Life

My Mother Married Her Prison Pen Pal

And it changed us forever.

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.

Tags: motherhood, prison, relationships

Anna Balkrishna is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn, New York.

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