It Runs in the Family (16 page)

Our principal aim in going to Guantánamo was to let the prisoners know that they were not alone. Despite the reflexive fear that Americans have toward those held in Guantánamo, coverage of our witness in the U.S. press was positive and extensive. Our march received widespread attention in the international press, including Arabic-language outlets. A network of lawyers representing the prisoners brought news of our proximity and solidarity to the men. They knew we had tried, and are still trying.

There are so many issues, so many injustices, so many transgressions that tug at the heartstrings and the conscience, and there is only so much time, only so much energy. I am haunted by the families shattered by indefinite detention. I am undone by the fact that they suffer for our “security.” I do what I can because I cannot sit idly by while children are kept from their fathers.

Even before I really understood time, I always knew that my mom and dad would come home from jail. It was not forever. It was not endless. Six months, eighteen months, two years, even the longest sentences had a “come-home date.” And there was always someone in the community who could figure out what an eighteen-month federal sentence actually meant: time off for good behavior, the newest sentencing guidelines which made every third Friday count for two-and-a-quarter days, whatever. There was always someone who could say, “Look at it this way, eighteen months sounds like a really long time, but your Dad will be home before next Easter.” And they were right. He was always coming home. And so was Mom.

But Faris, Johina, and Michael’s father has not come home. Shaker Aamer is originally from Saudi Arabia, but he has lived in the United Kingdom since 1996, where he is a legal resident married to a British citizen. Shaker and his family were in Afghanistan in 2001, doing charity work before he was seized by Afghan bounty hunters and turned over to U.S. forces. He recalled his relief at ending up in American hands after being held and mistreated by various Afghan groups. But that relief was short-lived.

He was brought to Guantánamo in February 2002. Shaker was tortured repeatedly, singled out as a ringleader, and subjected to gross abuses. Shaker Aamer has been cleared for release since June 2007 and the Bush and Obama administrations agreed that he is not a terrorist, that he poses no threat to the United States or its interests, and yet he continues to languish at the prison.

When I first started learning about Guantánamo, one of the things that struck me was how letters in and out of the prison are read and censored. Lakhdar Boumediene, an Algerian who spent more than seven years at Guantánamo, wrote in a
New York Times
op-ed in 2012 that “During that time my daughters grew up without me. They were toddlers when I was imprisoned, and were never allowed to visit or speak to me by phone. Most of their letters were returned as ‘undeliverable,’ and the few that I received were so thoroughly and thoughtlessly censored that their messages of love and support were lost.” I still have so many letters from my dad. When I miss him, all I need to do is open up a green box that sits above my desk and hold a small piece of him in my hand—slips of yellow legal pad (usually a quarter sheet), his handwriting neat and legible with a spidery slant, his voice still so alive. I know that envelopes in and out of jails and prisons in the United States are subjected to search and could be read, but his letters were never altered.

When he was in prison, my mom received a letter from him every day. Their correspondence was so steady that even the smallest blip was cause for alarm. After September 11, she went days without hearing from him. After being stonewalled by the prison officials, Mom appealed to Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski, who eventually found out that Dad was being held incommunicado in solitary confinement. He was placed there on September 11, right before lunch. The Senator’s office was told that he was put in the hole for his own protection. He was released back into general population after ten days.

He was not the only one. Across the United States, as most of the country was reeling and searching for answers, wardens were isolating their leftist and militant prisoners—Black Liberation Army members, Puerto Rican independentistas, perhaps as many as ten or fifteen people around the country. No calls, no letters, no visits. In each case, it was only because friends and family noticed a change in their normal patterns of communication and started agitating for answers that they were placed back in general population again, usually after a few weeks. Without that outside pressure, that solitary confinement could have been indefinite.

