The unPrison Project: Freedom on the Inside

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” ~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

This is my journey now, to walk out of silence and secrecy and use my voice. Not always easy for one like myself who spent many years silent, sometimes mute, and always with a secret held from the world: my prison birth, one of many secrets, many stigmas which I thought made me less than others.

Not anymore though. I’ve come to believe that we create other prisons for ourselves and my story just happens to be one of extremes. I’m hard at work on writing my memoir so that I can share my journey with you.

Fast forward a few years.

I’m now in high gear for another prison tour, but then, when aren’t I? I’ve named my prison tours The unPrison Project

If I don’t have 5-10 women’s prisons waiting for me to come and speak, then at least this many call every few months to say, “When can you visit? Our women want you here.”

When I get this call, my heart turns a flip. Yes, I love to go into prisons and work my hardest to offer any inspiration I’m able. I work hard to let the women know they are valuable human beings, who they are, just as they are. Then I suggest, why not consider making a few changes for betterment? I share my story as evidence of how a person such as myself can transform from a gun-toting angry con artist drug addict into… whatever I am today. Not the former, that’s for sure.

It took me a few years, more like all my life, to get the secret out that I was born in a prison. Then, it seems as soon as I admit this to the world — and myself, most of all — the calls start for me to speak about my journey, from prison birth into some years of Wild Mind, aka drugs, crime, and violence. Now my Wild Mind is all about creativity.

At long last I quit resisting what seemed like my destiny — to speak in prisons and other places and share my story and offer what I’ve learned, how I  overcame a multiple of challenges, some still with me today. More on this later.

Still once in a while, I think: is my life’s work really about going into prison after prison after prison?

It doesn’t seem to matter what I think.

This just in. I can resist all I want. The Universe doesn’t pay attention to my resistance.

I accept the calling. At least for today. In that, two prison requested I speak for Women’s History Month this March. Bedford Hills Prison in NY, and CIW ( the California Institution for Women.)

For more about this, you can watch this video, sort of Deborah-in-a-nutshell, more like a 5-minute memoir, a few references to the gory details, and more references to what’s hopeful and possible. I’m still at work on my memoir to get you the full palette of gory details and even  more about the climb up into this life of light that I’m so lucky to live today.

State and federal budgets rarely provide for a budget line item to bring in a speaker.

Please support The unPrison Project and donate what you are able. Any amount, and easy via Paypal. Thank you!

I’ll report here, on Facebook, and Twitter about my progress and also write while on the tour to keep everyone in the loop.

Thank you always for your words of encouragement, your support, and for your belief in my vision and work. ♥

The Mother Who Waited

The week of Thanksgiving, and I pause to recall the five days of solitude I took years ago at a retreat run by Franciscan nuns. I also joined them in their vow of silence for those days.

I committed myself to frequent silent retreats then, to write with more seriousness, by now relieved to end my long-lasting rebellion against my parents and their careers, both English professors and writers.

This particular retreat, in the dead of winter in Wisconsin woods, landed me in a one-room cabin heated by a wood stove. I’m a city girl and had to learn how to keep the wood dry and ready to stoke the fire. I loved the challenge, and rather than write that week, I meditated about my mother and our battle of a relationship.

This is the mother who endured a few decades of my rejection as I reminded her she wasn’t my “real” mother. This is the mother whom I plotted to gas to death, and also the woman whose face my fist grazed before it punctured sheet rock, my every bone shattered in my right hand.

This is the mother who stood by me no matter what, the mother who waited, as did my father, for me to come out the other side of hate, fury, and pain.

My parents adopted me around three or four from foster care. Before foster care I’d spent a year with my other mother in prison. When authorities removed me around age one, I unconsciously held out for over twenty-five years for my prison mother to “come get me,” held out without knowing it.

Fast forward through a disturbed childhood and a more troubled life as a teen and adult, a life of drugs, crime, and violence. When my mother was in her 70s and I was thirty-something, I finally “hired” her as my Mother. At last the girl my parents adopted, turned into their daughter.

This is the mother I never mention on-line. I don’t Tweet about her, or blog with stories about us (the way I do about my prison mother.) Not exactly a Facebook status update kind of woman.

