Prison Baby

by Deborah Jiang-Stein

  She shakes her head. “Drugs so young, using for twenty years, no guarantee you’ll catch up.”

  What if I don’t have enough time to catch up? There’s not enough of life to re-live twenty years twice over.

  MY OTHER ATTEMPTS to quit started because I got sick and tired of being sick and tired, but this time I faced death and, even worse, a possible lifetime sentence to pre-adolescence. All of a sudden this didn’t seem so fun. In fact it sounded scary. I felt unsafe in the world with my twelve-year-old emotions in a woman’s body. Not that I ever did feel safe, but this was new, and I was facing it all clean, no buffer this time with dope or alcohol. An epiphany didn’t hit me the way it does for some people who clean up. Where I was once afraid of living, now I feared dying. On top of this, peers zoomed ahead in their lives full of family, love, and responsibilities, none I knew about much, and I’d trail behind.

  ONE AFTERNOON I stagger home from the counselor’s office, full of jitters inside and out. Despair dulls my vision. A driver in a Mercedes honks me out of my daze and from almost denting the hood of his car. “You shouldn’t be on the road!” he yells out his window.

  I agree. I’m back where I left off before I started using. Twelve! Inside a thirty-two-year-old’s body. At least this explains why it feels right to date a nineteen-year-old boy, a guy I meet at a dance club.

  The veil falls from my altered, drug-free world and exposes raw emotional innocence. Even sex feels like it’s my first time. I’ve been sexually active since a young age—not by choice, not for pleasure, not for experimentation, but because an older boy I knew, someone close to the family and someone I trusted, took advantage of me. And my emotions shut down. The gratification was all his, not mine. Other girls my age ran around the neighborhood, playing on swing sets and slides. They clipped playing cards on the spokes of their bicycle wheels, while my pre-adolescent sexual encounters drove me further into confusion and more shame and secrecy. More reason to barricade myself in emotional isolation, another reason to dump my self-esteem down the drain, to doubt my worth. But born in prison trumped everything.

  MY NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY-MAN and I stroll in the summer sun the day after we meet. The wind lifts the front shirttail of his button-down, exposing his sleek stomach and the elastic top of his red boxers above his jean’s belt line.

  The second we reach my apartment door, we fall into each other.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ONE MORE SECRET

  I PULL MY BOY-MAN TOWARD ME, our lips a breath away. I kiss him, but he kisses me back harder. I tug the metal buttons on his Levi’s, then wriggle his jeans down around his ankles, his boy–short boxers stretched over his tight buttocks.

  He slips his fingers under the elastic lace of my panties and steps out of his jeans. The hair on his legs the same black-as-night as the thick mass of curls on his head. I kiss his chest until he pulls me down on him, and we both squirm out of our clothes. He kisses his way from my shoulders all the way down.

  “Do you like what you see?” he asks, kneeling over me. He moistens his lips with his tongue and wraps his fingers around his stuff as it starts to swell.

  “Beautiful.” The one word to escape with each embrace. And with each rise and fall of the weight of his body on mine, I grasp the newness of everything.

  A virgin again, at least in emotion and sensation, I want more and more, never enough. I have years to catch up after shut-down sex in a drugged alcohol stupor, years of one-night stands and week-long flings with boys, men, and a few women, my emotions closed down, unable to share real intimacy beyond brief spurts of lust. I abused substances—I abused my body, too. Even if one of those flings had turned into a passion beyond a few years, I still didn’t know how to love. How could I love someone else when I didn’t love myself?

  My new feelings of lust, not drug or alcohol, bewilder and devour me with this clarity of new pleasure. It’s all I want, and I lose track of the physical world outside myself. I lose track of time, of day and night. I don’t remember if it is after weeks or months or many months when one day my nineteen-year-old says, “We can do other things besides sex, you know.”

  Soon after, we break up.

  The first months of my clean days, I huddle at home, curl up on the sofa and hug my knees. No one knows I’m getting help. Mother and friends call in the weeks after. I think they just need to check on me, to make sure I haven’t moved, haven’t taken flight again. I’m scared of who I am and at the same time don’t have a clue who I am. Emotional pain clutches at my throat if I need to speak, and when I answer their phone calls, I fight not to cry. I can’t leave my apartment. How can I face the outside world?

