Tag Archives: codependency

The Creep

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ANNE

Ouch. That Eminem song … so many ways I could go with that.

—

When I was in Istanbul in November, there was a guy from the Philippines in my meetings. His name was J.P. Morgan. No, J.P. Morgan is not a Filipino name. His father had changed the family name in hopes that it would bring prosperity. It didn’t.

I happened to be seated next to J.P.—John—on a dinner cruise the first night. I thought, “Oh no, trapped on a boat for three hours next to this guy—what could we possibly have in common?”

But then we started talking and by the end of the cruise I was calling him “son” and he was calling me “mom.”

John’s father was an alcoholic who had left the family when John was small. John was pimped out at the age of 10, sold to strangers for sex until he was too old and no longer desirable—19 or 20—and he began pimping out younger kids in order to make a living and survive.

By the time I met him, John was Vince’s age, had recovered long ago, and ran a recovery program for street kids. Here we are, talking about his “River of Life” program.  To prostituted young men, John has become their idol, big brother, and mentor. Everybody, including notorious gang leaders, listens intently to John and follows every word he says.

JP Morgan

John and another sex worker had had a son together. He was a teenager now, and John was doing his best to keep tabs on him, though the mother was an addict and moved around a lot.

I asked John if he thought that kids being raised by single mothers was the biggest reason that kids got in to trouble. He looked squarely at me and wagged his finger. “No. It is not the mothers. It’s the fathers.” Alcoholic fathers. Abusive fathers. Fathers who gamble away their paychecks. Fathers who leave.

—

On Vince’s first birthday I called to invite his father to have cake with us, and he said he was too busy with “business.” A drug deal, in other words. I never saw him again, except briefly in a crowd.

From time to time I would ask Vince if it bothered him that he didn’t have a father. “Let’s just call him The Creep,” he said once, and we laughed and I never really got an answer, if he had one to give.

Vince never asked about The Creep. The Creep’s dad had been a barge worker and his mother was a telephone operator who had grown up on a reservation. They lived in a dilapidated farm house in Rush City filled with cigarette smoke and no heat and large bowls of bite-sized Snickers and a big-screen TV. The Creep and I visited his grandmother once, on the rez. She lived in a tar paper shack without indoor plumbing or electricity.

I never mentioned to Vince that the Creep had been a drug dealer from a small town who didn’t have a car or a phone, a high-school dropout who worked as a clerk in a gas station. A guy who aspired to nothing more than hanging out with his friends, drinking and smoking pot, laughing and telling stories about drinking and smoking pot. I never mentioned any of these things because I didn’t want Vince to be influenced by them, if he harbored some unconscious admiration for The Creep.

The Creep had had a son with another woman before I met him, and went on to father four more children. I got $103 in child support once, but that was it.

—

I’m not trying to shift blame; after all I must have had a far stronger influence on Vince since I was there 24/7 for 16 years, right?  I don’t spend all day analyzing and angsting over why Vince is who he is.  But for every Vince, there are 10,000 more like him in prison, in Minnesota alone.  I’m sure they all derailed for a different mix of complicated reasons, just as I succeeded despite a complicated mix of factors that should have kept me down.  If someone could figure it all out, they would deserve to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Babies

We Are Who We Are

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VINCE

We Are Who We Are

My brain is so easily distracted.  My mom emailed some of my older blog posts and I saw my list for a perfect mixed tape.  Well, I simply must make another…Tangerine, Led Zeppelin; Blinded by Rainbows, Rolling Stones; One More Cup of Coffee, Bob Dylan.

One particular song reminds me of me and some parts of my relationship with my mother: Headlights, by Eminem.

[Lyrics not shared here due to copyright issues.]

Sprung!

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VINCE

I made it!  Right after breakfast they changed me out of solitary and took me downstairs to Unit 10, the best unit according to word of mouth.

Already I’ve heard good news.  People are going to Boot Camp early!  One guy said his letter told him April, and he’s locked in for February!

This place is massive.  Until I get a job, I’m only allowed out of my cell until noon, after my first day.  Once I have a job, I’m free to spend my day training or reading or really doing anything I choose.  So far I have chosen to take a really long shower, with all my own hygiene items.  And that was exactly what I needed.

