Prison Baby: A Memoir (2 page)

That night at dinner, everything moves in slow motion as if on a conveyor belt. The voices of my family echo far away, as if from a faint cave. I forget I’ve ever read the letter, forget everything in it. Gone. Zip. Out of my mind, and it doesn’t show up again until a flash about a month later. Maybe not a month, maybe eight. I forget this too. These new facts about my prison birth never stay in my brain or anywhere inside me long enough to grasp. But something this big can’t hide for long. Buried secrets live forever, glued to our insides like sticky rice.

I convince myself: “Don’t think of it. Then it’s not true.”

Thus begins more than a decade of emotional lockdown, a feeling I’d experienced before but never understood what it was.

The anguish seeps out of me like poison trapped in a balloon-sized blister.

My brain battles as I force it to divorce from reality, the one way to metabolize what I’ve just learned:
I was born in prison
.

ONE SUMMER WHEN I’M AROUND EIGHT, before I have found the letter, we drive across the country from Seattle to Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire, to vacation with my aunts, uncles, and cousins on my father’s side. We often vacation near a lake or the ocean, on the Oregon coast, near our home in Seattle, or as far off as the East Coast.

For as long as I can remember, the power and passion of the ocean captivated me. That first whiff of salted air carved itself into my uncluttered memory, and the sounds of the sea soothed me more than anything. The ocean gives a good reason to feel small in life’s landscape, small and yet not out of place the way I feel everywhere else. I can’t find the right track to follow for how to live, how to act. Our beach visits offer a refuge, a mysterious peace in the solitude. Water is a pocket of gracious healing. Life is all there, roaring and real, a place for perfect safety.

MY FATHER GREW up in Brockton, Massachusetts, and his two sisters remain on the East Coast, one in New Hampshire, the other in New York. We spend a few weeks together every year at the lake, each family in their own modern log cabin but sharing a common clothesline, picnic table, and stone-rimmed fire circle.

My two uncles, Peter and Marty, hold me in long bear hugs whenever I try to run past them on the way to the beach. Their knock-knock jokes, pranks, and bubbles of love bring me out of my shell. Silly is the furthest thing from my ponderous father, the bearded stoic and scholar who might give a quick swing of his hand upside my head if something I say irritates him or if the energy of my mischief calls forth his reprimands.

Not always. Sometimes. He’s unpredictable in his outbursts, and once is enough to live on edge and wonder: Will this call out his wrath?

I thrive around my uncles’ playfulness, the same way I thrive around my mother’s side of the family in Minneapolis. It’s easier to let my guard down with both extended families. They bring me out of my isolation, and it’s simple: I just want hugs and to play without a need to perform or pressure for “proper” behavior.

One afternoon my cousin Dorrie bursts through our cabin screen door and races up to me. She’s like an older sister to me and born on the same day as my older brother.

“You’re lucky!” she exclaims. The door slams behind her because she’s run in so fast with her news. “My mother told me you were chosen, said you’re lucky because they had to take me just because I was born to them.”

I stare at her.
What’s lucky about me?

“You got picked,” she says, and spreads her arms wide. “You’re adopted.” Then she adds, “Lucky!”

This is the first time I’ve heard the word
adopted
. I don’t have a clue what she’s talking about or how the word connects to me. All I understand is I think adoption means some kids come from a first set of parents but live with a second set. I’d never thought about why. No one ever told me about my adoption, although I’ve already sensed something different about me. But I don’t know what and haven’t figured out why no one looks like me.

I don’t feel lucky. I’m sick in my stomach, tight inside, like a rubber-band ball the size of a bowling ball. Just then the screen door of the cabin squeaks and slams again, and my cousin Doug walks in with his wide smile. He always impersonates the “What, me worry?” character from
Mad
magazine, and I giggle every time. Not this time. I stare off past him and walk outside towards the beach. I don’t remember much after this. I never said anything to anyone. My usual lockdown took over, an instinct and habit I acquired long before the shock of the letter hit me. Any kind of trauma sent me into this state, but it’s impossible to lock up just one experience. The fence I’m building around me is turning into a concrete wall with barbed wire at the top.

