“One Minute Remaining”

It is no secret that prison is unpleasant. It’s designed to be awful. Caught between the competing politics of punishment and rehabilitation, prison often impales itself, not to speak of any life trapped within its walls. Such is the nature of this beast, a socially accepted hell on Earth.

Human beings can adapt to almost anything. Shared rooms the size of a parking spot, food that wild animals won’t even eat, inadequate clothing and protection from the elements, entombment in concrete, brick, and steel.

The most painful part of prison isn’t any of these, though. It won’t be found in the movies, and rarely if ever in the documentaries. I can’t find it in my sentencing order either. It etches us like slowly dripped acid. And by the time I realized it even existed, I was already seared to my core.

Strangely enough, it was the death of Charlie Kirk that brought this to light.

I am a mother of four children. Amazing, brilliant, and hilarious, they are the most precious creations I have ever encountered. They were only thirteen, ten, eight, and six when I was convicted. I had no prior convictions and I was facing nonviolent charges, so no one ever thought that, nine years later, I would in prison parenting in twenty-minute intervals, the maximum length of a prison phone call in Virginia. But here we are.

We, not just me. Them too. Precious people who never stood trial but who paid the price of my conviction, punished far deeper that physical separation. No due process was given to their little hearts. I own my piece in this, which sits in my soul like its own vat of acid, spilling into all that I am.

My children will always need me. It isn’t like my incarceration came with a replacement mom for them. No matter who is in their lives, there will always be a void if I don’t take my place. So I call them, I write them, I email them. I save up my little prison penny paychecks for their birthdays and holidays to remind them how much they are valued and loved, even from here. I call and talk about boyfriends and ballgames, English teachers and college professors, videogames, shoes, and girls. In twenty-minute phone calls, I sift through their lives.

I am still their mom. While my circumstances have changed, my responsibility has not. I stay involved. I am not there, I’m here. In prison. But I’m trying—fighting to get back to them, to get us all free from this, and keep everyone moving forward. I like to think that I know my children pretty well.

And then, in September, the conversation turned to Charlie Kirk.

Much of raising children to be healthy, whole, and productive human beings is teaching them how to think. As any parent knows, combatting adolescent narratives can be serious business, especially in the age of social media. In this case, Kirk’s murder had sparked much debate and, as any parent worth their salt would do, I helped my children sift through their thoughts and emotions. Social media had flooded them with a litany of possible ways of responding, and I asked probing questions to help them uncover their own values and beliefs.

One of these Socratic questions was delivered via email to my oldest daughter. I encouraged her to build and solidify her argument, even as I complimented her on her tenacity. She fired back with a defensive response that lit me up like the Fourth of July, indignant over my smart comments and rude implications. I was floored. I went back to read what I wrote. Still lost, I secured a spot in line to use the phone and was eventually able to call her.

Both of us feeling a bit angry and betrayed, we cautiously processed our thoughts and feelings. She is so like me; we are both made of fire and all things love. She expressed her belief that I was being cruel and demeaning. I couldn’t fathom how she’d so misconstrued my intentions. She began to explain her lens on life, the cruel rhetoric that had filled her feeds and experiences. She assumed my motivations were the same as those of the strangers on the Internet. The misunderstanding stung. Why would this child think that I would ever weaponize my words toward her? Does she not know who I am?

I have learned that progress is often about having the right question before having the right answer. “Does she not know who I am?” turned out to be the right question. And the answer hurt like hell.

The reality is, she doesn’t know me. She is now a college graduate, and she was only a little girl when I left. Her memory of me is limited. Twenty-minute phone calls sift only pieces of her life—and of mine, too. They don’t give her a complex understanding of how I interact with others around me, what my integrity looks like in motion, or what my role in my community is. She sees me mainly through compressed responses to her needs, hurried to outpace the daunting recorded voice that will soon cut in to inform us we have just “one minute remaining.”

None of this is my daughter’s fault. No matter how hard I have fought to maintain this relationship with my kids, only the shell remains.

We are going to have to get to know each other again, and grieve the losses of what we can never get back. I did everything I could, and it still wasn’t enough. The rest slipped through my fingers like water, and the realization that I lost most of what I was fighting for while I was on the battlefield hit me like a brick. How could this have happened?

Soon after, I spoke to my oldest son, further testing my paradigm shift. He began talking about how he got his gift of gab from his father. I agreed, but reminded him that I also speak quite well. He stepped out around this, a stream flowing around a rock, and asserted that he had learned from watching his dad pitch job proposals and ideas. This, and this alone, was where his talent came from.

Anyone who knows me inside of this place would laugh out loud at my son’s conclusion. Public speaking is my thing. I can talk to large groups or small without a waver in my resolve. I facilitate groups in the reentry units, for the medication-assisted drug treatment program, and institutionally for the population with interactive journals. I am always microphone ready.

But he doesn’t know me. Of this—my entire daily life—he is permitted to see exactly nothing. He sees me only through the twenty-minute windows where he processes pieces of his life. He only knows me there. He was only ten when I was taken.

My youngest two have an even more limited view of me as a person, as a woman, as their mom. My oldest two were tweens but the youngest were just little kids, young enough to forget. I was slowly deleted from their memory, deleted from their lives, all while they listened to my voice. “One minute remaining.”

The clock was ticking, but not just on the phone. Time was stripping my social and familial identity while I was under the illusion that I was connected. The skeletal structure was there, but the rest was being hollowed out.

I am not alone in this experience. I talked to woman after woman about this conundrum, finding that we all share this experience, this pain. White-knuckle grips on our children couldn’t stop us from being separated. The patterns and rhythms were the same, even though our situations differed. This was all by design, practiced and put in place to disenfranchise those whom the powerful wished to disappear. It still disproportionately affects people of color, plucking them from the fabric of society in vast numbers.

I learned a long time ago, if it’s not in your sentencing order, it isn’t a sentence you can fight. This sentence to social death has no written record. Hence I am writing one now. It should be noticed, it should be recognized, it should be stopped. In his great work Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl, having survived horrid atrocities, passionately asserts that when all other freedoms are taken away, we still retain the ability to choose how we respond, even in the face of death. He is right.

Not all is lost. My children don’t really know me. But the opportunity is still very much there. And after all the work that I have done on me—after whom I have chosen to be despite the injustice, in spite of the inhumanity, after how I have loved, fought and taught, and after all I have carried—they have a mom to be proud of. And to have them discover that on their own will be a gift beyond comparison.

The other side of this coin is that I don’t really know them either. I am limited to similar windows of time, limited understandings. And because of that, I am not used to all the magic that makes them who they are. There are things to discover and help them cultivate that I will see with fresh eyes, having deep appreciation and curiosity about the young people that they have grown into. Things I might have missed otherwise.

We have learned the value of relationships while unknowingly paying the cost.

And we have learned to live like there is only one minute remaining.

_{Image: Wilhelm Gunkel / Unsplash}

Contributors

Shebri Dillon Shebri Dillon is a mother of four from Virginia. She is the librarian of the Albert Woodfox Memorial Mini Freedom Library at Virginia Correctional Center for Women.

Topics

• Institutions & Practices

Tags

• family separation
• incarcerated and formerly incarcerated authors
• incarcerated mothers
• long sentences