Prison Baby

by Deborah Jiang-Stein

  I turn and step into the door threshold, try to enter this five-by-eight-foot room, my first home. There’s just enough space for a table, chair, and bed. I stand in the doorway and the cell soothes me like a scene in the dollhouse I played with as a girl. My home, this cell. I slept in here, ate, crawled around. My body melts, relaxes into a comfort like nowhere else before.

  Go in, step in there.

  My skin starts to itch, panic stirs in my gut. I tell myself, Go!

  I shake my head. I can’t. I blank out, then soar back in time to the moment in the middle of the night when someone snatched me from my mom’s bed.

  Part of me yearns to dive onto the coarse tungsten-colored blanket, bury my face in the bed, and cry. I don’t, but now I wish I had. I missed my chance to turn around and wave bye.

  Was there nothing to keep my prison mom clean, the way I found motivation? Why didn’t she fight to stay out of prison, to stay clean from addiction, to begin a new life? Why couldn’t she do what I did? Why didn’t she? Couldn’t she see any choices or chances? What if she’d quit drugs, stayed out of prison so she could look for me, find me, stay with me?

  She didn’t get the chance to read any of the poems and stories I wrote as a kid or sit in the front row at my dance and piano recitals. She missed the times I fell into hell, and she couldn’t teach me her street savvy, how to run from the cops or hunt the streets for the dealer who passed me bad dope. She wasn’t around when I passed out drunk or for the day I cleaned up. She missed it all.

  I am sad we missed out together when my name changed from Madlyn to Deborah.

  Sad she missed when I learned to dress myself, to tie my shoes.

  My first bike ride, the skinned knees I got from roller-skating down the front steps.

  Brushing my hair, then braiding it to keep strands out of my eyes.

  The day in sixth grade when I had to squint to see the blackboard, then learned I needed glasses.

  The first time I got my period.

  My first date.

  My high school graduation.

  Missed when I learned to stand up straight, shoulders back, so people think I’m confident even when I’m not.

  Missed the chance to see my profile like hers.

  I’m sad she couldn’t show me how to make the cowlicks in my hair, also hers, act right.

  How to salve my dry ashy skin.

  How to tame the restless tiger inside.

  How to cool the blaze in my chest from so many years of masked pain.

  She missed my telling of this story.

  Then I remind myself—“if only” doesn’t go anywhere.

  She just didn’t.

  Some people shoot heroin, others overdose on shame, guilt, and secrets. I’d lost myself in all of it. Drugs were never social entertainment for me; alcohol never just a beverage. They served as my anesthesia, a patch, medicine, healing, freedom. And then, near-death. Drugs ruined my every relationship, every corner of my life, because my one true love ruled—alcohol and drugs. I’d hoped this voyage to my homeland would be a tonic in my healing and forgiveness.

  Right before I leave the prison’s administration building, the warden’s assistant waves me into her office. She hands me an inmate bulletin typed on coarse beige newsprint, one page tabbed with a two-inch cutout sketch of a baby.

  “Open it,” the warden says, her eyes warm, almost teary.

  I read,

  Further down the hall we’re met with gales of laughter and we fought our way in to greet the bubbling, bounding debutante of the compound. The little dark-eyed witch Stromboli, 5 months old, weighing 13 lbs. She is already sporting argyle socks. Her given name is Madlyn Mary but no one seems to remember it. Even Margo, a personality kid herself, has a hard time recalling it. We left laughing, who could help it, behind the force of such a dynamic duo.

  MY NAME! MADLYN MARY. There, in black and white, evidence of us together. Even though I learned my name earlier, now it feels real. I run the words over my tongue and imagine our time together in prison, my mom and I, her whispers—Madlyn. My whole body floods with a warm gush of assurance.

  It’s the end of my tour and the warden walks me to the front of the compound where her house sits near a white picket fence around a four-foot-square grassy area. Inside the fence, six tiny grave markers topple sideways. Bits of moss creep up the white granite.

