I feel horrible when I think about it. It makes me think of how much I’ve hurt him and everyone around me. How low my life had gotten, where I felt I had to send myself to jail and be cut off from my daughter and my parents and everyone else because that was the only way I knew to get myself under control and away from death.
Since I’ve been out of prison, my whole family and Leah’s father all say that now they understand. They see how the experience changed me and my life, and they’re glad to see who I’ve become. But at the time, in the beginning, it was very painful and hurtful for them. I’m sure they still wish I could have accomplished what I accomplished in another way. It was extremely emotional all around, right up to the day I went back into county jail, where I waited to be transported to prison.
The first time the other inmates and I were set to move from county to prison, it was canceled at the last minute. My lawyer had slipped up and said something to the media about me leaving, and the prison called it a security threat and decided to change the schedule. The other girls were furious with me over that. In county, everyone’s anxious to get to prison. County jail sucks. It’s tiny, you wear these nasty uniforms, and you have to clean your clothes in the sink. Prison is bigger, and you can walk around and be outside. So the day the shuttle bus comes and takes you out of county, even though in one sense you’re just getting out of the frying pan and into the fire, in another sense you’re like, “God-damn, finally.”
When the coast was clear and the prison felt safe from the paparazzi, or whatever they thought the security threat was, it was finally our time to go. The guards came in the morning and shackled us up all together, packed us into the van like sardines, and drove us off.
Driving up toward those gates, I felt numb.
What had I gone and done this time?
11
Shelter from the Storm
I wanted extreme, and I got it.
My Teen Mom reputation still caused me problems from the get-go. Almost as soon as I set foot on prison grounds, I heard they were thinking of putting me in solitary. For some reason, they still considered my whole situation some kind of security threat. Luckily, that didn’t happen. But I still had a lot of crazy, screaming bitches to deal with. I was getting yelled at across the yard. People were cussing and calling me names, telling me I wasn’t in kiddie camp anymore, telling me to put money on their books. They all knew who I was, and they’d all walk by mean-mugging and demanding to know what the fuck I was looking at. It was rough in there, and of course there’s nothing you can do about it when that happens. You can’t be a narc, or a snitch, or a pussy. You just have to put up with it and ride it out until you find some people you can deal with.
Fortunately, by the time we got out of intake and I made it to my dorm, I had met two girls, Lisa and Stephanie, who sort of ran their whole side of the place. They made it a point to hang out with me and watch my back. They were both gang members. Lisa had been in for ten years for shooting a girl. She wasn’t some huge, tough-looking woman. She was very, very pretty and very kind and warm to me. Lisa and Stephanie were the first of many girls I wound up meeting behind bars who became close friends of mine. We spent a lot of time talking to each other about our situation. Like, how did we get to prison? What are we doing here?
We had a lot to talk about. One of the most depressing things in prison is being taken away from your family. There are so many women in jail who are separated from their kids. Their kids are taken away when they go to prison, moved in with relatives, or put into foster homes. It’s a constant topic behind bars, these women missing their kids.
Now I was one of those women.
When the drugs wore off, I was finally alone with reality. It wasn’t like the first time, in county, when I spent weeks destroyed by withdrawal and the rest of my time counting the days until I could get out and pick up my addiction right where I left off. This time was serious in a way none of the consequences had ever been. I was locked up with myself, and I was going to stay that way for a long, long time. I was alone in a way I had never been in my entire life.
The first thing I learned, and I learned it pretty quick, was that you never really know yourself until you’re completely alone. My situation was miserable. There’s no getting around that. But at the same time, I was clearheaded for the first time I could remember. It was like finding a safe place in the middle of a long war. It was a shitty safe place, with concrete walls and locked doors and gates and a bunch of people watching my every move, but it was a safe place all the same. Prison was a shelter from my addiction, and I had locked myself inside of it for the long haul.
Knowing where I was, knowing how long I’d be there, I was able—forced, really—to settle down and listen to my thoughts. For years, I’d been killing them with opiates, throwing handfuls of pills at my emotions to keep them away from me. Now I could feel everything, and I had to learn how to handle it all over again. I had to get to know myself almost from scratch.
I can’t tell you how many nights I spent sitting on my bunk, looking around and seeing everyone else asleep. I was always the one who was awake until four in the morning. I’ve always been the most nocturnal person I know, so that by itself wasn’t a big difference. But when you’re alone at night in prison, you’re alone with yourself. There’s no TV to distract you. There are no phones in there to play with while you lie in bed. No computers. All you have is a pair of headphones and a radio.
But you find yourself when you’re alone in thought, and that’s what happened to me. Every night I was lying in bed, looking out the window, just turning everything over in my mind. It was a scary, humbling, terrifying experience. But after a few weeks, or a few months, I found myself thinking, “You know, I’m all right. I feel better today than I did a year ago, when I was free. So I’m okay.”
