what made her fingers fret?

I consider my mother’s hands, and her socks, dozens of socks I bring for her on visits. Soft tan cotton socks, nothing too tight at the ankle, white sport socks, short argyle wool ones, maroons and more tan and more white and another wool, any color. I buy in excess for her then: underwear, socks, robes, nightgowns. All the socks for her to sit around, lay down in, socks to fit her swollen ankles and feet, bloated from cancer sweeping to her liver, skin stretched at her ankles like fruits ready to burst with ripeness. Her favorite—blue fluffy socks—she wears like slippers, at night in bed, then days in bed.

The next day, before I leave her bedside, Mother and I discuss my unexpected desire for children.

“But I’m single right now,” I tell her. My latest relationship has just ended. “And what if with kids I won’t find time to follow my creative work?”

“Women have raised children for centuries,” she says, “in all kinds of circumstances and all kinds of relationships, single or not.”

She smiles and I hug her. She encourages me to do whatever I want. Kids, career, writing, travel, everything together.

All of a sudden I recognize the truth of my mother. She’s a courageous pioneer. She’s been one all along. In my judgment as a child, I believed she and Dad adopted me to boost their liberal image. I guess those thoughts helped me block them out.

Mother, ten years older than my father, adopted me while in her forties. Even more unusual, she adopted a multiracial girl, as though oblivious to the rarity of our blended family.

My parents, already outsiders themselves as Jews in academia, marched around with their little caramel-colored girl, innovators in a segregated, pre–civil rights America, where races never integrated in private.

I want to be brave for her, give her whatever I can.

“Mother, do you ever wonder about the phone call from the police? Do you . . . want to hear about those years I disappeared?”

She smiles.

“Thanks. Not really.”

IT’S THANKSGIVING. FOR THE FIRST TIME in many years, eight of us gather at my parents’ house at the same time: Mother, Dad, my brother, his wife, their three young children, and me.

Jonathan wheels Mother to the family table but she refuses food. I try to tempt her with a spoon of whipped cream to her lips but she turns her face away. Something feels different about Mother. After dinner I call the hospice nurse. While we wait, I massage her feet through the fluff of her blue socks.

“Don’t stop. Don’t go,” she says, her gaze straight into mine. She stares beyond me and into me at the same time. I hold this look, possess it, this horizon together and fight an instinct to avert my eyes.

“Stay with her, stay,” I command myself. Every speck of courage in me gathers for this one moment. I refuse to look away. My father on the other side of the room holds her bottle of morphine, his face directed down like he’s reading the label, but his eyes peer over his glasses. He watches us, her, his wife of almost fifty years, from twelve feet away.

Within the hour the nurse arrives, races to Mother’s bed, then calls us together in the hall outside her room. “She’s close to death,” the nurse whispers. She turns to me. “Would you like to accompany me alone with her for a minute?”

I stare at her, air trapped in the bottom of my lungs. I panic.

“I’m going to wash her body, help soothe her,” she says.

I know she asked me for this daughter-mother aloneness, but I can’t. A private and proud woman, Mother would never want me to see her naked on her deathbed. More than this, though, in truth I am scared. Terror engulfs me.
Go
, I tell myself,
do it anyway
, but I can’t.

Now I wish I’d been able to wash and help soothe my mother. And at the same time, I think she would’ve hated it. Or would she?

I wait outside Mother’s room in the hall. Then, after a few minutes, the nurse calls my father, brother, and me into her room. I want to beg for mercy. To whom, though?
Please, not now, not again. Please. No. Don’t
. My plea, not to Mother, not to anyone in particular. I know she needed to go. I want her free from suffering.

But I want her. I need her. I need not to lose another mother.

I glance at the clock. It’s 11:15 p.m., the exact time the prison documents record for my time of birth. On the dot.

I stroke Mother’s hair with one hand and wrap my other around her bony shoulder. Dad stands opposite me, my brother next to him. Mother lurches and takes her last breath. The thought flashes through me: Did she wait to die until I arrived? I lean down, my lips close to her ear. “Thank you, Mother. You’ll always be with me.” I raise my voice. I want to make sure my words reach her. I need her to hear I value her.

I embrace my mother in her final gasp. She shudders in this dying, and fear makes me retreat. I jump. It’s her lurch for air, the suddenness. No one told me, not the hospice nurse, not my father or my older brother. I’d never read about this. It is not like this in movies. I never leaned so close to death.

No one warned me about the deep-lung death gurgle, and how my hands would want to reach for her. All I have is touch, then the sound of her dying. Soon the touch and sound end, my hands empty in the silence.

THE MORTUARY DRIVERS take an hour to arrive, and I covet the time alone with Mother. My brother and father had left the room right after she took her last breath.

I kiss her cheeks, her forehead, the way she kissed mine to check my fever. I sit at her side and hold her quiet hands, cry, and stop. Cry and stop.

I stand at the foot of her bed and wrap my fingers around her ankles, around her blue socks. I jiggle her with a slight rock, left right left, then a soft shake to see if any life has lingered. Is it real? Nothing. She’s still warm. And dead.

Images of my mother’s anguished disintegration cover me, images of her dying moments, the urgent vitality of her life flowing away in her last minutes. A wind sweeps through me, nothing I’d ever felt before in my body, like someone has attached a fireplace bellows to me and puffs and puffs a long constant breeze through my neurons. Not air. Not sky. A breath maybe. Electricity and breath into my every cell.

THEN I OPEN the nightstand beside her bed and discover an empty tissue box with a piece of paper peeking out. I’m snooping like I did when I found the prison letter.

I pull out the note, her last shopping list—
anchovies, capers, the bank
—scribbled on a scrap of paper, along with
bread, the pharmacy
. Pushed into one corner of the drawer in the back sits a clear-plastic rectangular box packed with lined-up bobby pins.

I then wander into the garage, open the glove compartment of my mother’s car, and dig around. Lodged under irregularly folded state maps, my fingertips land on a cough-drop tin filled with a collection of quarters, for parking I figure. I pocket and save the tin of coins and box of bobby pins.

Back at her bedside, I open her nightstand drawer again and find, further buried, a banded-together stack of postcards. It’s the preaddressed cards we had mailed to each other during my summer camp in England, before everything turned bad.