Prison Baby

by Deborah Jiang-Stein

  “Childhood trauma in the first years,” they tell me, “overstimulate and enlarge the amygdala, the part of the brain which processes emotion.”

  It’s like I’m in a science class, but I also recognize I need to address my thinking and behavior. I’m afraid of myself right then.

  “This part of the brain controls impulses and processes memories of emotions,” they say.

  Oh hell. I recall the multiple broken attachments and severed bonds I experienced as a child. Then we discuss my discovery of The Letter.

  “The shock and trauma pitched you into a tunnel of dissociative amnesia,” the counselors say.

  The lockdown, my emotions blocked and separated from my body.

  “Overdeveloped fight or flight or freeze instinct,” one of the professionals says.

  They suggest I have PTSD, which started, they say, in my infancy. Lots of people heal from PTSD, though.

  There’s more. “Most likely you arrived in your adoptive home with RAD,” one of the counselors goes on. “Reactive attachment disorder.”

  The word disorder sounds like a prison sentence.

  As one of the counselors explains more about this, I’m dazed. “It’s a rare and lifelong condition,” she says. “And it can permanently change a child’s brain in development and hurt her ability to establish future relationships. Often caused by early separation from a birth mother, a child learns subconsciously it’s dangerous to attach.”

  Yikes, it’s all there, I think. It’s more and more clear what damage those early years caused. But I don’t accept it because I’m sure I’ll overcome it all.

  Signs of RAD in toddlers and children include withdrawal from others, aggressive behavior towards peers, masked feelings of anger, and, the counselor adds, “Watching others closely but not engaging in social interaction, preferring not to be held and to play alone.” On and on, and it all rings true.

  “A lifelong challenge,” the counselor stresses.

  Yet I’m almost relieved because now I understand more about my past.

  STUDIES SUGGEST THAT chronic intrauterine exposure to heroin causes hyperactivity, a brief attention span, and delayed cognitive, perceptive, and motor skills, as well as other developmental delays such as hypersensitivity to light, sound, and touch. Does this explain my sensory jitters as a girl? Maybe it does explain the occasional pinball of language and sound inside me where at times it’s too much for me to drive and talk at the same time, and at other times, when sound and light bounce in a battle for my attention during a group conversation.

  More pieces fall together for me during my consultations with childhood specialists. Since every drug a pregnant woman ingests passes from her bloodstream through the placenta to the fetus, drug addiction in a mother causes addiction for the baby. After birth, with the drug no longer available, a baby’s central nervous system becomes overstimulated and causes withdrawal symptoms, which can last for two to six months.

  I learn how the brain of a deeply traumatized child needs repair over a lifetime, if it’s possible. I’d already conquered one: my reaction to the smell of airplanes and the big vomit scenes when I travel. The olfactory bulb communicates right into the amygdala and hippocampus, the latter responsible for associative learning. Both are part of the brain’s limbic system, an area connected with memory and feeling, sometimes called the “emotional brain.” It’s all tight wiring and explains a lot of my past.

  The sense of smell often calls up powerful responses and memories in an instant from conditioned past experiences. When we smell a new scent, we link it to an event or a person, even to a moment. Our brains forge a bond between the smell and a memory. When we encounter that smell again, the link is built in, ready to provoke a feeling or association. It’s common for smells to call up childhood memories because we encounter most new odors in youth, though studies show we begin to form associations between smell and emotion before we’re even born. Infants who were exposed to drugs, alcohol, or cigarette smoke in the womb show a preference for these smells. Even for garlic. Such smells might upset another baby, but to the initiated, they’re normal smells, even comforting.

  This all explains my nausea on airplanes, the association with the Big Escape.

  “Babies who suffer from heroin withdrawal also struggle with eating difficulties, overstimulation, and irritability,” a counselor tells me.

  I suck in deep breaths. This was me. She’s described my parents’ concerns about our first years together.

  “They’re difficult to console or comfort.”

  My heart pumps full with a burst of pain. I don’t think about how I needed comfort. Poor Mother, I couldn’t hug her. Wouldn’t.

  If only, if only . . . my parents had been informed, our relationship and my childhood could’ve been so much easier. But now I understand “if only” doesn’t go anywhere. I need to reframe my view of the past with a new perspective through a different lens.

  I’VE SWITCHED FROM the addict outlaw to a hands-on mom. When my girls reach elementary-school age, I arrange play dates and sleepovers for them. Or we pile together into the car and go to the park, where we zoom down the slide and I push them sky high on the rope swing. Other times I sit in parent-teacher conferences and feel clueless.

  As they’ve gotten older, I oversee their Facebook usage and monitor PG movies. I take my daughters to dance performances, concerts, and museums. Instead of a middle-of-the-night run to the dope dealer, I grab my kids on a Sunday afternoon and after a lunch of buttered noodles, their favorite too, we visit Veiled Lady and stroll the museum. We hold hands, and even though I have my two daughters, I long for my mama sometimes. I know she’s with us in spirit.

