My Mother Married Her Prison Pen Pal

For me, answering the question "Are your parents remarried?" is a delicate matter. My dad is easy: Nope, he's a born-again bachelor since he and my mom divorced after 22 years together. My mother is not currently married, I will say carefully, but she was for several years. I might even add that she moved from California, where I grew up, to New Mexico, in order to be with her second husband. The conversation usually stops there. But sometimes I'll plunge ahead. In 1996, my mother met and later married a man incarcerated in a New Mexico state prison, an inmate who began as her pen pal and ended up as her lover.

At first, I was supportive. Which seems hard to believe. My mother's affair began very soon after my parents split and I moved away to college, and it carried a crazy whiff of romantic adventure. The universe seemed to conspire to bring them together. Joe reached her by randomly tapping a string of numbers together into an out-of-state collect phone call. She accepted the call, thinking it was one of my old boyfriends who shared the same name. He was looking for someone to write to him, since his family didn't often visit—would anybody in the household be interested? (He later admitted that he'd heard from other inmates that the collect-call routine was a good way to find women.) She volunteered for the job, and I thought her daring and fabulously unorthodox.

My mom told me later that corresponding with Joe seemed like a good mentorship opportunity—he was 17 years her junior, a young, amiable Navajo man with some "bad boy" hobbies (a biker! a tattoo artist! a pot head!) who'd gotten himself into a bit of trouble with the law. She figured she could be a positive influence and gain some post-divorce good karma for herself. It turned out, though, that my mom needed him as much as he needed her. Their letters and phone calls quickly turned into therapy sessions, during which my mother poured out her distresses—about her divorce, her marriage, her childhood—dredging up painful bits that she'd never told anyone else. She told him about being raped in college, and about the abortion she'd had after my sister was born. He listened, attentively and sympathetically. In my cynical moments, I pointed out that, of course he was a good listener. He had nothing but time since he was sitting around in a jail cell.

But the undivided attention was a novelty to her (which was, in itself, sad—had my father never listened to her?), and she blossomed in a way I couldn't deny. Before I had thought of her as stoic and self-reliant, the woman who had refused her father's money in order to put herself through college, and ignored the slights of male colleagues to become a respected computer programmer. She was serious-minded, and preferred reading science magazines to socializing. Now she became gregarious and girlish. She shed 40 pounds and filled her new wardrobe with Levis and brightly tie-dyed T-shirts. Before she’d been rather puritanical—she had grown up in the late '60s, yet did not know what a bong was!—and was now fearlessly venturing off to Harley Davidson conventions.

She carried a camera with her everywhere, documenting her experiences for Joe to see: hiking trips, lovely sunsets, flowers from the yard, bread she'd baked, interesting tattoos or motorcycles he might like. He mailed her beautiful pencil drawings of wildlife and Native American scenes, which I thought were hokey but she framed with pride. It was as if she'd screwed in a pair of new eyes, living vicariously not through Joe, but for him, and she was delighted by what she saw.

Mom fell in love like a teenager. She was only 21 when she married my dad, and the years after that had felt to her like grim adulthood—it made a weird sense that she should revert back to square one, emotionally speaking, for this new relationship. But a 21-year-old mind backed by the power of middle age is an unsettling thing. A teenage girl can dream of eloping with the first boy she meets, but parents and her own limited resources hold her back. A mature woman of independent means, however, can throw herself headlong into any ill-conceived venture that she chooses. To spend $600 a month on flights and collect phone calls is a decision an adult can easily make. Like a teenager, my mom was obsessive about her lover, and closed to anything but her own reasoning.

When I'd come home for visits, she wasn't "present" anymore. She was uninterested in spending time with anyone but him; when the phone rang, she would cut our conversation short and race to her room to answer it, slamming the door behind her. Her living for him started to seem creepy to me. When Joe ogled the busty blondes in the pages of his biker magazines, she dyed her graying hair a hideous brittle yellow. Oblivious, she would prod me and my sister to take photos of her in the backyard wearing slinky slips from Victoria's Secret. (Eventually, we protested so much that she purchased a camera tripod with a remote control shutter.) This was not a woman I had ever known. Wasn't my mom a militant feminist in the ‘70s mode, who refused to wax her lip on the grounds that it catered to male standards of beauty? And now, suddenly pink nail polish and giggly phone calls? Where had my tough, skeptical mother gone? I had initially liked her energy and new clothes, but I didn't trust this flighty creature that looked through me when I spoke.

Over time, I adopted the role of grown-up, and lorded it over her. I thought I had seen more of the world, while she pointed out that she'd been in the world longer. I preached caution and moderation, while she argued for independence. "I'm an adult," she protested, the ultimate battle cry of what had become our frustratingly inverted mother-daughter dynamic.

