Tag Archives: parent-child relationships

Poppies of Expectation

There’s a saying: “Expectations are disappointments in the making.”

That sounds so cynical. And as with all self-helpy kinds of things, I had to struggle with this concept intellectually before I could accept and employ it.

Some expectations are reasonable. I expected Vince to graduate from high school. I was bitterly disappointed when he didn’t. In this case the saying still holds true but you couldn’t fault me for the expectation, right? It’s a pretty minimal one held by most parents. (Vince has since earned his General Equivalency Diploma and finished two years of college.)

But there are other expectations that are unreasonable.

Vince wrote numerous times from boot camp about how he had spent four hours scrubbing the baseboard in the gym, or all day moving manure from Point A to Point B, or how he made his bed with sharp corners and ironed his clothes with exact creases. This was not the Vince I knew from before boot camp. “Wow!” I thought, “How wonderful that he’s learned to be a perfectionist clean freak like me!” I looked forward to him moving in. It would be great to have someone else in the house who would wash windows, dust and vacuum, wash the car (and here I got really carried way), paint the spare bedroom, clean the spider webs out of the basement, tear up the old patio and cart all the bricks away, maybe even wallpaper the dining room!

Ha. Suffice it to say that none of those things has happened. And why should they? Vince met the expectations of boot camp because his freedom was on the line. I had never even voiced my expectations to him—I was barely aware of them myself.

The progress I’ve made is this: I used to be completely unaware of my expectations, then feel shocked when they weren’t met. Now I catch myself—maybe not in the moment but eventually—and I laugh at myself a bit. The only disappointment I feel is in myself, for having unrealistic expectations.

Vince will never be a neatnik like me, but he does clean up after himself. He takes out the trash and puts gas in the car when the tank is low. He picks up items at the grocery that I forgot to get the day before. He replaces the toilet paper when it’s gone. He makes ribs and bakes cookies and offers them to me. He pays rent. He works full time and volunteers at the Goodwill on Sundays. He exercises. He’s started his own blog. He’s going to meetings and has sober friends.

I still have thoughts like, “I hope he goes back and finishes his degree,” and “I hope he meets a nice girl and gets married and has kids.” I notice these thoughts. I name them as expectations. I am kind to myself. I acknowledge that they could happen but that there are no guarantees and that Vince’s designs for his future may not match mine. Just for today, I’ll be grateful for what’s right. I will not go romping into the poppy field of expectations and disappointments.

Jailbird Rock

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Wow! I got another enthusiastic email from JPay, whose slogan is, “Making it Easier.” I feel my blood pressure rise as I read that. Nothing—nothing—makes having a loved in in prison easier. And to the contrary, being ripped off in order to communicate with them adds financial strain on top of the shame, worry, anger, disappointment, and all the other negative emotions.

I will just repeat here what I wrote early on in this blog. When people said, “At least you know where he is, and that he’s got a roof over his head and three meals so you don’t have to worry about him,” my response was, “That’s true. There have been months and years when I didn’t know where Vince was and I worried myself sick imagining he was dead in a cornfield.

It was always that cornfield. Maybe, as a city person, it was my worst-case scenario. If I were going to be found dead, I would hope it was in my own home, fully dressed with my makeup on, after I had taken the empty wine bottles out to the recycling bins. I shudder at the image of being found dead in a cornfield, where in my imagination it is always winter and crows are circling overhead. Ugh.

All you have to do is watch the Prison Rape Elimination Act video to know that there is still plenty to worry about if your kid is in prison.

Back to JPay. Here’s what they say about video visits:

There’s nothing quite like seeing your loved one in person. Visiting them at their correctional facility, however, can often be difficult; the prison or jail may be far away, and the security procedures can be invasive. Sometimes there’s just no way to be there in person.

“When physical visits are impossible or inconvenient, JPay’s Video Visitation lets you talk face-to face with your incarcerated friend or relative from the comfort of your own home. When you can’t be there, this is the next best thing.”

Wow, it almost brings a tear to my eye, how compassionate they are and how they want to help! It’s almost like they know I was ejected from Moose Lake and banned from visiting my son for six months.

