Never Too Late (18 page)

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 upset. 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!

Seeing Leah was as amazing as a dream come true. I was so nervous about what it would be like. I’d been away from her for a whole year, and I was afraid she’d be less comfortable around me, or the visit would go bad somehow. But Leah was so excited and came straight for me. My heart just exploded, I was so happy. I have never felt so blissfully happy as when I look at that little girl. She is more than the world to me. The love I have for her and the love I feel for her is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever experienced, and it’s worth everything.

I saw her for a few visits total after that. She was still little but at the age where they grow up so fast, and she was so different and so much smarter every time I saw her. I felt like such a piece of crap having to spend my only time with my daughter in prison, but every minute I had her she’d sit in my lap and I’d just hold her tight. When it was time for her to leave, her facial expressions would kill me. It was so sad. It seemed really clear that she was aware of the situation, that it wasn’t good, and that she wasn’t going to see her mom again as soon as she wanted. That was extremely tough to stomach. Still, despite the situation, we had a great relationship and the same amazing bond we’ve always had.

The family dynamic was as difficult as ever, though. After Leah’s father told me he had a girlfriend, he stopped putting money on the phone. I started paying for it, but he stopped answering as often as he did before. And it seemed like every time I called him Leah was either sleeping, or she wasn’t there, or she didn’t want to talk on the phone. It got to be sort of ugly, and we started talking more sporadically. I remember when I told him about my GED and that I got the highest score, he laughed at me and said, “Yeah, right.” He didn’t believe me. Whatever. All that kind of thing does is make it feel better to prove a person wrong. I’m over it.

I knew I was getting out of jail if I worked hard enough on the GED. If I got the time cut, I’d be leaving in a matter of months. That’s pretty much the best motivation you can have to pass a test. I walked in there thinking, “If I get this, I’m leaving in a month. If I get this, I’m leaving.” And when I finally got the time cut, I almost died. I knew I was going to be out in three months. I called my mom and my friends and told them all. But I didn’t tell my ex-fiancé. I only ended up telling him a few days before I left, when I had the details, and only because I wanted to see Leah.