I waited until we arrived home from New Hampshire to pull out more details from my mother about my adoption. Shortly after we return, I track her down in our garden on a late Saturday afternoon. She’s sleeveless and wrist deep in planting tulips, geraniums, and pansies, and yanking weeds, her usual for the weekend. The garden is the one “room” I like to share with my mother. I never let on how I admire her strength, the way she pounds stakes to prop up her plants or untangles a garden hose as it whips around the yard when she sets the sprinkler near her shrubs.

A late afternoon mist has moved in as the Seattle sun prepares to settle.

“Am I adopted?” I ask.

“Yes, you’re adopted.” Her answer drops with a thump and sticks like flour to wet glass. In and out, her jaw muscles clench.

She digs lines of holes for tulip bulbs and doesn’t return my gaze. “And we love you.”

Inside I’m a swirl:
Tell me everything! Who is she? My mother, my other mother, why didn’t she want me? Where is she?

Silence weighs heavy in the air. I need her to say more, but I don’t know how to ask. I keep it all in. I hold my breath and gnaw the inside of my cheek, too afraid, too frozen inside to dare.

It’s true. I have two mothers. Another mother, somewhere else.

The final question pounds at my insides: Didn’t she want me?

Most adopted kids wonder about the same question. Kids simplify, and for many adopted children it goes like this, a belief in our rawest core: if we’re good, they want us, and if we’re bad, they give us away.

The deeper my mother digs in the dirt, the more hatred is dredged up in me. Mother-blame sets in. I hate her for her brief answer, hate her for adopting me, and hate myself for being adopted. Nothing bothers me about the identity of my birth father. Not yet. It’s primal, the complex bond between a mother and daughter.
Why didn’t my prison mother keep me? Didn’t she want me? If I love Mother, am I betraying my other mother? But isn’t she the one who didn’t want me?
I try not to think about this.

The more muddled and saddened I feel about losing my prison mom, the more I hate Mother. I cringe every time she says those words—“we love you”—and every hug adds to the hate.

MY BROTHER, JONATHAN, was adopted at birth and is almost two years older than I am and Caucasian. For much of my childhood, I didn’t know he was adopted, perhaps because he didn’t seem to suffer in the same ways I did. For some reason I just accepted him as my brother, maybe because I didn’t have another brother. He was it. I loved him as my protector and hated him for it at the same time. I hated his whiteness and felt jealous of it. I hated his boy-ness, his handsomeness, his charisma and social ease. I hated his favored standing in the eyes of my parents. And I loved him.

Light-olive-colored skin gave him the look of an Italian boy, with all the verbal and charismatic traits of a first-born. While my grades were sometimes higher than my brother’s, Jonathan was an affable young man—the polar opposite of his moody, timid sister. I’m the one who stretched the rules. Jonathan was bar mitzvahed and was a track star in school. He wore a confident attitude and fitted pants and t-shirts that showed off his muscles. We got along well, though our musical tastes clashed. He played the Beach Boys and surfer music of the 1960s. I cranked up Aretha, James Brown, the Temptations, Marvin Gaye, and Nina Simone.

My parents sent Jonathan to comfort me whenever I couldn’t stop one of my crying jags. Sometimes I’d sob and sob and sob until my throat muscles felt like they’d snap. He’d sit by my side and pat my back, and I’d calm down, simple as that. I remember him saying, “It’s all right,” even though “it” wasn’t all right, and I didn’t know what “it” was. His tenderness helped. I knew he loved me.

Every week after Sunday school, my mother and brother and I stopped at the Twenty-Third Street Bakery in the inner-city Central District, the only Black neighborhood in Seattle. While my mother ran in to pick up snacks for us, we waited outside in her faded-green Plymouth.

One Sunday Jonathan grabbed my shoulder and shoved me under the front seat of the car. I was still small enough to fit under it. He whispered in a panic: “I’ll lock the doors! They might take you!”

By “they,” I knew he meant someone whose skin color matched mine more than his. My t-shirt tore over my brown-skinned back from where the coiled car-seat springs stuck out.

Whenever someone walked by the car, he repeated his order, as if a Black family would take me away. Like me, he wasn’t sure in which world I belonged, but I knew he loved me with his big-brother protectiveness.

