Prison Baby: A Memoir (20 page)

Soon after the diagnosis, my mind races with all sorts of thoughts.
What about my future? Have I lived as well as I could? What about sex? Do I stop my dreams—are they over? I just started to dream big! I’m scared. My kids! What about my darlings, their little-girl lives ahead of them and their mama . . .

I can’t fill in the blank. Their mama, what?

I have my children tested, and neither of them carries any sign of the virus.

In a way, at first I take the diagnosis as if it were payback time, as if I’d been handed a life sentence. At the same time, my attitude is, fuck everything and treasure everything.

Then, flash! I recall something from high school. Right after one of my annual physicals, my mother had said, “The doctor called. You need to return for another test.”

I was old enough to drive by then, so I zipped back to the doctor’s office. All I remember is when the results came back to my mother, she reported: “They said your urine looked like you might have hepatitis or something like that.”

I remember precisely the word
hepatitis
. I never looked it up and thought it was some boring word related to health. I’m seventeen after all, and what girl, especially the kind I was, pays attention to her mother or doctor?

“Drink lots of water,” my mother said, almost as a scold and a command.

But there was no more discussion and I never asked one question.

With the new diagnosis, the thought flickers through my mind:
Did I inherit this from my mother in prison?
In utero transmission is infrequent. Infrequent but not impossible. So is a baby born in prison, infrequent.

My next thought surprises me: “My mothers are killing me. One from secrecy, the other with tainted blood.”

But this drama moment passed right away because my new muscles for rational thinking kicked in. I’ll never find out how I contracted this, and I can’t get lost in the “what if . . .” I never take the route of victim, so all I’m left with is the stance of warrior, away from the path of suffering. It’s the default I choose as a woman, to veer away from the old story of victim and create a new one where we are warriors, brave and soft in our courage even when afraid.

The diagnosis launches me onto a familiar road—the unknown, an adventure.
Fight this damn thing
. I pull on my
Well, then, let’s see what happens
boots, and I’m ready to take this on. Inside, I both brace myself and soften into this new awareness. Instead of thinking, “I have an incurable, chronic disease,” I use the language, “I’ve been diagnosed with hepatitis C, and so far there’s no cure.”

Tomorrow isn’t here yet, so who knows what discovery might develop. Or not discovered. Either way, if I worry today about tomorrow, then I’ll miss the moments of Right Now, of living with no urge to step away or towards anything. True contentment. It may sound glib, yet I live this to my core, and it’s easier since I don’t take life for granted.

THE AFTERSHOCK OF my diagnosis has lifted and I’ve been living symptom-free with no medications. When I participated in a National Institutes of Health blind study of Chinese herbs for treatment, my viral count reduced. I turn to all kinds of relaxing bodywork when I can, like acupuncture, shiatsu, yoga stretches, whatever I need to take charge of my health. I don’t think about this diagnosis every day. In fact, for months and months the thought never crosses my mind.

Every
I love you, I’m sorry, forgive me, I forgive you
sits in my mouth with a new taste. Every
thank-you
rolls off my lips with deeper meaning. I’m not diseased, not impaired. I’m just aware of which organ might fail on me, or might not. Or a taxicab might run me over next week, too. It’s this random, life. I’m not suggesting it’s best to ignore something so serious. It’s just that I’ve put the diagnosis in its place, off into a little pocket in the back of my brain. I’m aware it’s there. The pocket isn’t closed. It’s got a fancy abalone-shell button ready for me to pry open with gentleness whenever I need to.

I’ve told some of my family and friends, but for many who read it here, this will be the first time they find out. Once in a while those in my inner circle ask me, “How’s your health?” and I tell them all is well.

Every year around my birthday I get a blood test to monitor any changes and a CT scan of my liver area to check for enlargement. So far, nothing. If I postpone the annual test, any one of my friends will encourage me to get on it. Each report after the annual test, rather than go over the details of my enzyme and viral count, the doctor calls and says, “Your enzymes are high, expected for someone with hepatitis C. Nothing to cause alarm, though.”