Next step, figure out my schedule, then develop a routine.  I know sooner than later I have to get to the P90X workout.  Cardio is huge at Boot Camp, along with five miles per day, the P90X is used in winter.  Five miles is rain or snow or shine.  I’m a little nervous about getting started.  I know I can do it, it’s just a matter of keeping focused.  I have trouble keeping my thoughts on one activity for very long.

Or on one subject, for that matter.  Next subject.  Actually, I’ll continue on Lanesboro.

I have mentioned the town in previous posts, about working in a couple of the restaurants there.  Well that’s not all I did.

—

OK, sorry, I’ll have to get back to Lanesboro.  I did my first real cardio exercise in quite a while.  To qualify for Boot Camp, you have to be able to walk or run a mile in 14 minutes.  I failed, but not by too much.  I will try every day and I will improve.  I also played four games of volleyball.  So I kept my heart rate up for about an hour, and it felt pretty good.

I watched about five minutes of people doing the P90X thing.  All I have to say to the person that invented that is Fuck You.  Fuckin asshole.

—

Lanesboro is a town of 788.  It has been named the B&B Capital of America or some such shit.  So in the summer, the town can swell into the thousands.  10,000 or more for Buffalo Bill Days.  In the winter, however, almost everything closes down…except for the bars.

That’s where I learned that it’s okay to have six beers before breakfast, skip breakfast, and go straight to the bar to start getting a good buzz on.

Usually by noon I could be near blackout, eat a small lunch, then go home and take a nap. That way I could go out and get drunk with the evening crowd too.

Even on my work days I could show up fairly hammered as long as I could function.  I could even pull beers off the tap during the slow days of winter to keep a nice, even buzz.

Pause…Good news: It’s not the P90X that we have to do and practice.  It’s the Reebok Step video.  My apologies to the creator of the P90X workout.  I’m sure it’s a fine program.  For insane people.  My verbal assault was out of line.

Ashamed of Ashamed

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ANNE

Did you know it’s possible to feel ashamed of feeling ashamed?

Well it is. A couple times, Vince and his friends came to St. Paul for the weekend and stayed with me. They brought everything one needs for an overnight:

BoozeCigs

And since I live in a nonsmoking building, they smoked out in front of the building, or took their home-rolled cigarettes and a cooler full of beer up to the roof and played poker up there. I would bring up a platter of food—hard boiled eggs, olive tapenade, crackers, some fruit—up to them but they wouldn’t touch it.   Once I bought four kinds of sausages at Whole Foods, figuring they were meat eaters, but they wouldn’t touch them–too froo froo.

Vince took his shoes off inside my door, as he had been trained to do from childhood:

Shoes

This is where the shame came in. Here I was, living in what was billed as a “luxury” apartment building, and my son wore shoes like this. And then I felt ashamed of feeling ashamed.  Of being such a snob.

Whoa! Time for a cute kitten photo!

kitten

(Did I mention I do kitten fostering for the humane society?)

Anyway, another time we all went for sushi—Vince’s and my all-time favorite food. And he couldn’t eat it. He had to leave the table to be sick, and then I noticed that his abdomen was distended and my bubble of denial that he was “just drinking” was burst.

I had attended the family program at Hazelden, I knew the medical symptoms of chronic alcoholism, including liver disease.

—

A number of people have said to me that it must be kind of relief that Vince is in prison. At least I know where he is, he can’t drink or smoke, yatta yatta. Yeah, these things are true and they are good, although drugs and alcohol can be had, even in prison.

All I can do is keep my focus on myself—examining my embarrassment and guilt over that embarrassment, forgiving myself for being human, for having feelings, for having mixed feelings.

Lauren, Ralph Lauren

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ANNE

In some of Vince’s posts it sounds like I abandoned him.

But during the seven “fun” years, as he calls them, when he was “only drinking,” I did visit him every couple of months.  Remember, it’s a two-hour drive to Fountain / Lanesboro, so each visit meant a six- to eight-hour day or staying overnight. Mondays were his only days off, so a visit usually involved taking a day off work, too.

I hope I don’t sound defensive. It’s just interesting, and very common in families, that our emotional impression of events is so different.

At first, right after his relapse, visiting him was so emotion-laden that I might weep in the car most of the way home. The first time I saw him after six months of not knowing where he was, after his meth bender, I was shocked by his appearance. Gaunt, hollow eyes—they even appeared to have changed color from brown to almost black. His clothes looked as though he had just survived a ship wreck—torn and filthy. He was 27 but he looked 10 years older. Someone passing by asked him, “Hey Vince, who’s your date?” He didn’t like that.