As Anne-Marie Cusac wrote in
The Progressive
, the actions of my dad’s warden in rural Ohio and of wardens elsewhere were codified in new regulations from the Bureau of Prisons soon after September 11. These regulations authorize the Bureau of Prisons to hold an inmate incommunicado for a “period of time designated by the Director [of the Bureau of Prisons], up to one year.” In the past, the term was only 120 days (which sounds long enough indeed). In addition, “The rule also allows for the Director to extend the period for the special administrative measures for additional one-year periods, based on subsequent certifications from the head of an intelligence agency.” I remember those days of uncertainty and anxiety as my mom frantically tried to figure out what happened to Dad. I remember the relief that came with knowing for sure what had happened. I remember how the relief was quickly replaced by outrage. For his own protection? He was in no danger. He was in a position to help other inmates understand and process the horror they were watching on rec room TV screens, to contextualize and explain and educate. So was Marilyn Buck, Comancho Negron, Sundiata Acoli, and others who were isolated and silenced. Maybe the prison industrial complex sought protection from an informed and motivated population.

We only had to wait ten days, but we had a U.S. Senator and her office on our side. Ten days, not ten years, not twelve years, not forever.

When I stay up too late working on a press release, when the last thing I want to do is brainstorm ideas for the next action, when I am hungry and delirious on day two of a ten-or twelve-day fast, when I spend the night on the hard and grubby floor of a police holding cell, when the handcuffs are too tight, when the orange jumpsuit is too unflattering or too hot or too cold or too stinky from the last person who wore it, when the last thing I want to do is go to another demonstration to close Guantánamo, I think about those ten days our family spent working to get my Dad out of the hole, I think about how precious that first letter after the long silence was, I think about how happy I was to hear his voice on the phone, I think about how even when he was incommunicado, he was always coming home. And I want that for Faris and Johina and all the parents and children of Guantánamo.

It has been many years now since I walked to Guantánamo with twenty-four friends. At the time, there were a number of parents on our walk, but they had kids who are older, in high school or college. Since then our little community of walkers has experienced a population boom—at least fourteen children have been born since then. Now the Guantánamo demonstrations are trailed by a deployment of strollers and straggling toddlers and young kids.

That is where you’ll find Patrick, our children, and me. We are not on the front lines with the banners and bullhorns and barricades.

When the Obama administration threatened Syria with war, friends gathered at a busy intersection in downtown New London. Less than a dozen people were there with signs that read: “Two Wrongs Don’t Equal a Right,” “No War on Syria,” “Peace.” It wasn’t much, but it was enough to provoke lots of honks and thumbs up and a handful of “War is necessary,” “Get a job,” and “$#%& you.”

Seamus and Rosena and I walked down to join the protests, mostly because it was the right thing to do but also because their grandparents were planning on being there and everyone was excited to see one another. We upped the numbers by a third. Rosena held a sign, flashed the peace sign, asked a lot of questions, and kept her little brother from falling off a monument. I really don’t want the United States to bomb Syria. I really don’t want the Assad regime to gas and repress its citizens, and I really don’t want people to die at the DC Navy Yard or at an elementary school in Newtown, CT or anywhere else. None of this suffering, tragedy, and violence stops because we hold signs at the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in downtown New London, CT. But it feels better than doing nothing.

There is the famous and somewhat apocryphal story about how pacifist A. J. Muste stood in front of the White House one night as part of a regular anti-war vigil when the rain and cold kept everyone else away. He was completely alone. A reporter came up to him and asked how he thought he could change the world with his solitary protest. Muste responded: “Oh no. I don’t do this to change the world; I do this so that the world won’t change me.” I do this so the world won’t change me. And so the world won’t change my kids. Patrick and I want our kids to read the newspaper and not despair. We want them to take moral cheerfulness to the next level. We want them to be joyful though they have considered all the facts. Madeline and Seamus and Rosena are already making New London and the world a better place with their infectious laughter, their bright colors, and their indiscriminate affection.

Our job as their parents is to help them continue this work of personal and societal transformation while they grow, lose, and grow again teeth, while they learn to say “mama and dada,” and “please” and “thank you,” and “NoNoNoNo,” while they skin their knees and bruise their shins and eventually break their hearts and fall in and out and in love again.