  CHIP, CHIP, CHIP. I break through the walls I’ve built, the fortress around me. Each chip feels like a slab of concrete crashed to the ground. But clean and sober, I’m still fear-filled, and the fear shields a raw wound. A smidgen of a crevice opens to let in my parents and I take baby steps in a giant’s shoes to close the gap and reacquaint myself with them.

  Mother invites me for lunch at their new home in Champaign, Illinois, where my dad now teaches at the university after leaving Johns Hopkins. She, Dad, and I sit at the table, and Mother serves noodles and butter.

  I look from my mother to my father, then back to my mother, and a volcano shoots into to my lungs and erupts in my stomach. I fight to hold in my words that burn in my throat. Mother and Dad raise their forks. I’ve held it in so long, now I need to say it, not ask, just blurt it out.

  “I read the letter . . . I was born in prison.”

  Both their forks stop in midair. They look from me, to each other, and back to me.

  “But . . . how?” they ask.

  I don’t answer. Then I ask, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Mother’s shoulders sag. “We worried what would happen if you found out.”

  I almost laugh into my pasta. Oh, this way worked out so much better. But I don’t say it out loud, afraid my sarcasm will hurt them.

  Mother manages a smile, and we say no more. A heaviness lifts from me. At last we’ve cracked the door to The Big Secret. At least she gave me an answer. Even if I didn’t agree with all their intentions, they meant well but didn’t know any better, and these days, families with transracial adoption receive more resources. I’d blamed my parents for what they didn’t know, their lack of information.

  AFTER THE BIG breakthrough visit to Illinois, Mother and I fly back together to Minneapolis for her to hang out with me for a long weekend. We museum hop the first day, then after lunch at the Institute of Arts, we charge up the granite stairs to the top floor and stand transfixed by Veiled Lady, a marble sculpture from the 1800s. We both love her crisp features and white veil sculpted in the illusion of gauzy, translucent silk to cover her face. This trompe l’oeil technique, or “trick the eye,” speaks to me about illusions and what we hide from ourselves.

  Side by side in front of Veiled Lady, Mother reaches for my hand, and my breath catches. My old pattern always forced me to cringe, pull away and reject her. But I’ve kicked other habits . . . I slow my breathing and then rest my palm against hers. I’m still a little girl inside, still cautious, but a new twelve-year-old. Mother and I hold hands and it’s the first time I remember when mine melts into hers.

  A sigh ripples throughout the whole family across several generations when Mother and I at last nestle into our new and bonded relationship. Everyone had hoped all along that we’d one day love each other as daughter and mother, and at last we made it.

  I never let Mother close to me, either physically or emotionally. She didn’t stand a chance against my fierce loyalty to my biological mother. No one did. But Mother was the one with the stamina to wait for me. Some things just take time. Decades even. I’ve never met another person with my mother’s patience.

  EVERY TRIP MOTHER makes to Minneapolis to stay with me, we hop in my car to view Veiled Lady. Visit by visit, the tightness inside me begins to release. When I trek to Illinois, we swim laps in
my parents’ backyard pool, and Mother and I play piano together.

  Around Dad, I still feel cautious even though he’s stopped his backhand swats at me. Just his presence in the room drives me to retreat into my shell because his intense intellectual energy and potential for outbreaks of rage frighten me. At the same time, I’m drawn to his gentle compassionate side and quirky wit. I live on edge around him, but now that I’m clean I grow to love his warmth when it shows up.

  Mother, my white-haired and wrinkled and now seventy-four-year-old mother, her eyes glow, her heart pours out to me. She’s waited so long for the daughter she’s always wanted. We both open up and receive and return precious love. At last, I have a mama. At last I’m daughter to the woman who believed in me even when I didn’t believe in myself.