I asked him if I could buy him a pair of jeans and he said, “Sure mom, but they have to be Lauren—Ralph Lauren.”

It was always the same routine. He didn’t use email or Facebook or talk on the phone; communications was solely by text. So I would text and ask if such-and-such a weekend would be good for me to come visit. Half the time he wouldn’t reply. Then I would text again a few days later, and a few days later, until finally I’d get a text back with him saying he’d dropped his phone in the river but he would love to see me.

When I arrived in town it was always awkward. He was usually working so I would have a burger and a beer. I always had the impression that he wished he could escape from me—to go use? I don’t know. He didn’t want money from me; he never asked for money and, after all, he was working full-time. When he lost his job I might take him shopping for clothes or buy him a contact lenses refill so he could see, but I never gave him money.

Wrench

We would go agate hunting. He would show me the home-made raft he and Seth had built out of empty industrial-sized ketchup tubs and duct tape. We’d go to the Amish market and make fun of their eye glasses, which were all the same steel-rimmed, round, and always smeary. We camped on Seth’s land with their group of friends. Vince would toss a ball for his dog, Willie, or play catch with one of his friends. One time someone had won a meat raffle and Vince roasted it all over the campfire and I gorged myself.

Bluebell

I would show up in my Mini with my Emporio Armani bags and my Murano glass beer bottle opener I’d bought in Venice.  These were almost like protective shields, as if they declared (again), “I’m not one of you hillbillies!”  (A friend in London works there and is my source for these sturdy plastic bags which are great for camping.  I am way too cheap to actually buy anything there.).

Seth talked nonstop, but Vince would say barely 20 words.  There was never any animosity, just an elusiveness. Who was he? What did he want in life? Was this it? Did he ever date? Did he wish he had kids? Would he ever go back and finish his degree? Did he ever think about buying a house?

BeardedOne

If I couldn’t contain myself and asked one of these questions, he would deflect it with a joke. When I left, he would hug me and say, “I love you mom.”

It got easier as time went by. And, I have to admit, once I gave up my vow to never drink in front of him, we all loosened up a bit.  Alcohol, such a time-honored stress reliever.

I came to feel proud of Vince.  He worked, paid his bills, paid taxes, had friends, had fun.  He seemed to have overcome the drug demons and was only drinking moderately.  Well, moderately for him.  For the umpteenth time, I was lulled into thinking it would stay this way forever.

VnMe

One Battle Won

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ANNE

As Vince has written, the tourist trade in Lanesboro dies off in winter, so he goes on seasonal unemployment. The State loads his weekly payment onto a debit card which is managed by Mega Bank. When he was arrested, he was no longer eligible to receive additional payments; fair enough. However, he still had a balance in his account, which he couldn’t access.

So I started calling Mega Bank. I will not bore you with the details of how much time I spent on hold, making copies, faxing and mailing and emailing the Power of Attorney form Vince had painstakingly found in the prison library, and doing it all over again because Mega Bank claimed they never received it, and so on. Months passed.

My friend Stephanie, who came with me to visit Vince, works for a big consulting firm. I said to her, “I feel so cynical! I wonder if big corporations ignore people like me until we give up, and then they keep the money, and all those tiny accounts add up …” She laughed and said I wasn’t being cynical at all, that that’s exactly what they do. They wait you out. They do nothing. They make a nice profit.

But I am a fighter. Hearing Stephanie’s take on it made me mad, which energized me. I called the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office. When a real person answered the phone and asked me to describe my complaint, I was tongue tied for a moment. “I…I wasn’t ready to talk … I’m not used to a government agency or company that actually answers the phone.”

The AG sent a letter to the CEO of Mega Bank, asking him to respond within five business days. Mega Bank ignored the letter. I don’t know what transpired after that but I received a check for $154.03 within a couple weeks. In particular, I’d like to recognize Joao Halab in the AG’s office for pursuing this on my and Vince’s behalf.

A hundred and fifty bucks may not sound like a lot of money, but it meant coffee and ramen and pens and paper to Vince. And to give Vince credit, he told me to keep $50 for m effort, which I did.