EPILOGUE

S
he came fast and furious. She was petite and dark. She screamed and caterwauled. She had a full head of brown hair. The pushing phase of labor was so fast—just a matter of minutes. What took me a long time (at least it felt a lot longer than the minute it most certainly was) was recognizing her as my baby—the one I had carried, nourished and made room for inside my body for nine-plus months.

But there was no mix up at the hospital. She came out of my body at the foot of our bed and when I first held her, she was slick with blood, vernix, and all sorts of goop from my insides—still tied to me by the long white cord of vein and artery. There was no denying her.

It took us days to discover her name (we had boy names all picked out), but eventually, Madeline Vida Berrigan Sheehan-Gaumer made herself known to us. Her eyes, which might change color with time, are dark blue and she seems perpetually lost in thought—contemplating the big questions of the universe. Her brow crinkles, her lips purse, and I imagine that if I could decode her language, I would understand everything all at once.

When you are a stay-at-home mom, the world gets very small—as small as Madeline Vida’s eight pounds, one ounce. Nursing and diapers and bits of baby puke. When that is mastered, you get to add in the rest of the laundry, the bills, the dishes, the groceries, and the tidying up. I almost added meals to that list, but truthfully (and thankfully), my husband does most of the cooking. I embraced this very small world with gusto when Seamus—now almost two years old—was born. Before having him, I was the kind of person who always said “yes” to almost everything: plan this action, sit on this committee, give this talk, attend this conference, run this race, write this article, meet these people, take on this new commitment, be in these two places at once. After having him, I relished, reveled in, and rollicked with having created a demanding, wholly cuddly, and delightful reason to say “no” to just about everything outside of my front door. I learned to love my small, domestic, mommy world. I learned that it was precious and finite. I learned that many mommies covet and crave and cannot have what my husband and I have chosen. I learned that saying “no” to a lot of the big things meant that I could say “yes” to my son, my family, and my community. And that is no small thing.

But then, right when I was just about ready to say “yes” again—to activism, organizing, a paying job, even maybe a regular exercise routine—I found myself pregnant again. And life inevitably, and perhaps wonderfully, slowed down and shrank again. Taking care of a toddler and having morning sickness tend to narrow one’s field of vision.

While pregnant, I barely kept up with email, barely wrote my column, barely got my household chores done, barely kept up with the bad news of the day, was barely an activist of any sort. I tried to “keep my head in the game” so to speak. But, over and over, given the choice between those things and being with my family— building my marriage, growing our fetus, watching our little boy develop a language all his own, celebrating our seven-year-old’s daily triumphs—I chose family. I stayed close to home, have been an active part of my Unitarian Universalist congregation, walked my little city with a greeting for most people, baked and cooked for families with new babies, helped to raise money for needy people, and tried to be a good neighbor and local citizen. I have tried to be generous. I have built a network of friendships and relationships, have kept up with correspondence of the old-fashioned variety. I’ve visited people and stayed connected with my far-flung immediate family in Baltimore, Kalamazoo, Philadelphia, and the Bronx. It is not the stuff of legend, but it is the stuff of life.

And now, Madeline Vida is here and even those little efforts are nearly impossible, at least for a while. I worry sometimes—and have been straight-up told by some people—that my choice is selfish, that it is all about me.

But having lived for years as an out-there, doing-it, 24/7 activist individual, and now being hunkered down as a stay-at-home mom with three kids—I have to say, “No, this is not a selfish choice.” It is a humbling, human, hard choice. My own ego is much less large-and-in-charge in the rearing of children and the managing of a household than it ever was organizing an action or giving a speech before hundreds and getting to absorb the accolades and attention afterward. When you are a headline speaker, no one smears banana in your hair. When you organize an action and get quoted in the newspaper, none of the activists willfully ignore your important discourse on listening and respectfulness. I opted out of the limelight by choosing to be a stay-at-home mom—someone who doesn’t get a standing ovation for still being standing at the end of a long day. In fact, if you are doing a really good job, almost no one notices. They notice when you forget their strawberry toothpaste—or underpants—on an overnight trip. They notice when the toast is burnt and the broccoli is al dente. They notice when you are surly and sarcastic and short-tempered.