So, even though Vince is no longer incarcerated, I’ll share with you all the marvelous ways that JPay helps families stay in touch with incarcerated loved ones.

You could send them money so they can buy ramen and instant coffee—that’s only $9.95 per $100. You could buy one short email for $2.00. Or how about a first-class stamp? JPay charges 40 cents to buy a 49-cent stamp. That’s not a 9-cent discount, that’s 89 cents total for one stamp.

Finally, you could pay $9.95 for a 30-minute video visit.

This is new information to me; when I visited Vince the last time before he was released they were just rolling out this option and the rumor was that it would cost $99—not $9.95. So, my apologies to JPay—$9.95 is actually a bargain compared to taking the day off work and driving for four hours to make a physical visit.

But on this day, JPay was emailing me to say I could fund a media account with no fees for this one day. I could not figure out what a media account was; maybe it’s not available at the facility from which Vince was released. Again, they show hip, attractive, young people having a great time … listening to tunes, I guess.

And at the very bottom are Apple AppStore and Google Play buttons—are these corporate giants getting in on the easy cash to made off of prison families?

Mothers and Sons and Sibs

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Once a month or so since I started this blog, I’ve posted a roundup of all the prison-related news. Lately there has been a lull in the media, but not in my personal life.

I met a grade-school friend for dinner. Even though I have a constant desire to live somewhere else or to at least travel constantly, as I get older I’ve found I appreciate the old friendships more. We went to the same school, lived in the same neighborhood, spent a lot of time at each other’s houses.

And our sons have much in common. Over dinner, she told me the long story of his unraveling. To protect her privacy I won’t go into detail, but he is looking at some serious prison time—maybe 10 years. His circumstances didn’t come about over night; she’s been trying to balance support and detachment for 20 years. All I could do was empathize about how powerless and bereft she felt. She didn’t seem to feel the shame that was predominant for me when Vince was first imprisoned. I think she was too exhausted.

—

Another friend, whose son is a Lutheran version of Vince, called to say she had phoned the police to report her son acting threateningly. It took the police an hour to show up. They took him down to the station and she didn’t know what would happen and she asked if she could sleep on my couch in case they let him go, because she was afraid. I said of course. The police did let him go and there was more drama but in the end they both slept under her roof and no one was hurt.

—

Two professional colleagues have brothers who were recently jailed for Driving Under the Influence, neither one for the first time.

One asked me if I thought she should bail her brother out. In Alanon I learned not to give advice but to talk about my own experience and offer support.

“If you pay his bail,” I said, “expect to lose that money. And since he’s looking at 10 years inside, don’t be surprised if he goes on a major bender.”

“But he’s going to live in the family cabin in the middle of the woods, and he won’t have a car,” she said.

“Is there a riding lawn mower or an ATV there?” I asked, and we laughed because there is a riding mower at the cabin and she knows he would ride it into town to the liquor store.

—

A member of my own family spent time in jail recently. He managed to find an old grade school friend to bail him out.

Note to my grade school friend: If I ever wind up in jail I hope I can count on you to bail me out.

My relative is out now. He was ordered to undergo mental health and chemical dependency assessments as a condition of his release. This is a good thing but since he is homeless and unemployed and doesn’t have a vehicle, it’s hard to imagine how he will make it happen, even if he was enthusiastic about it, which he isn’t. He calls his mother and hangs up, or leaves messages which start out sweet then turn sarcastic when she doesn’t pick up the phone. She is doing a wonderful job of not reacting to him. But then, she’s had 30 years of practice.

It’s never, ever just the person sitting in jail who is affected, it’s the whole family. All the old narratives, grudges, and codependency kicks into overdrive. Mothers feel guilty. Fathers hide in their workshops. Step parents are often the most sensible ones because their identities aren’t hanging on the offender’s actions. Siblings are either overly involved, ordering everyone around like they have an invisible clipboard, or distance themselves even further from the family.

So what’s going on? Is it the full moon, the holidays, the dark cold season? Or because, like most people, I associate with people like myself?

Alone in the City of Dreaming Spires

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I spent Thanksgiving in Wisconsin with my cousins, which is what I do every year. Vince couldn’t come because he is not allowed to leave Minnesota.