And I’m not alarmed. Every morning I wake up eager for my day, especially since I’m less and less secretive about this diagnosis. If Mother were still alive, I might not have wanted to tell her at first, but eventually I would. Sometimes the need to keep a secret is to protect ourselves, and sometimes it’s to protect others. I’ve now shared the basics of this diagnosis with my children, enough so they’re informed and enough not to scare them. A mother’s natural urge is to shelter the ones she loves from a truth that might hurt or cause fear.

“ANY QUESTIONS?” I ASK IN A prison gym filled with women.

“Yeah,” one of the inmates asks. “Are you angry with your mother in prison?”

The question stops me cold.

I stand in the gym below the stage, eye level with the rows of prisoners. Several hundred forest-green-clad women stare at me, waiting for my answer.

I’ve been stunned into silence before. Once an inmate called out to me from the back row in an echoing gym full of three hundred women. She rose to her feet, her weeping so fierce I couldn’t understand one word. She repeated the sentence over and over and then I heard it: “Tomorrow social services pulls my daughter out of foster care, and then she’s adopted. I’m losing her! I’m losing her!” She asked, “What do I do?”

Before I knew it, others began to weep. Buried grief surged to the surface in a tidal wave, and I stood alone on the front line.

This woman didn’t need an answer from me; she just sought comfort, and a mother losing her daughter is inconsolable.

RIGHT NOW, WITH this inmate who asks about anger, I stand alone again on the front line.
Angry with my prison mother?
I’d searched deep into the quietest cave of my soul to wonder why I’d never felt angry toward her. Wouldn’t a child burn inside with fury about a mother who abandoned her? Wouldn’t a girl separated from her mother wonder what was wrong?

Children cry and rage when their mothers leave just to go to the grocery store. Babies demand,
Don’t leave me! Come back!
while their mothers pull away for a quick errand, leaving a babysitter or spouse in charge. Yet a baby wants her mama. Sometimes my daughters wailed when they were infants whenever I took off for a much-needed night out, so I know.

But have I never felt angry with Margo?
I’ve asked myself this hundreds of times. Who delivers a baby in prison and keeps her for a year? Maybe she thought she could raise me in prison until her release. But for years? For her whole sentence? My adult brain knows I might be mad at her for not cleaning up. Why couldn’t she stay out of prison? What did she think would happen, running the streets with junk in her veins while pregnant with me?

The Bureau of Prisons documents revealed just facts, information I processed in my head. My bond with my birth mother, though, this lives in my heart, a love frozen in time. Prison protected us, walled us into our cocoon. Prison gave us a home together. Our palace.

It’s hard to hold much anger about her if the first year is all I hug inside my heart. I never expected her to change anything in our year. She kept me. She loved me, and I loved her. I feel protective of her. I once listened to a forensic psychologist interviewed on the news one night who said that sometimes when someone is demonized, those who love the person will make that person into a saint. From the moment I read about my prison mother, I already knew the public perception of women in prison, in fact, of anyone incarcerated. They’re second-class citizens. I’m here to defy those judgments. Every human being is worthy of love no matter what’s happened, where we come from, or where we’ve been.

It may sound nuts to someone on the outside, but if this first year is all I have with her, then it’s flawless. We were perfect.

The neurologist Oliver Sacks explores memory in his book
Hallucinations
and presents what I’ve witnessed and know is true from my preverbal memory and infant life in prison: “We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and re-categorized with every act of recollection.”

When we don’t have a lot of memories, we protect the few we hold. For my prison mom—what I hold inside is frozen in time. Forever. I’ll never create another memory. For Mother and me—we had the gift of chance after chance to build new memories.

All I share with my prison mother are my restless spirit, our physical features, my yarn toy, and sensory memories. What else do I have with her? Nothing. Not one thing. Why tarnish these few treasures, taint the softness of our year together? We shared so little time that I don’t want any anger to shroud this perfect love we shared.