  Her voice softens, almost to a whisper. “These babies didn’t make it. You were one of the lucky ones.”

  I reel inside, ready to break. How did I end up as one who survived?

  I feel a glimmer of a miracle, how I’d survived against so many odds, beginning on day one of my life. But I don’t have time to linger in reflection for long. It’s time for my tour to end and the warden leads me farther down the hill. I thank her, we shake hands, and I walk through the prison gates.

  Before I drive off in my rental car, I stand in the parking lot and turn to face my first secret—my prison birthplace. The humid air tastes sweet, almost like someone baked bread far off across the Appalachia hills. I feel raw and powerful, as if I can take on anything now, strong right into my muscles like I could lift the asphalt full of cars. For the first time, feeling this exposed gives me hope instead of panic and terror. I’ve waited my entire life for this—the return, the hope, the dream of my prison.

  I drive away, the prison at my back. I’ve faced my biggest stigma but still don’t want to share it with the world. I haven’t told my family about my visit to the prison, and informed just a handful of friends.

  All this changes three months later when a radio producer calls and leaves me a voice mail.

  CHAPTER 15

  THE BABY BOOK

  WORD ABOUT ME, ABOUT “THE WOMAN born in prison,” had spread among wardens, and one tells a reporter about me. She wants a story. But I’d just started to sort it out for myself.

  “Deborah, we’d like to interview you inside your birthplace, in your birth mom’s prison,” a producer from a public radio station says in her voice mail.

  It’s my prison too.

  When I don’t call her back, her message the next week tugs my heart.

  “We’ll air the show on Mother’s Day.”

  “I . . . need time,” I say when I call back. “I’ll think about it.”

  MY FIRST RETURN to my prison leaves me with so many treasures, like a vase of clear water, sweet with a most precious bouquet inside. I need to take in its scents, take time to lift each flower, examine it up close and pull its petals apart. I need to absorb the potency of my return, integrate what I’d stashed in the recesses of my brain for two decades. I’d rediscovered the beginnings of my life inch by inch and renewed the bond to my time with my prison mom. But the sweep of stigma about my prison birthplace feels like terrain covered with cactus. I need to deal with it if I want to cast it off.

  I need time.

  I still don’t feel whole. After a lifetime of curiosity, of “I need to discover more,” I need even more, not only information but just more. One place to turn—the Feds. Go to the source. Nothing stops me when I’m on a mission.

  After my visit to the prison, I petition the Federal Bureau of Prisons in Washington, DC, for my prison mom’s file. The privacy officer in DC calls to follow up: “This’ll take some time. My job is to read each page and block out any identifying names.”

  “How long?” I ask and give him a brief one-liner about the urgency. I’ve waited forever to know about my prison story.

  “First,” he says, “I must finish another request. I’m in the middle of a privacy review for Al Capone’s file. Could take me a month, maybe longer.”

  Al Capone! I’m right after one serious gangster. Something felt appropriate in this.

  One month after I mail my notarized request, a six-pound package of nine hundred pages from the Department of Justice arrives via overnight delivery. Every typed page is marked up with thick black-felt-pen strikeouts to block names and dates. These pages reveal what I never
imagined. Before the Bureau removed me from prison, I’d lived with my birth mother for almost a year. A year! Her cell, my nursery. Her bed, did it serve as my crib?

  Everything I absorb from her files begins to fill in the blank slate about the woman I’ll never hear tell her own story. I glimpse into her soul through typewritten forms, through the eyes of prison officials and caseworkers and piles of letters she wrote about my custody. All her files, they waited for me because she couldn’t.

  “We never keep these detailed files,” my contact at the Bureau says. “I’ve no idea how these stayed in storage.”

  Well, I know why. They’re meant to fill the void I’ve carried, to fill the boulder-sized hole in my heart. Good or bad, I’m ready to hear it all. Hit me with the worst of it, because I’ve already staggered over the coals.

