Prison Baby: A Memoir (21 page)

This stir of uncertainty also feeds my love for two mothers. One, a woman I cannot remember with my eyes but sense in my soul. The other, a mother I battled and loved with equal fierceness. One of life’s beautiful challenges is to embrace our own nature, our destiny, even if part of the quest is to accept what we wish we could change—but can’t. Nothing brings greater freedom than the discovery of how to live with the unlivable.

THE DAY AFTER MOTHER’S DEATH, I open her cedar trunk and dig through her linens to rescue my yarn toy. Under folded white napkins and her stash of two unopened boxes of Dunhill and Gauloise cigarettes, packed deeper in the trunk, I discover three baby sweaters, one in sunshine yellow with fuzzy mothball-sized pom-pom tassels. More from my prison mom’s knitted craftwork, reclaimed at last, pieces of our bond. Today they overlook me, folded, on an open shelf behind my desk.

In the main hallway in my home, the yarn puppy perches on top of an ornate scrolled wall sconce. Beside it leans Mother’s Mont Blanc fountain pen, the one she wrote poetry with. Icons of my once-fractured self now unite side by side. This is me, a tapestry of these stories, every bit of confusion worth the contentment and joy I’ve learned to mine from uncertainty, every battle worth the exploration.

MANY PEOPLE HELPED THIS BOOK COME TO LIFE: Gayatri Patnaik, deep gratitude for your fierce belief in this project and bringing out the best in my work; Rachael Marks, Travis Dagenais, Tom Hallock, Susan Lumenello, Beth Collins, Marcy Barnes, Jessie Bennett, and the rest of the Beacon Press team who worked on my behalf with personal attention and energy to make this book a reality, thank you.

How can I name each person who’s touched this work? For the countless people who assisted in this book over so many years, please see yourself in here. Great appreciation goes to every mentor, writing coach, and freelance editor, for teaching me and cheering me on in this project. I’d like to thank all those who helped with research and early readers of my manuscript. I’m grateful for friends and family who provided moral support and helped fuel the creation of this book. Online friends and Facebookers for such loyal virtual support, thank you. My biological family, for all the ways you’ve embraced me and the story as I tell it, my deepest thanks. Those who take great care of my children when I travel to prisons or need solitude to write, you are our village.

The women and girls I’ve met in prison, and the ones still to come, it’s a privilege to stand before you and see your trust and courage and face your openness in my presence. You are the reason I do this work.

My children offer great patience with my work, and they inspire me every day with reminders about the complexity of motherhood and family. Girls, thanks for the magic.

Enduring love and honor for my parents, who helped shape me into the woman I am today.

Last but not least, high esteem for my mother-source in prison who handed me this story and, because I didn’t get a chance before to say it, “Thank you for the yarn toy.”