—

I’ve got other battles going as well. They are mostly internal ones; I am choosing not to expend my energy on them because I know I cannot win them.

I wrote that I have to move because I am being priced out of my apartment. I haven’t found a new place yet. It seems there are either spacious penthouses with doormen and champagne happy hours for $2,000 a month, or dark cramped rat holes for $800 a month, and not much in between.

My landlord has started showing my apartment, which amps up the pressure. I called a friend who lives in the building and asked, “Should I make a point of being home when they come in with the potential renters, so I can make sarcastic remarks about how they’re taking advantage of the economy to jack up rents?” She said NO without hesitation. I knew that was the right answer, but I needed to hear it.

But when I came home from seeing yet another “no-go” apartment, there were people in my living room. These potential new renters gushed about what a beautiful apartment I have. I kept my mouth shut.

The poor leasing agent is also being priced out of his apartment, which he’s been receiving as a benefit of being an employee, so he’s very sympathetic. He called me a couple hours later to say that a corporation had rented my apartment sight unseen but would be sending someone the next day just to verify the square footage. They’ll be using it to house MBA interns. I asked which company it was a company that makes industrial chemicals.

This is me a couple years ago reveling in the view from my apartment:

740View

—

My other internal battle is a February work trip to the Occupied Palestinian Territories. I can’t say much except that it adds inherent complicated stress and additional pressure to find a new apartment by the time I leave, because I’ll come back and need to move five days later.

 

Prison, Prison Everywhere, Part II

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ANNE

I have to move. The apartment vacancy rate in the Twin Cities is so low that landlords have the upper hand, and mine is taking advantage of that to raise my rent $307 per month. “It’s a business decision,” they say. “We realize some people will be priced out of the building.”

Some people. I’m one of those people.

My apartment has been my sanctuary for almost five years. But I work for a nonprofit, so I have to be realistic. I gave my notice and then started sifting through the over 16,000 apartment ads on Craig’s List.

—

At work, I get emails about prison all the time. One of our funders, the Open Society Foundations, draws my attention to a new federal report that reveals “near-unremitting abuse of juveniles held at New York’s Rikers Island jail.” Thank god Vince is 36 years old, big and tall, and he can look scary when he needs to. There was a second one from OSF about how the suicide rate for people held behind bars awaiting trial is 10 times that of the world outside. Delete.

There’s another one from an organization called Empathy, about prisoners in Uganda. Okay, once again, grateful that Vince isn’t in prison in Uganda. Yet another one from the National Academies Press announcing their new report, The Growth of Incarceration in the United States. And then there was this one, from Human Rights Watch, called The Human Rights Case for Drug Reform: How Drug Criminalization Destroys Lives, Feeds Abuses, and Subverts the Rule of Law.

I am researching a big foundation and find this article about one of the family members who was arrested on suspicion of possessing Class A drugs. During a search of the house, police found the body of his wife in their bedroom–she had died two months earlier. A coroner said that her death was as a result of “dependent abuse” of drugs.

Then I find the Public Welfare Foundation which, among its criminal justice interests, aims to “Reduce jail populations through the use of diversion at the front end of the criminal justice system that connects individuals with substance abuse disorders and mental illness to the public health system.” Well duh!

Then I stumble upon JustLeadershipUSA, an outfit with an “ambitious decarceration goal” because “Mass incarceration is the most significant domestic threat to the fabric of our democracy.”

I wonder, if all the money spent on reports and task forces glitzy websites and conferences and foundation executives’ salaries was used to fund treatment for low-income prisoners…nah! What a crazy idea.

Lastly, there is Richard Branson, chairman of Virgin Atlantic Airlines and Virgin Records, of all people, writing a blog about ending the war on drugs. All I can think of is the time a friend who travels more than anyone I know let me use 125,000 of her air miles and I flew business class from London to Minneapolis-St. Paul. I waited for my flight in Virgin’s Heathrow “Upper Class” lounge, as they call it there. The décor was fantastically posh and I discreetly gorged myself on smoked salmon and champagne, trying to act like I really belonged there.  

 

Welcome to Moose Lake

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VINCE

It all happened so quickly: Monday night they called my name for a red box; Tuesday morning I packed up all my stuff; and by Wednesday afternoon I was way up north in Moose Lake State Prison.