After eating way too much food, I made the mistake of checking Facebook right before I turned out the light. There were a couple posts from Vince. He sounded so lonely.

I couldn’t fall asleep. I laid there thinking about the time I learned to be alone. I think this is one of the most important skills we have to master in life.

—

I had moved to Oxford, England four months before my birthday. I rented a house with a three-legged cat named McCartney and housemate who went home to Scotland every weekend. I had a great job. I had joined a posh gym. I had made some acquaintances through work and Alanon meetings.

This was before Skype or Facebook or What’sApp. My family and friends used email to communicate with me, but there was no internet at the house.

I don’t normally even care about my birthday. I hadn’t told my housemate or acquaintances it was my birthday because I didn’t want to seem like I was fishing for a fuss.

I walked into town to see a movie. February in England is dreary and drizzly. Well, most months are. In comparison to November, the sun was setting later (almost 5pm!) but the sky really only went from murky black to dark grey and back to murk again.

I got some popcorn and found a seat. Someone behind me said, “Pssst!” Hurrah! It was a friendly woman from my Alanon meeting named Rebecca. I wouldn’t spend my birthday alone after all! But she just said, “Nice to see you,” and that was that. I thought, unreasonably, “Why couldn’t she have invited me to sit with her and her friend?” I felt really put out.

The movie was Walk the Line, the Johnny Cash biopic. There’s a scene where Johnny is drying out and his family confronts a drug dealer with shot guns. The theater exploded in laughter. “Typical Americans!” I could hear around me.

I had picked a bad time to move to England. George W. Bush was using their air bases to transport terrorists and political prisoners in black helicopters, and most Brits were not happy about it. Most people were nice enough—if reserved—but I had been confronted by several very angry people who took me to task for everything my country had ever done wrong.

It really hit me that I was not only lonely but alone. I was on an island with 64 million people and I didn’t know a single one of them beyond asking the time of day. It was piercing.

I went home and had a few beers while I stared out the front window like some tragic heroine in a period movie. People strode past with their hands deep in their pockets and their heads down. I wallowed in self-pity. But somehow I knew I would get through it, that I wasn’t going to die of loneliness, that everything would change eventually—if not the next day then next week or next month. Everything did change. I’ve had a lot of great adventures on my own and with other people.

Now we can feel like we’re never alone by floating along on endless social media streams of cutsie platitudes and cat videos and political rants and “breaking news.”

—

Did Vince know that nothing stays the same forever? I finally fell into a worried, fragmented sleep. I dreamed that Vince fell into a river and was swept away into a big pipe. I ran along the river bank until I came to an opening in the top of the pipe. I could see his face underwater, looking up at me. The iron bars over the opening were wide enough for my hand to slip through so I could touch him, but too narrow for me to pull him through. Ugh. I woke up crying. I don’t need a psychiatrist to analyze that dream.

Free But Not Free

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After avoiding each other for a couple days—not easy to do in an 800-square-foot space—I offered to make dinner so Vince and I could talk and clear the air. “Unless u want me to write a letter to u instead,” I texted. No, he texted back, we can talk.

We started with a hug and “I love you.” It reminded me of our moments on the hug rug in prison.

He wolfed down his stir fry while I talked, then talked while I ate. We went through our lists of grievances. To my surprise I didn’t get defensive and he didn’t roll his eyes and walk out of the room.

The one thing I was nervous about was saying, “It is my house.” That’s a fact, right? But saying it would feel like I was lecturing a teenager. This was about my request that Vince ask me—or at least give me a heads up—when he was inviting people over—even family members. He responded that I had brought my friend Sarah home a few nights earlier without warning him.

“I didn’t even know who she was,” he said.

“Sarah? You don’t remember Sarah?” I asked. “We came down to visit you and we spent the day together picking agates. We had dinner at that nice restaurant where you ended up working….” Had he been high on something, all day and evening, and I hadn’t been able to tell? It didn’t matter now.

“It’s my house,” I said, and the world didn’t end. We agreed to have dinner together a couple times a week so we can talk things over on a regular basis instead of saving them up.

—

A few days later I texted Vince to ask if he’d like to eat lasagna with me that evening, and he replied that he just wanted to go home and go to be after work.