  We sit down together for family meals, though not formal or as long as my childhood dinners. Other moms at the school ask how I’ve taught my children such disciplined study habits, and I just grin. I don’t know how, but I know why—I’m haunted by the idea that my kids might run crazy like I did.

  One afternoon, I pick up my daughters from school. “We’re off to Mexico,” I say.

  The beach and anywhere on the water is still a place I always long for, and my kids now share this after our travels to Cape Cod, Sanibel, Southern California, the Oregon and Washington coasts, and now Mexico.

  They both jump forward in their seats, eyes aglow. “When?” they ask.

  “Now!”

  They yelp all the way to the airport and the beam never leaves my face. How life can change. My last visit to Mexico, I crossed the border with a car full of weed, bags of coke and white crosses, and a switchblade and gun under my seat. I never thought I’d say it, but now I carry something much more precious than drugs in my car.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CURIOUS AND WITH PURPOSE

  If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself. If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation. —Lao Tzu

  THE DAY WE ENTER THIS WORLD and the day we discover our purpose—these two moments bind our lives to meaning. Through the evolution out of my past, I felt adrift at sea. What do I do with my life now? More than anything, I’ve used my curiosity to find purpose in life. I look for humor and fun as much as I search for serious meaning. I still roller-skate and dabble in the bass guitar, and I love boxing. Laughter and play fuel me for the long journey. And there’s always the beach.

  Much of my drive for curiosity comes from my parents, most of all from my mother, who would urge me to notice the world around me, to look for the beauty in everyday life. Together, curiosity and the thrill of adventurous living push me through loss and uncertainty and into contentment, and often joy.

  Just in recent years do I hear my mother’s voice follow me around with its reminder “Look around,” as she’d say on Sunday drives to the Japanese garden in Seattle. She’d call attention to the quiver of dry grasses in a breeze or a hummingb
ird in its hover around sugar water in our kitchen-window feeder. She encouraged me to pay attention to details around us the times she joined my father’s and my excursions to the public market on Seattle’s waterfront. “Look at the red on this pomegranate,” I remember her saying. Or, “Do you like this texture?” and she’d pick up an artichoke. She’d wrap her arm around my shoulder and we’d lean together to watch birds squabble and peck for crumbs at the market entry.

  I recall one day on a walk by the market through the park where a lot of homeless people stayed, and she pointed out the beauty of the lines in an old woman’s hands, folded across her lap. While my mother showed compassion, I also learned another lesson from her about inequities in life.

  Just in recent days I’ve recalled her letters from the ten or so years I was estranged from my parents, after I’d moved out at seventeen, when, as Mother called me, I was a hoodlum. She’d write to me in her minuscule fountain-pen script, “Send me a note, write anything. Tell me what the sky looks like at night or about the fall leaf colors.”

  I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I started to “look around,” yet over time, my view of the world changed. Curiosity replaced my life of drugs, crime, and thrill seeking. It’s this curiosity about the world and other people, this need to explore outside of myself, that saved me. Rather than holding onto an apathetic and stagnant world view about my surroundings, I focus on the next best step, excited about the unknown even if I’m afraid of it. Whatever it is, I take a step. Whether it’s forward or even a step to the side or backward, I step.

  My mothers, each in a different way, taught me to embrace life and to stand strong when the world shakes. I’m grateful to my prison mom for the spirit of this tug of opposites and how it stirs in me. From her, beyond the addiction we shared, beyond the year in prison, I inherited a restless, wild fire that burns in my soul, one I’m sure she also carried.

  My whole life I’ve wrestled with my prison roots, my adoption, and my identity. But don’t we all tweak our identity a bit as we go along? A new relationship, marriage, divorce, the death of someone we love, birth, adoption, financial or job change, a move to a new city—every part of the life cycle is a chance for personal transformation. I learned this the hard way as I dismantled myself, brick by brick, until I could look through new eyes, something that took decades after I’d read the letter and drank the Kool-Aid of secrecy and toxic shame. I’d committed emotional suicide. After everything, I needed to take control of my own identity because chronic suffering is a place with no future and staying there was slow death.

  THE ONCE-MUTE GIRL who shunned attention, I begin a career as a public speaker. The stage terrifies me. Why would I put myself in the position I’ve hated all my life: people looking at me. My eleven-year-old daughter finds her own wisdom in my journey. One day I pick her up after school and we discuss my return to prisons as a speaker. She says, “I think it means your spirit is free.”

  Public speaking pushes me past my safety zone and I enjoy this challenge. Whether by nature or because I crave adventure, I love the exploration through unmapped territory. It’s fun, it’s scary.

  I speak in public about my journey because I’m a storyteller and a writer with a purpose, not because I was born in prison. At first, to overcome my fear of talking, I’d take a deep breath and repeat a mantra I’d practiced all my life but never with intention until recent years: Go. Do it. I told myself the same thing when I stood outside my prison mother’s cell, except then I couldn’t follow through on it. I said the same thing when Mother was dying.

  My former enemies are now clients who invite me to keynote conferences for professionals in law enforcement and corrections, mental health care, social work, adoption, foster care, and other social services. The first time I keynoted at an adoption conference, I came face to face with the pain birth mothers feel. I had never witnessed their anguish and our shared “what ifs.” I left there with deep compassion for their yearning and loss. Then, last year, the agency that placed me out of foster care invited me to keynote for their annual fund-raiser, and I’m told it raised more money than any other year.