I’m excited.  I’m not being stored in a county jail.  For a few days, however, I am being stored in a segregation unit, by myself, without any of my property, until there is an opening in general population.  I don’t really get why they took me from St. Cloud if they had no room here.  But I’ll accept the time in seg if it means they’re giving me an early start to Boot Camp.  All of the people that had been approved for Boot Camp and were being transferred with me were scheduled to enter Boot Camp two months from now.  So I’m thinking, hopefully, that somehow I got bumped up.

—

I’ve been in seg 2 1/2 days now and I still haven’t been able to make a phone call.  It kind of pisses me off that they treat me like somebody that has gotten into a fight or has broken the major rules. Not the attitude I had when I arrived.  Being in solitude has definitely changed my opinion.  It makes no sense to me.  Why am I here?

—

This really sucks.  Friday night and at the very least I’ll be stuck here for the weekend.  I still have no idea when I will be able to use a phone.  The schedule said today, but nobody ever came to let me know when.

—

When I was in Hazelden in 2001, I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder, although I think if I knew the correct responses to their questions, I could have been diagnosed with excessive flatulence and dementia.  If it had a pill, it could be cured at Hazelden Center for Youth and Families.

Anyhow…my mother is the only one other than them to inquire of my mental stability, repeatedly.  Looking back at just the first page I wrote since my arrival in Moose Lake, I can see some big mood swings.  Naturally I can deduct that my emotional stability, or instability, is a product of my environment.  Makes sense, since I have been in some pretty shitty places, the segregation unit of Moose Lake State Prison being one of them.  If I were at Disneyland, I would not need pills.  Here, I need pills, right?

[ANNE: In the Department of Corrections handbook, under “Prison Lingo”, Segregation (solitary confinement) is defined as a “restricted living unit used to house offenders who have violated major rules.” The United Nations Convention Against Torture considers solitary confinement and indefinite detention to be forms of cruel and unusual punishment, if not torture. The US is one of the big offenders, along with Iran, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia. Thing is, those countries are known for locking up political dissidents and throwing away the key—it kind of makes sense even if it’s horribly wrong. Vince is a petty drug dealer.

As an introvert who loves spending time alone, I had to think through why solitary is considered a form of torture. It goes back to my Christmas Day post, where I wrote about how human connections, while they can be challenging, are the ultimate source of meaning in life. While I enjoy being alone, I have a choice about it, and I can pick up the phone and call a friend or go hang out in a coffee shop whenever I want to end my isolation.]

 

Prison, Prison Everywhere

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ANNE

There’s this phenomenon where, if something’s on your mind, it’s what you see everywhere you go. That’s how this prison thing has been for me. Why did I never notice before how the word prison comes up all the time, everywhere?

I open my little neighborhood newspaper and there’s a story about a local guy, a recovering addict who spent time in prison, just published a book called “Sobriety: A Graphic Novel” (Hazelden Publishing). The next week, there’s a story about a local woman who just published “A Mother Load of Addiction“. When her children were young adults, people would ask what they were doing. “I would say that my daughter was at college at St. Thomas and my son was at St. Cloud.” What she did not add was that her son was not at St. Cloud State University, but was serving time at the nearby state correctional facility for a drug-related holdup.

In my Sunday paper there’s an article about an old law that requires drug dealers to buy a tax stamp from the Minnesota Department of Revenue. Inside editorial by a judge who writes about mass incarceration, “There’s a problem, yes. Is it proof of racism? No. Are there solutions? Yes, but they shouldn’t involve an end to punishment.” The following week there’s an article about prison phone reform. “They’ve got the monopoly, so they charge whatever they want,” said one Minnesota mother, struggling to stay in touch with her imprisoned son.” Not me, but it could have been. Today there was a question in the advice column from a woman worried about her mom’s ex-con boyfriend being around her 18-month-old daughter. The columnist’s advice? “When it comes to baby proofing your house, I would put access to ex-cons at the top of the list.”

I turn on the radio in my car and it’s Back to the 80s day with Grand Master Flash’s White Lines (Don’t, Don’t Do It): “A street kid gets arrested, gonna do some time. He got out three years from now just to commit more crime. A business man is caught, with 24 kilos. He’s out on bail and out of jail and that’s the way it goes.” It’s a great tune, by the way.