When Mother got into the car with a bag of doughnuts, Jonathan grabbed for the sugar and glazed ones, but I wanted to run away in our yard to climb trees, seclusions high in the sky.

MY FIRST MEMORY in my adoptive family is a recurring dream. The dream goes like this: From high above, I’m looking down on myself right before sleep descends in the bedroom I share with Jonathan. The room is dark, other than the nightlight by the roofless wooden dollhouse by my bed. Just when my spirit is about to leave my body and float around the world, a vision startles me. Five or so unrecognizable faces of women surround me in a half-circle. We are in a room full of movement, a busier environment than the sedate atmosphere of my childhood home. In this mirage, the onlookers’ faces, sometimes visible and other times obscured behind vertical lines, peer down at me as I rest on my bed. Narrow wooden rods hide their bodies below the shoulder. I wake soon after I fall asleep, the dream so brief.

The same women stand around me every night. I’m not distressed; I just feel crowded, my personal space invaded. I crave solitude. I wake up weepy, not fearful about the dream but, rather, sad about its recurrence, the repetition of images I can’t understand. I sniffle in the night so no one will hear.

Jonathan, asleep in his bed on the other side of the room, has no idea what’s going on. He’s a deep sleeper and never hears me stir or cry in the night.

MY RECURRING DREAM haunted me for years. I call it my crib dream, the vertical lines maybe crib rods from my past. I couldn’t shake the dream and even grew to expect it every night. After a while, the dream women at the edge of my bed stood like a wall between the world and me. They never left, yet I can’t identify who they were. When my brother and I moved upstairs into our converted attic bedrooms when I was around age seven or so, though, I never dreamed the vision again.

After I unearthed the news about my roots, I began to wonder if my dream vision had started in prison with my birth mother and other inmates, the vertical lines representing iron window guards and not crib rods. Or was the image a memory from one of my foster homes?

I have no idea if Mother heard me cry—whether it was from my bedwetting, even as a grade-school girl, or from my angst about waking up in the morning with my thumb in my mouth—but I knew she cared for me in the night. I longed to stop wetting my bed and sucking my thumb, tried and tried and just couldn’t. Not until my teens.

Many times after I’d woken up crying, I’d sit up, lean over the edge of my bed, grip my pillow so I wouldn’t fall out, and grope around in the dark for the single graham cracker my mother would hide each night in one of the rooms of the dollhouse next to my bed. The tooth fairy also visited the same dollhouse rooms the nights after I lost a tooth.

I’d discover my treasure and then sit up in bed and nibble it, one hand under my chin to catch the crumbs. The crackers appeared night after night, yet my mother and I never discussed this secret ritual. I locked my tenderness inside.

Memory can play tricks on us. Or maybe we trick memory to serve a deeper purpose. Maybe I kept the dream alive so I could keep the sensation of my prison mother surrounding me.

The longer I kept her with me, the more I pushed away Mother, the one I should have loved, the one I wasn’t sure I wanted to love. The longer I kept myself outside my family, the more I lived with the memory sensations of my first home in prison. I’d begun to glamorize my birth mother, to romanticize our relationship, romanticize the prison and whatever sent her there.

The longing stayed with me, but I didn’t know for what. I couldn’t control any of it.

MY ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TEACHERS SEND ME to the principal’s office at least three times a week. One day I pull the fire alarm, another day I hide above the dropped-ceiling tiles and jump on top of my teacher. Bits of sheetrock rain down on her as I thump onto her desk. On another day I sit on a boy’s lap in the first row, and on a different day I wave the blue-gold flame of my stolen Zippo lighter, my favorite score from my parents’ bedroom, over toilet paper rolls and crumpled wads of paper towels in the girls’ bathroom trash can. No false fire drill this time.

All the trouble I stir makes me forget about the prison, forget the fact of my birthplace. It’s gone from my consciousness, but deep inside, a river of quiet anguish runs through me.

My gut’s in a constant tangle, and Mother drags me, trip after trip, to the doctor’s office for my stomachaches.

“Nothing wrong,” the doctor says on a visit.

She and my mother discuss bland foods.

Nothing wrong?
This isn’t a food problem.
What about the big prison secret?