This is it. This is what they were talking about the day Vince was released, when they said that adjustment to life on the outside would be harder than anything they experienced in prison.

And now the weather has turned, to the cold, dark days of Minnesota winter. It’s hard for anyone to get up and leave the house when it’s dark as night and freezing drizzle, but Vince has to walk six blocks, take a bus and a train, then walk six more blocks to his job in the laminating factory. He still can’t cash his own paycheck because Wells Fargo requires two forms of ID, even for checks drawn on its own accounts.

—

There was an editorial and an article in the St. Paul paper about criminal justice system reform. At the end of a local forum, two mothers got up and spoke about the effects of incarceration on the family.

“There’s no help,” said one mother whose son had committed suicide at age 28 because he just couldn’t make it on the outside.

“There really isn’t,” said the second mother. One of her sons is schizophrenic, and thanks to her persistence he’s in a state hospital, not a prison. She faces eviction because her landlord won’t let her other son, newly-released on 10 years of probation, live with her. He was convicted of criminal possession of a firearm. If I was renting in her building and found out he had moved in, I’m sure I’d be unhappy.

These forums and op-eds are good news—there are reform efforts like this going on at the national, state, and local level, and that they have bipartisan support. But the words of these mothers weighs on me. Vince actually said the other day something like, “It would almost be easier to go back to prison that to be trapped on house arrest like this.” Ugh.

MUST be positive! Must make gratitude lists! Must not indulge in self pity! This too shall pass!

Only eight more months to go.

Geographic Cure, Denied

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We’re having a long, warm, sunny autumn here in St. Paul. I get outside as much as possible. I hike along the Mississippi River or go to a park and sit in my car with the sun on my face while I read or do a crossword puzzle. I even went camping in the middle of the week.

Well, it was cabin camping. A heated cabin with electricity. I went for a long hike along the St. Croix River then made a roaring fire outside the cabin. I drank some wine and read a book. It was soooo quiet. Lovely. It was just what I needed, but now it seems like a year ago.

I love being outdoors and I love to travel, but I am also a homebody. I’ve been trying to not be home as much as possible because things are tense. Sharing 800 square feet would be tough with anyone, but I am living with my grown son. No grown man wants to live with his parents.

And my grown son is newly released from prison and negotiating all sorts of challenges, like maintaining sobriety in the land of 10,000 liquor stores and bars. His time outside the condo is very limited and must be pre-approved. The probation agents have not come to the house lately, unless they’ve come in the middle of the night and I didn’t hear them. Apparently they are now showing up at his workplace and making him take urinalysis tests there.

He is working full time, volunteering, cooking, getting out into nature and exercising, and going to AA. He doesn’t complain. He doesn’t ask me for much. I thought things were going relatively well.

When there is something I don’t like, I’ve been direct—asking him to take off his shoes when he comes home, for instance. He always says okay.

He’s been mostly silent for weeks. It’s uncomfortable, but I figured he was going through lots of changes and it wasn’t about me. I figured if he had something to say he would say it. Then I discovered that he had said it, just not to me. Ouch.

I want him to have his say. I want him to speak up. This morning he took me to task for making noise in the kitchen while he was sleeping. His bedroom is on the other side of the wall from the garbage disposal…I got defensive at first, then apologized. I’m glad he said it to me, not to the spectators in the arena that is the blogosphere.

—

I interviewed for a job in London three weeks ago. Typical for a nonprofit, they wanted someone who could do at least three jobs in one. They wanted a researcher, a relationship/sales manager, a writer/editor, a trainer, and a budget/finance person all in one. Ideally, there would be a division of labor by people who are suited to and strong in different skill sets.

It was 10 days until I found out I didn’t get it, but it was 10 days of daydreaming. It was like having a “Move to London” lottery ticket in my pocket. I researched where the office was and looked at flats on Craig’s List. I mentally packed two large suitcases with everything I would need. Vince would, of course, stay behind in the condo and have all 800 feet to himself. We would get along great again, once I was 4,000 miles away. I would use every vacation day to travel, travel, travel. London would be such a great base! It would be so much easier to get to my long-haul bucket list destinations, like Australia, New Zealand, Japan, India, and all of Southeast Asia. Oh yes, and the job…of course the people would be easy to get along with and they would love my work and it would be cosmically fulfilling. Then after 3-5 years I would come home and semi-retire, just as Vince was getting married and wanting to buy his own place.