  Once again I’m a poster girl, yet this time I’m an example of what the other side of “at-risk and special needs” looks like. Most of all, I present myself as proof that anyone can overcome obstacles. With caution, I tug the crime-and-drug saga out of the pinhole pocket in my brain, along with the family stories. I talk about how I made it out alive, resilient, reinvented. At one particular speaking engagement, after I tell pieces of my story to a group of psychologists, one raises her hand.

  “How did you change?” she asks. I’d mentioned the plot to gas my parents, along with a few life-threatening exploits. “Today, if one of us called the Mayo Clinic to seek consultation about a child with the kind of behavior you describe, they’d refuse to treat you and your family. I doubt they’d admit a child with the symptoms you describe.”

  “What? Why?” I ask.

  Her answer shocks me. “It’s untreatable,” she says, “the extreme danger you presented to others, the attachment disorder, PTSD as an infant, RAD, the violence. That’s why I asked how you changed.”

  AS FOR ATTACHMENT disorder and other diagnostic labels related to trauma, today I don’t link myself to any of them. I don’t claim them, even though I might struggle with the symptoms. I shun labels. Even prison baby. Whatever I am, I am—and I continue to grow and evolve because sometimes where we’ve been broken is where we free ourselves the most.

  The group discussion caused me to understand that I was never alone, even in the times I thought so. We don’t have maps for loss. Mentors, coaches, teachers, neighbors, family, friends, partners, all who walk the path with us, they help shape our lives when there’s no algorithm to follow. I’m the only one, though, to decide if I listen to others and work and push forward—to learn, to forgive, to flourish.

  I focus most on my prison tours, and to embody this work, two significant colleagues and mentors, now board members, helped me form a nonprofit organization, the unPrison Project. At least once a month I travel to a prison in a different state to address gyms full of inmates who sit on rows of folding chairs, the walls lined with guards. I turn over my personal belongings at the gate. Steel doors clang behind me, and hundreds, often thousands, of women await me on the inside. My work as a speaker is not a verb. It’s a social justice and spiritual act. Judaism calls this tikkun olam, “to repair the world.” If we lock up rather than heal, treat, and alter behavior, then the United States will remain the industrialized country that incarcerates the most people. I believe healing, not prison cells, will change our massive incarceration—if we invest in health and wellness, in restorative measures and rehabilitation.

  Mental health care is a commonsense solution to help reduce incarceration, child abuse, and domestic violence. We can pay for these problems up front or pay even more on the back end, in our schools, jails, and prisons.

  Part of the dialogue I engage in with inmates is about forgiveness—for ourselves and others. But how do we forgive the unforgivable, and why would we? Another lifelong journey.

  Freedom and healing are humanitarian issues. Is our system one of justice or vengeance, or of healing and rehabilitation? Incarceration is a serious concern for our society. The majority of prison sentences relate to crimes stemming from drug-related charges, as in the case of my biological mother. Many prison officials say that the majority of incarcerated women also have diagnosable mental health issues. Common sense says, then, that the best route to a healed and safe society is treatment, rehab, and education as alternatives to incarceration.

  Eleven states now house nurseries on their prison compounds. Some studies find that babies who remain with their mothers grow up with healthy attachments, and for the mothers, their rate of recidivism decreases. On the other hand, some people dispute whether a child is better off removed at birth so that attachment to an incarcerated woman doesn’t develop. My belief is every case is unique.


  The rapid increase of incarceration of women is an international concern, as much as it is for the children born inside and those left behind while a mother serves her sentence. Trinidad, Canada, Australia, China—all are countries where women’s prison populations are on the rise and therefore deep concerns arise for the children left behind. A number of prisons in other countries have reached out to me in recent months, and I’m driven to expand this work of mentorship and life-skills programs for incarcerated women and girls. Established nursery programs in prisons in other countries allow children and babies to stay with their mothers. After years of working in the field, I’ve learned that Cambodia’s prison system allows children of inmates to stay with their incarcerated mothers until age three. Ghana permits female inmates to keep their children, with certain restrictions, and in Johannesburg, South Africa, sometimes up to thirty toddlers live with their incarcerated mothers. Now, my vision clear with a greater sense of purpose, I hope to reach the people in these international prisons as well as more across the United States.

  Either way, we need solutions because more and more inmates are pregnant at time of sentencing. The need is high for how to address the incarcerated parent-child dilemma.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  FREEDOM ON THE INSIDE

  EACH TIME I LEAVE A PRISON it’s as if I’ve left a war zone of the soul, hundreds and hundreds of wounded souls. Afterward I need a power wash of my own so I can reconnect into my world a little less charred. I go in alone and come out crowded, flooded with stories and sorrows. More and more, after every prison visit, I’m disconnected from day-to-day life. It’s a new kind of emotional lockdown, although it’s really more of a pause, to take in the bigness of what I witness, to allow it all to sift through me.