  Addiction Data: Drug dependence. Morphine, heroin, cocaine. Reason for beginning: she states for curiosity sake. She uses heroin and morphine daily, five shots per day. Needle scars on left wrist. The patient states she’s been vomiting. Court recommends consideration for parole when cured however she has no insight into her use of drugs and very little desire to remain off of them.

  I’m dying inside. Tears drip onto the paper. She’s in withdrawal and who’s taking care of her? I wipe the page with my shirtsleeve. Don’t want to spoil my treasured documents. She’s locked up—does anyone notice she needs help? Or does someone just clean up her puke and leave her to retch again, over and over until the demon crawls out of her?

  Needle scars on left wrist . . . same place as my tattoo, the five-pointed star inked into me at some beachside dive in San Diego after I left home.

  Sixth of seven children, her father a carpenter of good repute, made adequate living and parents interested in children but weak in discipline. Attended various public schools. Completed 10th grade. A problem from second grade on, taunting, lying, bluffing, defiant.

  Hmm, defiant. Maybe I learned this from her. And from the second grade. Wow, earlier than when I started.

  Reported to Juvenile Court by school and police dept. Sent to reform school for a year, paroled one year later. Worked for Boeing Aircraft for two months, then given business training, completed her course, worked for one month until arrested on suspicion of relapse to drugs. Multiple arrests for drunk [sic] and fighting in the street. Given a probation sentence and released, relapsed at once to the use of drugs.

  Oh, I know this one, tough to quit.

  Incident after incident, each description excites the rebel in me. But . . . she’s a mother, my mother. Am I in earnest proud of her or just afraid to make any judgment?

  She was assigned to the prison laundry, an average worker, seemed interested in her work, and had a good attendance record. She stated how working in the laundry she became nervous, upset, and it seemed to her she was going to break down. She shirks work. She has canceled Typing class because of nerves. In all her classes she is respectful and cooperative, but impulsive.

  Impulsive—my middle name. I’ve battled this my whole life and here it is in black and white. Did it come from her?

  Of high average intelligence however it is felt the diagnosis of emotional unstable personality can be made. She has been addicted to narcotic drugs since the age of eighteen years and the prognosis for permanent drug abstinence is considered to be hopeless.

  Hopeless? Who says this about a person? About my Margo mother? No one is ever hopeless. The nerve.

  Then, a series of other incidents:

  Officer called to her several times but she paid no attention and became quite angry and threatened to do something drastic if the officer embarrassed her before the girls again. Contraband razor blades and one penny found in room. At dinnertime she left the mess hall and slammed the door behind her because she was not satisfied with the peas and spread served in place of the potatoes, which were not done. Taken to seclusion.

  Multiple times, her reports say, “Good time withheld for month of _______,” or, “Taken to seclusion.” Over and over the phrases appear: “Reasons checked below: Failure to follow directions.” “Lack of concentration.” “Warned time and time again.”

  I can’t stand it. She’s in the Hole. I start to calculate her total time in solitary confinement but quit, the idea so unbearable. Every month for a week or two at a time, she’s in isolation. She’s stubborn. Maybe I like the stubborn part, I don’t know. I’m a mess of confusion about it all, lost in this fairy tale.

  Fight! I want to yell at her, and at the same time, Get it together, woman!

  I turn to a new section in this foot-high pile of documents. I pump my lungs full of air, as if I’ve been trapped for hours without oxygen in a coal mine, and read further.

  Since the admission of this inmate, her adjustment has been stormy. She has a long sentence to serve and faced with the prospects of giving birth.

  My throat clogs, my heart chokes me, way up out of my chest into my neck and mouth. I can’t breathe. Here it is, my story, the beginning of the voyage into sorrow. The saga of Madlyn to Deborah begins.