Yep, I had it all figured out. I probably dodged a bullet. But now what?

Jew Be a Verb

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ANNE

A story line throughout the third season of Orange is the New Black is the character Cindy’s conversion to Judaism.

The corporation that runs the prison is cutting costs by purchasing brown, lumpy slop in giant bags that they pass off as food. One prisoner figures out that the frozen kosher meals are pretty good, and soon a group of prisoners are claiming to be Jewesses in order to eat kosher.

When the prison notices the uptick in kosher requests, it sends in a rabbi to suss out who is a genuine Jew. Cindy, who is Black, begins to read up on Judaism. At first she just wants to pass so she can keep eating kosher. But then something grabs her, and as she studies she becomes serious about converting to Judaism, and well, this is one of the few happy endings in the series. It wouldn’t be a happy ending to born again Christians, and we Jews aren’t in to converting people, but I am moved when anyone finds meaning.

I heard in this scene many of the same things that led me to Judaism. Like Cindy, I was raised in a faith in which pretty much Everything was A Sin, and fear and guilt ruled the day. You didn’t ask questions, you did what you were told by the men who ran the show, some of whom were molesting your friends. If you sinned, you went to this same man to ask forgiveness and it was granted by him and after I mumbled three Hail Marys.

—

I think there’s a perception that Judasim is just like Christianity, except without Jesus. It’s not.

In liberal Judaism, which includes the vast majority of Jews in the world, there is no hell and little emphasis on sin. The idea is to do the right thing today, because it’s the right thing—not to avoid hell. If you screw up, it’s your responsibility to make amends to whoever you have hurt and to make your peace with God, if you even believe in god, because a lot of Jews are atheists. Confused? Well in Judaism it’s your responsibility to study, ask questions, and wrestle with all the big issues to figure out what makes sense for you. No one tells you what to think or do. Rabbis, who include women and gays and lesbians, are teachers and have no authority to forgive you.

Judaism doesn’t prosthelytize. We don’t care if you agree with us or not; we don’t care if you are a Christian or a Buddhist or a pagan. Just don’t try to convert us, thanks.

Instead of using the word charity, we talk about justice. It’s not an option, and it’s not about writing a check. It’s about doing, fighting, and pursuing justice. These principles are one reason why I’ve been able to look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from all sides.

Of course there are plenty of Lutherans and Catholics and pagans and agnostics who are also motivated by social justice.

There’s more, but like Cindy, the main thing that attracted me to Judasim was an inexplicably strong feeling of recognition. Like Cindy said, “I feel like I found my people.”

After I had studied for several years with a Rabbi and a group of fellow seekers and yes, learned elemental Hebrew, I converted—which is a five-minute ceremony. My mother attended the Friday night service in which this took place. Just before we left for synagogue, she said, “I guess it makes sense, you converting to Judaism, since your father’s family was Jewish.”

What!? She had known I was studying all along. She didn’t have any details, and since my dad died 47 years ago and we’re not close to his family, and I have no time or patience for family tree research, it will just remain a question mark.

When I told a rabbi this story once, she said that she hears stories like this often, and that there is a theory that all the Jewish souls lost in the Holocaust have sought refuge in the people who are converting, whether they’re in prison (Cindy) or are unwed teenage moms living in subsidized housing (me, nearly 40 years ago).

A Cell is a Cell is a Cell

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ANNE

Is there such a thing as prison-phobia? If so I’ve got it. After nearly two years of thinking, reading, talking, and writing about prison, I have an irrational fear of ending up in inside myself.

Just for the record, I have not broken any state, federal, or international laws.

However, just last night I was reading the novel, “Go Tell It on the Mountain” by James Baldwin. In it, a character is minding his own business when a two robbers being chased by the police come running along and stand next to him, catching their breath. He is arrested with them and beaten mercilessly in an attempt to get him to confess, which he doesn’t. He is eventually released, but he slits his wrists the next day because he is so traumatized by the experience.