It’s a very powerful thing, having that time alone to think. I can’t say enough about it. I sometimes wonder if I ever would have had that experience and that chance to learn and grow the way I did if I hadn’t gone to prison. Even if there were no drugs and I was acting the way I was supposed to, I might have still kept jumping from relationship to relationship, never comfortable enough with myself to take that time to really think. And even if I had been comfortable enough, I never would have been in a situation where I had to examine my life and myself in such an intense way, with none of the distractions we have in our normal lives. Lying in that bunk, I couldn’t even see the night sky because the lights in the yard were so bright. I literally had nothing to focus on but the thoughts in my mind.
You start to have these “Aha” moments. I can’t give you the exact date or time that it happened, but one day, I just knew I was going to turn things around.
Since I was a kid, I’ve never found joy in living. I’ve always struggled just to feel okay. Everything was a fight against darkness. I spent years full of anger and hate over the things that were wrong with my life. I hated my childhood, the constant fighting, the drinking, the years with my father that I lost to his addiction and his sickness. All my life, my stomach turned when I thought of that terrible night when we lost my baby sister. It was so wrong, so horrible, and so unfair. I was angry at the way my family fell apart in the years afterward, the blame and bad feelings that tore everything up.
I grew up hating my life, hating my body, hating the darkness and loneliness I couldn’t get out of my head. I spent a lot of time and energy turning that hatred on myself, from the first time I made myself throw up in grade school, to my first attempt at suicide at eleven, to the pills I abused without any concern for what I was doing to my mind and body. And when I couldn’t keep that anger and hatred to myself anymore, it spilled over into the rest of my life and started to destroy everything.
I wonder how much my father can relate to my experience. When you look at the two of us, the similarities are undeniable. Until the day I went to prison, I was going down almost the exact same road he’d gotten stuck on in his life. What if I had ke
pt going? What if Leah had gotten older and I had gotten worse? What if her happy memories of me and our special bond turned into the bitterness and anger of a child who loses her parent to addiction? Would the pills have turned her mom into a monster the way alcohol turned my dad into one?
I know now that my dad was fighting his own demons when I was growing up. Losing my baby sister, Candace, and then being blamed for her death, being blamed for the horrible death of his own daughter, is worse than anything real I’ve ever gone through. And who knows what else was inside his mind that made it hard for him to fight his alcoholism?
I understand his situation now more than ever. It doesn’t give me back the years I lost with him, and that still breaks my heart. But I can learn from what my father and I have in common.
When my dad got sick and I spent those painful weeks with him, listening to him moaning in pain and praying not to die, I saw a man whose addiction had dragged him down to rock bottom. But in all that suffering, I also saw something truly amazing. After all that had happened, all the things he’d done to hurt me, he was able to look me in the eye with honest love and tell me that he was sorry. And even after all the damage he had done, all the hatred I thought I felt for him, I was able to forgive him. It wasn’t too late. It’s never too late.
Maybe my father was just like me. Maybe nothing could have helped him get back to himself except something unbelievably extreme. I wish to god he hadn’t gotten sick. I wish more than anything the doctor hadn’t said back then that he had only eight months to live. I wish I could know him healthy now, and look forward to many years together. But just like no regular kind of help, treatment, family intervention, or program was able to drag me away from my demons, I think my father just never came across the kind of help he needed.
I had. Prison was my help. That’s what I knew, deep down, when I told the judge I wanted to take my jail sentence. Prison was the extreme thing I needed to get me off of the road I was following my dad down. And I’m lucky, I’m lucky as hell that I got off so much earlier than he did.
It wasn’t too late for me. I knew it. I knew I was going to be okay. I can’t tell you the exact date or time it happened, but one day I just knew I was going to take all that darkness, hatred, and anger I’d been fighting all my life and turn it around times ten. I was going to put all of that negative energy into the strength that would get me the fuck out of prison and into a life that was good and right.
Leah wasn’t going to be an angry teenager, hating her mom for choosing addiction over motherhood. Leah was going to get her mom back. I was going to get my family back. That was my only focus, my only goal, and I was completely determined to use my time in prison to put everything I had into achieving it. And that’s exactly what I did.
Those were the realizations I came up with when I was alone there in that miserable place. Those long nights alone in prison can tear you down, and for some people it does. But it can also build you up. And if you can face yourself like that, you can see that you can get through it. If you work your ass off, you can get through it. And when you put all that together, you will make yourself a stronger person.
The CLIFF program helped me save my life in prison. CLIFF stands for “Clean Living is Freedom Forever,” which is beautiful in itself. It’s an amazing program that you live and breathe every minute of every day in there. What CLIFF basically is, is a college for addicts. You spend hours a day in tons of different classes, and you become a part of an extremely tight group of women who are doing the work right along with you. You almost feel like you’re in a crazy sorority house sometimes. The program is led almost completely by inmates, with just a small number of counselors who sort of oversee everything and make sure everything is running the way it should. As you work your way through the meetings and classes, you get higher and higher in the program and take on more responsibilities. The women who have been in the program for the longest work as the facilitators and teachers, and they manage everything from the schedules to placing teachers in classes and sitting in on interviews and training.