I go to a party and everyone is laughing about the show Orange is the New Black. I’ve only seen the first season since I am old-school and still get Netflix DVDs. Hilarious! people say. Yes, it is funny, but not so much when you have an actual loved one behind bars. I didn’t see the end of the last season coming…it was really upsetting.

A local university announces it has a law professor named Mark Osler who has been chosen to join a team of experts screening 18,000 prisoners who applied to have their sentences commuted through Obama’s new drug clemency program.

I go to the Arrow Awards show. This is an hour and a half of British TV commercials and public service announcements that have won awards for creativity. Most of them are hilarious and I look forward to this bit of escapism every year. But then there is this one, where an ex offender is talking to a potential employer and you can hit the “skip” button.

I pick up a pile of old New Yorker magazines in the business center of my building—I like to cut out the cartoons and mail them to Vince, although they don’t always get through. In one, there’s a very long but fascinating article about the “alternatives-to-incarceration” industry. This is where private companies get paid to hound people who’ve failed to pay their parking tickets, for instance, piling on more and more late fees and fines until they’re on the verge of losing their homes.

These are just the prison references I come across in my home life. Work offers many more.

Sunny Day, Everything’s A-OK

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ANNE

I visited Vince again, for his birthday. This time a friend went with me and we made a day trip out of it. Stefanie brought a couple big bags full of toys and books that her granddaughters had outgrown, and handed them out to the kids in the prison waiting room, which I thought was touching and brilliant. The kids couldn’t bring toys into the visiting area, but they could play with them until they had to walk through the metal detector and the sea of bars.

Vince and I had a good visit, again, then Stefanie and I drove around, got turned around and lost a couple times, and discovered a nature preserve where we went for a long walk. It was a beautiful warmish day. I had brought a couple beers in the trunk and we hung out in a field and each drank one, and I smoked a cigar.

Below is a screen shot from the Minnesota Department of Corrections from their manual for families of incarcerated people. I just happened to find it about six months after Vince was locked up. I am listed as his next of kin / emergency contact or whatever in the DOC system. How hard would it have been for someone to send me a form email with a link to this?

kid

Some of the information would have been really useful, like knowing there’s an email system where I can send messages to Vince for 10 cents. Other tips, not so helpful, like the one about buying a cell phone with the prison area code so calls are cheaper. A friend of mine, whose son was also imprisoned, did this and then they transferred him without notice to another state and she was stuck with a second cell phone and call time she would never use.

I’m a highly resourceful person with unlimited internet and phone access. I have time to figure things out. But what about the mom who is now raising three kids by herself and working full time? No more second income or child support once the man is inside. Maybe no health insurance, car, etc. Certainly no help from a partner, if the guy was any kind of decent partner before he was arrested. I read the whole manual, finding some encouragement in the fact that the DOC seems to get how significant imprisonment is to a family.

It’s not just about locking up a bad guy, as they are so fond of saying in the media. It’s about all the people affected by it. If you’re interested, here is the Tip Sheet for Parents, the Tip Sheet for Incarcerated Parents, and believe it or not, the Sesame Street Handbook for Children Ages 3-8.

It would be funny if it didn’t involve real children. As a child who was lied to about the whereabouts and cause of my dad’s death, I appreciated the tip that encourages parents to talk openly about how the other parent is in prison, and to take the children to visit. This is because children will fill in any blanks with their imaginations, and what they imagine will be worse than the reality. I wouldn’t go that far—the reality is pretty awful and our society wants it that way because it’s punishment—but I am a big believer in being honest with children.

Now the section on Dating an Offender, that’s hilarious. Unintentionally so, but still. I know, I know; if I was dating an offender it wouldn’t be funny.

Dating an Offender

“If you are dating someone in prison, it may be difficult to really get to know the inmate. You may be the offender’s only connection to the outside world. The offender may lean on you more so than if you were dating on the outside. Therefore, your letters, visits, and telephone communications become very important to the offender. The offender may also depend heavily on you to send gifts, money or to do things you don’t really want or can’t afford to do. Try not to let the offender put pressure on you. Don’t focus only on the needs of the offender and don’t feel pressured into taking care of only his or her needs. Be sure to find time for yourself and keep a proper focus on your own needs and feelings. When you communicate with each other, try to talk about your past and your goals and hopes for the future. A more balanced relationship will help you decide if you want to maintain it after the offender is released.”