Did I mention he is black and the cops are white? Does this sound familiar? The book was published in 1953. Sadly, some things don’t change.

So that scenario is not likely to happen to me, but phobias are irrational, not rational.

I was also freaked out by the third season of Orange is the New Black. I won’t give away what the last scene of the last episode sets up for the inmates, but it had something to do with crowding/lack of privacy and it really hit a nerve.

—

My cousin, Molly, and I have talked over the years about buying a piece of land overlooking the St. Croix River and building a retirement community of tiny houses. You know, these are the 250- to 400-square-foot houses (75-122 square meters) made of beautiful woods and lots of clever features to store stuff and make the most use of the space. The idea is, you can have a paid-off house, live in the country, and feel good about yourself because you aren’t destroying the planet by consuming as much as the average new home built in America, which as of 2013 was nearly 2,500 square feet (762 square meters)!

Then Molly sent me this article, “Dear People Who Live in Fancy Tiny Houses” and it killed my dream:

What if you’re having a shitty day and you just want to be alone? You can’t be alone, right? Because your partner or children are sitting two to ten feet away from you at all times. Don’t you feel like a rat trapped in a cage? Don’t you ever want to turn toward your lover or spawn and shout, “Get out! Get out of my tiny house!”

The condo Vince and I are sharing is 800 some square feet. So it’s not the tiniest, but there are privacy issues. When the other Molly—Vince’s girlfriend—is over, I’m sure he wishes I would disappear. I wish I could kick back on a Friday night and watch my geek-ola shows like the PBS News Hour and Washington Week in Review with a couple glasses of wine, but I can’t.

On the whole, things are going well with us, at least from my perspective. But I have mostly lived alone since Vince left home 20 years ago, so it’s an adjustment.

Breaking Free, Mom-Only Version

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ANNE

It’s been nearly two months since I’ve written a post. For those of you who began following this blog recently, I’m Vince’s mom. He and I co-wrote this thing for a year. I had been posting every other day for over a year. He sent me hand-written pages and I typed them and posted, alternating between his content and mine.

When Vince was released from prison, I checked with him every other day: “Do you want me to write a post?” and he’d reply, “No, I’ve got it covered.” I asked him several times to give me a couple days’ notice if he wasn’t going to post on a given day.

I winced at his typos and sloppy spacing. But Breaking Free was his blog too, and he was really unloading some powerful content—stuff he had not been free to write about in prison, some heavy experiences and emotions.

It was kind of a nice break for me. Vince wrote that he wanted to take his writing in a different direction, and I started thinking about what else I might blog about eventually—maybe something fun like travel.

I felt blindsided when I read his post in which he announced that he was done with the blog—right now—for personal reasons. I have no idea what the personal reasons were. When I tried to discuss it with him he said, “You weren’t writing anything anyway.” Aargh.

I was pissed. I was hurt. He hadn’t given me a heads up, so I had no content ready. And when there’s no posting on a blog, readership falls off quickly. I had invested over a year of my life in conceptualizing what the blog would be, figuring out the technology, keeping it fed, and getting the word out about it. I watched as the readership stats shriveled with each passing day of inactivity. It was like sitting by the bedside of a dying loved one, patting his/her hand, and feeling powerless to do anything.

I was waiting for inspiration (and time) to write. Then I read one of those Facebook quotes—it was by Albert Einstein or Fred Flintstone or a maybe a fortune cookie—something like, “If you wait for inspiration you wait in vain.” That snapped me out of my procrastination and resentment. Hey, whatever works.

Co-blogging with Vince created a natural cadence, a tension, and a story arc that was a pleasant surprise. I’m not sure how it’ll go with just me, but we’ll find out.

A Break from Breaking Free

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ANNE

Vince says he’s hit a wall with the blogging, and I need more than 10 minutes notice to come up with new material. After over a year of blogging and nearly 200 posts, I’d say we’ve earned a break.

We’ll be back. If you haven’t yet binge read the thing from the beginning, start here and click on the right-pointing arrow at the bottom of each post to proceed. Feel free to share with others, and thanks for reading.