  THERE’S NO TELLING what’s behind a wall after it crumbles and crashes. Now that I’ve stepped back from the fight against myself, family, and the world, my love for reading, for poetry and short stories, reignites. Soon after I start writing again, I win the American Association of University Women’s poetry award, and my parents celebrate with me. Followed by a series of grant awards and honors for short stories, I take on my first full-time job, as a freelance writer-in-residence in Minneapolis public schools. But still something digs at my gut, like a thin sliver of glass stuck in your finger that you can’t pluck out.

  Despite my new bond with Mother, a piece of me still craves to find out more about my prison mom. After a little investigating, I find a search agency that’s in the business of uniting biological families and adoptees.

  “I’m pretty confident we’ll find her,” the “search angel” says.

  My heart somersaults. Would I look like her? What would she think of me? For weeks, my mind ping-pongs questions and they fling me from excitement to fear and back again.

  The agency calls a month later. “We have news for you.”

  My breath catches in my throat and the hairs on my skin spring up like miniature soldiers. Okay, breathe. I’ve waited forever to reach this point, this close. Then . . .

  “I’m afraid your mother is dead.”

  Dead. I roll the letters around, over and over. The word taunts me. All these years, so much pain and chaos, and lost time, so much brokenness and yearning. And she’s dead.

  “Deborah, you okay?”

  I nod into the phone.

  “But we found a half-brother. You both have the same mom.”

  A brother. A link to my birth mom.

  “I’ve got his phone number. Got a pen?”

  I scramble for a pen, drop it, and grab it again. I hang up and stare at my brother’s phone number. My mother’s dead. So is my lifelong dream to meet her. I yearn for a needle in my arm to take away the fear, the sorrow. A slam down of Johnnie Walker Red. Anything. I draw on everything in me not to score some dope.

  Instead, I exhale, pick up the receiver, and dial. My brother, Nick, picks up on the second ring. In a few weeks, I’m on a flight back to Seattle to meet my birth family. Besides Nick, who’s about ten years older, in his forties, I’m met with open arms by aunts, uncles, and cousins. All this time we’ve lived in the same area! They’re just north of Seattle. They welcome me as if I’ve returned from a long summer away at camp.

  Nick and I had different fathers, and it shows. He’s half Irish. And talk about shocked, he’d thought he was an only child. Our mother never told him he had a sister, never told him when she was sentenced that she was pregnant. For most of her life she was in and out of, first, reform schools, then jails and prisons, and almost always on drug-related charges. It’s the same case today, too. According to the Bureau of Justice, more than half of prisoners, both men and women, are incarcerated for drug-related crimes.

  One of our aunts raised Nick, and he was used to our mother being in and out of prison. While I grew up without her, he grew up with her broken promises.

  Secret on secret, but this time I’m the family secret.

  Within moments of our embrace, Nick says, “Your voice, your gestures, you move your head like our mother.” His words pump a new confidence inside me: I am her, of her. And then the connection hits reality. My addictions were part of her too, and maybe the thrill-seeking.

  Nick leads me into the house and perches next to me on the sofa. He reaches for a photo album and places it on my lap. “Our mom’s.”

  My stomach flips.

  “Her brother, our Uncle Tom, kept it hidden from me until you called.” Tears brim in his eyes. I blink back my own.

  He leans into me, wraps an arm around my back, and opens the album. I gasp at the first page.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  WEEPING MOTHER

  INSIDE, RIGHT OFF THE BLACK-CONSTRUCTION-PAPER photo album page, a lock of my baby hair and my baby picture stare at me. My mother kept a lock of my hair! I stroke it with my forefinger and swear I sense her love seep into me. It takes a while before I can turn the page, then I move on through page after page of photos of her, and a sense of belonging fills me to the core. I want to dive into those photos and live inside them with her.

  By the time I reach the end of her photo album, one more puzzle piece slides into place—I have the hands of my bio mom, her smile, the fire in her black eyes. At last I look like someone else. But I notice differences, too. My eyes more almond shaped, my nose smaller and broader, my coloring darker. Still, questions burn into me: “What else am I?” “What about the other half?” My birth mother was Greek, I learn, but I’m clearly a blend of more. But what?

  Nick steps away to answer the doorbell and brings an olive-skinned sixty-something woman about my height into the room. “This is our cousin, Sophie.”