It’s kind of tragic I was such a bad student in school. The weird thing is I’ve always been really good at studying and helping other people study, when I put my mind to it. When Leah’s father was preparing for his CNA test, I was the most devoted study partner around. I helped him drill through that material every night until he aced the exam. In prison it was the same thing. One of the big steps I needed to take in there was getting my GED. I knew if I passed my GED, I’d get my time cut automatically in half, so obviously that was a top priority. I teamed up with a friend and we studied our asses off for that GED. When everyone took the test, I had the number one score, and my study partner had number two.
My scores were so high they told me I would have been in the top ten of my graduating class if I’d performed like that in high school. If I had actually stuck with it, stayed in school and done right, I could have had a totally different story. But even if you can’t change the past, it’s never too late to take a turn toward something better. It’s definitely never too late to act smart and work hard.
Along with the GED, I really put everything into the CLIFF program. I took anger management, and ended up teaching anger management. I took parenting classes, which wasn’t even required. By the time I was out of prison, all of the facilitators and directors were my friends, and if anybody in the program had a question I was one of the few people they could always come to. I knew everything, and if I didn’t, I’d figure it out. They called us the moms of the program.
There are so many women in prison who just need help. So many of them are just drug addicts who never even got the chance to get the help they needed before they wound up in prison. And at that point, they’d lost their kids and had to struggle even harder than before to find hope, and in some of the most depressing circumstances you can imagine.
When I started rising up in the CLIFF program, I wound up totally embracing the position of helping these women learn about themselves the way I was doing. They made me think about how many people like me are out there, extreme women who need an extra boost of kick-in-the-ass to make the change to save their lives and their families. The system isn’t set up to help women like that, and a lot of them get sent straight to prison without even getting to try rehab. I started thinking about what could be changed to stop that from happening, what kind of programs and treatment facilities could be built on the road between addiction, prison, and total self-destruction. The idea grew and grew in my mind, and the more I started getting into managing the CLIFF program, the more I started to think about how I could make something like that happen. I spent a lot of time envisioning the kind of rehabilitation facility that would have helped a person like me, and that would help women like the ones I met in prison, and eventually not just women but addicts in general.
A big part of becoming a stronger person is finding your source of strength. For me, it’s Leah. I never experienced happiness until I held my daughter in my arms, and there was nothing I wanted more than to be with her again. That was the biggest driving force in my fight to get out of prison as fast as I could. The second motivation was starting fresh and getting my family back together.
I was working things out with my ex-fiancé. In prison, you have to have someone put money on a phone account for you so that you have minutes to talk. He was putting money on my phone, and we were talking every single day, figuring things out. It seemed like we were doing a pretty damn good job, and I was feeling great about it. We were going to get back together when I got out. By the time I’d been in jail for almost a year, we were talking about where we were going to live. I sent him a thousand dollars to help him get a place for us.
And then one night on the phone I figured out he had a girlfriend.
I didn’t cry a lot in prison, but when I did cry, everyone knew it was about Leah or her father. That night I lay in my bunk sobbing so hard my friend had to put her headphones in because it was making her so u
pset. I was in disbelief. For a year, I’d been putting everything I had into getting out of there because I believed in this hope that I was going to have my family back together. I pushed myself forward thinking about how when I was free I’d have Leah and her father and a house and a family. That was the driving force behind everything I was working for, all the effort I was putting into changing myself. And suddenly it felt like everything I was fighting for had been ripped apart.
Thank god I had come so far already by the time that bomb dropped. That night I was so devastated I could have been down for the count. But I didn’t fall apart. I stuck with it. I’d already been in CLIFF long enough by that point that I didn’t give up when I was basically told, “Hey, never mind, you don’t have a family anymore.” It was okay. I was able to keep it together, and that showed me the progress I’d made in myself, that I didn’t give up over such a huge setback. And I took that as a major success.
Besides, however betrayed I felt over what happened between Leah’s father and me, I still had Leah. She was the most important thing. And unfortunately, a year into prison I still hadn’t seen her. I begged her father to bring her, and I don’t know exactly why it didn’t happen. There were problems with the papers that have to be sent in for visitation. He’d say he sent them, but something would go wrong and he’d have to put new ones in. So I’d send the paperwork to him again. It went on for way too long. But finally, a year after I was locked up, he finally brought Leah in to see me.
That was the funniest day. I was so excited, and everybody on my dorm knew I was about to see her. By that time I’d started teaching the anger management classes and was about to graduate, so I was pretty well known and had some seniority in the community. The day Leah was scheduled to come visit, I had a hundred and thirty women wishing me luck and yelling that they were happy for me as I walked out the door. I still remember coming back from the visit in tears and having a ton of people crowding around asking me how it went. That’s the kind of love I had in prison!
Never Too Late Page 12