  She recently attempted to smuggle a letter out of the hospital which she had written to [blocked] urging her to write the institution, telling us, “You will come here and take the baby. Tell them you will whether you will or not.”

  She’s still on the scam, trying to work the system, and now it’s about me. What mother wouldn’t, though?

  At no time has she been above board regarding her plans for the future of the child she was carrying at the time she was received at this institution. At times she indicates she wanted the expected child to be immediately placed for adoption, however, each time when approached regarding the matter for a definite plan she would then become emotional and state she hoped to make plans for some member of the family to take the child and keep it for her until her release.

  I continue to read and turn each page as if I’m pulled into the middle of a good book I don’t want to end, in the middle of a fable, a myth, not real, none of it. The Legend of the Baby Born in Prison and the Inmate Mother Who Would Not Let Go.

  However, she was outspoken in her statement she would not release the child for adoption but just for a foster home placement. In the meantime, she has changed her mind and did not want the child to leave the institution.

  “The child.” “The baby.” Use my damn name. Just because she’s an inmate with a number doesn’t mean we don’t have names.

  And “Did not want the child to leave”? Then what was in her mind? Did she want us to serve her sentence together?

  When Martha was advised of the plans and the arrangements made, she became upset, disturbed, emotional, and did everything she knew to delay the removal of the child from the institution.

  I knew it. She loved me and hung on for dear life, our dear lives.

  She refused to sign the temporary custody forms and became belligerent when told this would not delay the child’s removal from the institution.

  That’s it, fight for me, mama.

  She was also of the opinion if she signed the papers, her baby would be taken from her by the Courts. She wrote the Director of the Bureau of Prisons a letter and told him she was not letting the baby leave the institution and requested that plans for the removal of the baby be postponed.

  Straight to the top, right to Washington, DC, to make her plea. Go for it, Martha Prison Mama.

  But she loses her case. Loses me. And I lose her, everything I needed, all I ever needed. Lost.

  And then this:

  She talks a lot about her baby and her plans for the child if she can again obtain custody of her when she is released. She has been allowed the company of the other girls because of her baby being removed from the institution.

  She has no insight, is unstable, and is selfish. She has done a lot of thinking, whether all of it has been constructive thinking or not. At times she still indicates she is interested in the child’s welfare, she does not want to lose custody of the child and is strong in her sta
tement that she plans to make a home for the child upon release. She was sincerely fond of her child and has given much thought to it.

  My body doesn’t have enough space inside for the grief. I’m about to blow up, smithereens of me blasted out the sliding-glass door of my third-floor apartment onto the rush-hour street below. One long, deep wail courses out of me, no tears, just this animal sound I’ve never heard before.

  I turn to the next page in my baby book, these treasured details about my start in life. No pink-bowed baby journal with fluffy cloud stickers to decorate the front cover, these Bureau of Prisons documents record my infant life like no baby book I’ve ever seen.

  The Welfare Department stated they had continued to work closely with Madlyn and pleased to state she was doing well. Madlyn is developing into a beautiful child who is adjusting marvelously in the foster home in which she is placed. In a recent psychological report, Madlyn showed she is indeed a child with high average development at this time. The psychologist added that her unusual spontaneity and vitality react to a wide range of situations and suggests she may be brighter than the present test score. She has, therefore, been highly recommended for adoptive placement.

  Every neuron crackles under my skin. I’m outside my body. Noooo, don’t lock down inside, not now.

  They realize this would be a painful procedure for Martha but at the same time stated they must think primarily of the future of this child. Martha has been indifferent to any work other than to care for her baby. She is our worst housekeeper, has accumulated so many things—baby clothes included—that the room is an untidy mess most of the time.

  She has settled down materially and appears to be growing up and gaining insight. Of course, in matters pertaining to Madlyn, it is hard to have a true perspective while confined in prison. Matters of this kind cannot be judged fairly when you are not free to do and say as you would in a normal free environment. Martha has a feeling of guilt over having given birth to Madlyn in prison.