When my mother did finally marry Joe, her reasons were oddly practical. As his wife, the prison would be legally obligated to inform her if anything happened to him. She would also be allowed conjugal visits, an important rite of passage for two people whose intimacy transpired on pen and paper. She needed to know whether a young man in his 30s could find her aging body attractive; if he could not, then better to find out sooner rather than later. Once they wed, however, troubling details emerged. Joe confessed that he had lied about the reason for his incarceration. He had not been charged with vehicular manslaughter, as he'd said for the last five years; in reality he had been convicted of rape. She vowed to stand by her man. "He was just terrified to tell me, since he knew I'd been raped," she explained serenely. To her, it was evidence of his love and fear of losing her. I saw, on the other hand, a man who could easily lie for years to achieve his goal. And a woman so willfully blind that she never thought to check his record before.

Joe was reluctant to tell his family about her, which hurt her pride immensely. His excuse was that Native Americans would not trust a white woman. We later discovered that he had another mistress, a member of his extended family. Then came the two additional rape charges, old cases that had been reopened thanks to new DNA evidence. My mother spent a good portion of her retirement savings on his lawyer. Was he guilty, I wanted to know? She refused to ask him directly; she felt it would be a breach of faith. I felt that I had lost my mother to a cult of personality. In my mind, the man was a sociopath. I badgered her with enraged outbursts of "how could you?" and "can't you see?" She grew silent and turned away from me.

What I couldn't understand, or wouldn't accept, was that Joe represented more than a love affair to my mom. This is why she stuck with him, far beyond all reason. She believed that he was put into her path for a purpose. She made a commitment: morally, to "turn him around" and wean him off his bad behaviors, and practically, to help him through his sentence and his parole until he could integrate back into free society. Once she made the commitment, she could not break it.

I found her stubbornness unreasonable and shocking, but I see in hindsight that it fit the pattern. Once she'd made up her mind—to get through college, to stay unhappily married to my father—she seemed to take a perverse pleasure in the hardship. So, she set her jaw tight, only rarely allowing herself to despair. In our many conversations, she patiently explained to me how their relationship meant redemption for them both. She also said Joe reminded her of the son she could have had but instead aborted. (I preferred to ignore the freaky psycho-sexual implications of that one.) It was a lofty ideal, perhaps harder to see the ugly truth for its loftiness. Of course, Joe did not share her vision. She tried to teach him to take responsibility for his life—instead, he maneuvered the responsibility onto her, as he had done with many other women in the past. I think he really loved her, but he also needed a meal ticket. They were the idealist and the conman, a perfectly symbiotic pair.

When Joe finally got out of jail in 2006, he moved into my mother's new house in Albuquerque, which she'd bought and fixed up for his arrival. Within four months, everything had fallen apart. Despite his promises, he refused to give up his mistress; my mother would find gas receipts from the days when he'd sneak off to visit her. The other woman she had unhappily tolerated, but his lying was finally too much. She moved out and filed for divorce. Still, I was furious that she should leave her own house, which she loved, into a tiny apartment, so that he could continue living there. She explained wearily that it was too difficult for a person with a prison record to be approved for his own apartment lease. Soon, even that bit of good will was extinguished—once Joe finished his parole, he stopped looking for work and he started doing drugs again.

As I write this, he is back in prison for assaulting his first wife. My stomach sinks when I think how easily that could've been my mom. My mother is back in her house and currently renovating all traces of him away. She gets excited about painting the walls bright colors and building new closets, and her cheerful e-mail updates make me glad ("Don't you love the bedspread? I'm now thinking about the outside of the house. It's going to be great!"). She is still devastated in her quiet way. Lovers are hard enough to give up, but ideals are even harder.

My relationship with my mom remains tentative and strained. I worry that it may be damaged permanently. We have been fighting about the same topic for my entire adult life so far, over the 13 years since I was 18-years-old. Our fights are not about her love life at all, not really, but about the big-picture stuff: the meaning of strength, the meaning of commitment, the meaning of free will. I thought she was weak to hand her life over to this man, throw away her money and time, put up with all that pain. The self-sacrifice was a form of martyrdom that I find distasteful. But although she is divorced from Joe now, she doesn't regret that phase of her life. She still believes she showed deep strength in embracing a man with so many imperfections, in following the relationship through to its conclusion, in sticking to her guns when neither her friends nor family supported her. "I chose that life myself," she says.

"No, you chose his life," I point out. We have reached a stalemate, sometimes respectful, sometimes not."What about happiness?" I asked her. "I have never been interested in happiness, "she replied. "I am interested in knowledge, and in doing right." A stoic in the end. I wonder what that smiling, hopeful woman 10 years earlier, camera in hand, would've said to that. I sigh and turn the conversation to lighter topics.

Photograph of hands on prison bars by Dick Luria/Getty Images.