  Excitement of this union of new family bursts into hugs and smiles and more family, more connections with Martha, my prison mom, aka Margo, as I learn she liked to be called.

  “I needed to see you,” Sophie says, “tell you about your mom’s plan.” She smiles. “Something your mother yearned for her whole life.” She looks from me to my brother and back to me.

  I want to pry every bit of information out of her, my core desperate to know everything.

  “Right before she died,” Sophie says, “your mother stood at the nursery window in the hospital, stared at the babies. She intended to hire a detective to find you soon as she felt better.”

  The thought of her at the nursery window with hopes to find me almost topples me over, dizzy from sadness. It wasn’t just me, one-sided. She’d yearned to meet me and we’d missed each other. I can’t bear the crack in my heart. “At least she wasn’t in prison the day she died,” I say.

  My mother died from throat cancer, I learned, but she thought she’d be able to kick it and leave the hospital.

  Another cousin arrives, Madlyn, dark-haired and lean like me. She sits and clasps my hand in both of hers. “Your name, Madlyn Mary, it’s a family name.”

  An image of Mother springs into my mind. I laugh. “My adoptive parents are Jewish,” I say. “Madlyn Mary, not quite a Jewish girl’s name.”

  IT WAS A whirlwind of a weekend. I returned to Minneapolis carrying memories and stories from my new family and mementos of my bio mom. They gave me a silk scarf of hers, her diamond ring, and an engraved wooden cross, all nested in my jewelry box to this day.

  A last patch of wholeness filled me after meeting my birth family, and the walls I constructed around myself began to crumble. I needed to do something as soon as I returned home. I dragged my suitcase from the back of my bedroom closet, opened it, and pulled out my pistol. I ran my fingers over the barrel. I hadn’t used it except to threaten people in a few heists, over a decade ago. It was time to let go of my past even more.

  The gun’s weight in my hands haunted me. What would’ve happened if I’d continued on my old path, my life of crime, drugs, and self-destruction? Out of curiosity, not with a plan to use it, I checked the chamber: frozen. I rose to my feet, hurried outside to the dumpster, and tossed the gun inside. A piece of my dark past I wa
s glad to discard.

  For many years, none of us knew what to do after the reunion. We exchanged holiday cards and occasional letters at first, and I attended a cousin’s wedding. But I didn’t call often because I didn’t know what to say. Big life changes take time to sink in and find their design.

  After a while, Nick and I began to call and text one another, and now we’ve slid into a family pattern of our own.

  SOMETHING’S STILL RAW in me even after all the healing I’ve forged through. I’m still tender like an over-ripe raspberry balanced on a single-edge razor blade that’s going to get sliced no matter which way it rolls. And that’s me, shaky and raw, my insides scrambled and carved up.

  I’m clean, I’ve straightened up, I’ve even begun to work out and use my body to rewire my brain. Most days I’m in the gym for a few hours, on my way to better and better health. Still, something claws at me. I’ve at last connected with my adoptive family, above all with Mother. I’ve met my birth family, and I know a little more about my birth mom, and still . . .

  Two questions haunt me: “What am I?” “What race or races am I?” I’m sick of checking the Other box. Sick of my answer, I don’t know, when people ask what I am. As a teen when I tired of people asking me my race, I’d respond, “Hundred-yard dash.” Besides this play on words, the answer gave me my own race to belong. Wherever I go, people think I’m one of them. I’m sick of this too. By fitting in too many places, I feel like I fit in nowhere.

  And then there’s the prison. How is it possible anyone is born in prison? Even though I’ve grown to accept the fact, sometimes it still doesn’t feel real.

  Even when I try to ignore and push away my uncertainty about race and about my birthplace, a feeling of isolation floods me. Too often I feel alone in my story because I’ve never met anyone with a story quite like mine, and often I still forget.

  After I meet my birth family, I bury my lingering uncertainties with work. Always an entrepreneur, an idea person, I continue a freelance life and work as a writer-in-residence in public schools. A million ideas swirl in my head and a mountain of energy burns and bring me back to my true creative nature. I also dabble in real estate investment and buy and sell a few commercial properties.