At last I learned to release the past, to accept what I imagined for years would never happen — my return to live in prison with my other mother. At last I opened my heart to the woman who loved me day in and day out, even when, and probably especially when, I’d been estranged and absent for years.

Along with acceptance, gratitude replaced anger. Compassion and forgiveness healed our wounds. I learned the art of forgiving. I forgave my mothers, forgave myself.  The journey to achieve our redemption, my own and ours as a family, is the story of the memoir I’m working on.

For the two years up until this retreat, almost every weekend I flew to visit my mother, now in chemo treatments for ovarian cancer. I had to catch up for a lot of years. We’d sit and read magazines, watch TV, and nap together. I massaged her swollen feet, puffed from cancer now in her liver. We talked, something new for us.

I flew in on the Thanksgiving after my silent retreat in the Wisconsin woods and my mother sat, almost a pile of bones, in her wheelchair through the whole dinner. She scolded me when I tried to force feed her whipped cream. Some hours after I arrived that day, right after our family feast, my older brother wheeled her back to bed. She died in my hands, my father and brother on the other side of her hospital bed.

I’m grateful for our victory, the six or so years of our mother-daughterness. Without this, I’d be a different person, not a woman speaking in prisons, not a writer. Probably not a mother myself. She’s the woman who taught me to see humor even in the darkest of moments.

I’m convinced my mother waited until Thanksgiving, waited for my arrival, to die. Every Thanksgiving week I honor her, my mother’s stamina, her maternal endurance to wait for me for thirty years to accept her.

Sometimes attachment takes a long time. This is the woman I call Mother.

R & R: Rebound and Recovery

We all need to replenish and renew ourselves. This is a working list for ways I know  to nurture a depleted mind, body, and spirit. I’ll continue to add as I think of things.

What did I leave out?

Stillness

Reading

Reiki

Sex

Cranial sacral therapy

Therapy (who hasn’t put some therapist’s kids through college?)

Beach, sand, sun, ocean

Korean salt massage

Thai massage

Good food

Healing ritual in water

Work out

Music

Museum

What else?

These aren’t  necessarily in any particular order and if they can all happen in the sun on a beach, even better!

IN THE WALLS, DID YOU?

I make no secret of it. I was born in a federal prison. I was born and lived my first year in the same West Virginia prison, long after Billie Holiday served one of her sentences there, also for heroin addiction and related crimes, like my prison mother.

I honor my Prison Mother for her strength and courage to fight and keep me for that year. Rather than a tragic beginning, I sense my time in prison as cozy slumber party. Just imagine 200 women…and me. I expect I was pampered more than most infants.

IN THE WALLS, DID YOU?

(for Billie Holiday)

Billie, did you sing to me through haunting prison walls when I was too young

to remember?

Did you draw me into slumber with your grieving blues and

did God Bless the Child when I was rocked in sad, and bliss,

When I was cradled in strong light-mahogany arms that tightened their wrap

as I inhaled humid stale prison sweat in the crook of my mother’s neck on shoulders

that braced me to her own blues?

Billie did you feel my moments of adagio, the smooth lyrical flow of hopeless

time while we all waited, I didn’t know for what and

Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child.

Still, I hear your lullabies like you wrote them to sing simply to me, alone.

Billie when I hear you now, sounds of your voice sweep me on my knees inside

as I squint to recall my prison mother, myself, hundreds of inmates,

hundreds, I can’t quite unravel,

did I hear you then?

In the walls, Billie, did you sing for me?

##

NOTE: Written around 1995, when I returned for the first time to the prison of my birth to address the inmates.  I’m now preparing to go again back to West Virginia for a line-up of five different presentations.

Mutt Meditation #18: Enough! Something has GOT to change

Why not take a deep breath, and reset what doesn’t work in life?

Change is an adventure. I’ve re-invented myself a number of times. It’s fun actually, not only in the end, but also along the away even when it’s agitating. I keep what works, and shed the rest. (I have no idea where it goes, but it goes.)

So take several deep breaths. Make sure your footing is firm, and get ready to press, or bang, your reset button.

I’ve created a flow chart for my “Enough” moments, that Something has GOT to change notion that hits me when the time is right.  Does that happen for you?