But, but . . . wait a minute. This question from the inmate triggers a tornado in my gut.

My prison mom—
Fuck her sorry-ass junkie self
, the girl ripped away from her rages inside.

Fuck. Her.

FUCK YOU—
right to Margo’s face—
fuck you all locked up in your stupid little steel cell. Why’d you ruin everything?
What kinda mom are you?
Go ahead, rot the rest of your stupid life in prison. See if I care
.

But I care. A boulder of ache blasts a hole through my chest, a bloody mess of sorrow splattered everywhere.

If anything, I’m angry at the series of events that I now know are the reason why I lashed out against the world at large, a world unfair in its dealings, where my whole emotional world of brokenness stirred at work underground, out of control. I’ve surrendered any hope for a different past or story.

I don’t have words for the fury and sadness I can still feel at irregular times about the circumstances and separation. They puncture my heart. The rage can drop me to my knees, shattered, and then batters me some more, because if I stopped, I’d blow up in bits. A whole book and a bunch of published essays don’t touch the sorrow of these moments, but if I stayed only where I felt comfortable, that zone would have turned into a self-built barricade. Every step of the way, I’ve inched out of my comfort zone, just a little at a time.

THE AUTHORITIES AND GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS INVOLVED in the web of my custody and my future, from West Virginia to Washington, DC, to Seattle, what were they supposed to do with a baby in prison? Let me serve my mother’s ten-year sentence with her?

My Margo mother, what could she do? Raise me with my one yarn toy and her village—two hundred inmates along with guards and a warden for my community? A baby needs exposure to the big beautiful uncertain world. A baby needs a community to surround her with stimulation, colors, and texture. A baby needs more than just miles and miles of cotton khaki. I love color, a luscious and vibrant world, most of all, any shade of sunshine yellow. Yet I imagine just inmate and guard uniforms surrounded me for my first year.

I’m conflicted. A baby also yearns for her first bond, and a yearlong one, even more.

Just one emotion floods me, all mushed together, whenever I think of my prison mother and leaving her—anguish and sorrow accompanied by joy. Agony for the separation she and I endured, and joy for no specific memory, just a sensation of our beautiful, short life together—sorrowjoy. I am shredded to pieces by the leaving. My leaving. I left my mom behind, locked up. This one moment in my life—my birth in prison, my prison mom’s incarceration and her pregnant behind walls, and then our separation—it all makes me nauseated with grief and love, all a jumble in the pit of my gut. This is what I cannot reconcile.

Ask me if I wish I could’ve stayed with her, I’ll tell you: Yes, forever, for the rest of my life.

Ask me if I’m glad they removed me from prison, I’ll tell you: Yes, otherwise I would not be the woman I am today.

You can’t breathe and not breathe at the same time.

If healing hitches to us only when we restore harmony inside, then we’re misled by the concept of healing and reconciliation. It’s not easy, but it is possible to heal even in the midst of discord. One reason it took me so long to get this story on paper is I waited to restore inner harmony, but grief isn’t a straight line.

I waited for the day when grief would heal, waited for reconciliation of these messy beautiful feelings about my birth in prison. I waited for sorrow to finish its flood, for sadness to subside, and for my deep-seated unease about the enigma of my prison birth to morph into acceptance. But reconciliation never showed up at my door.

I hoped for a sureness about my start in life, and it never came.

Maybe some experiences we don’t need to go away. Maybe we just need to metabolize and integrate them, to get a few stakes in the ground to navigate by. Sometimes the monsters inside us win, and sometimes they don’t. For sure we don’t need to let them take control and possess us. Identity is whatever we make for ourselves, and not everything ends in resolution. To this day I’m still a restless woman, on fire inside, a low slow burn of healing and contentment now replaces the past flames of rage.

One thing I’ve reconciled at last and for certain: I do not reconcile my prison birth and all its impact. And I am in love with this commotion inside. It feeds my creativity, my love and joy for life, how I’ve learned to live in the moment, and my ability to endure uncertainty. All of which give my world beauty and power.