While it is more common than it should be for a child in the United States of America to experience the incarceration of a parent, guardian, or family member at some point in their young life, it is still rare for them to maintain a relationship with that loved one. I used to think I was all alone as a kid with a parent who was "locked up", but I was more alone in the fact that I missed a parent I'd never really gotten the chance to know. Again, it's not just me. But there are few of us who live in this reality, and go on to have a satisfactory level of engagement with the parent who was gone, despite any and all efforts made by the remaining parent. After years, sometimes decades of separation, you want to be close. But you don't know who you're trying to be close to.
I desperately looked for stories like mine to validate my confusion about who I was supposed to be to my father once he was released from prison, and who he was supposed to be to me. I wanted easy answers to the kinds of questions no one can really answer for you. I certainly don't have any answers about who anybody should be to anybody. But I do have a bit of writing from the night before I went to meet my father after his release. If you know what this moment feels like, I hope you feel seen. If you don't know what it feels like, I hope you feel better prepared. Your experience won't be like mine, but in the moment, you won't be alone in having had to meet the experience with your full self present. You can't predict or control how anybody else will show up, but you.
From The Night Before I Went to Meet My Dad
I made a special playlist on iTunes before going to see my dad for the first time. He would technically be a free man by the time I arrived. I sat up in my hotel room in Indianapolis, having arrived from Brooklyn at nearly 1 a.m. The room was dirty and badly designed, but I’d booked it last minute using an app, and you get what you pay for I guess. I was back in my favorite Midwestern city, preoccupied with the phone in my hands, trying to answer the question, “What songs will I want to listen to on the way to see my father for the first time outside of prison?” I didn’t want to hear anything too loud or too fast. I wanted familiar and soothing; Sixty tracks later, the list was lousy with Anita Baker, Lauryn Hill, and ‘90s-era Kenny Loggins.
Sleep did not show up that night. As scared as I was of the bedbugs I assumed surrounded me in that atrocious hotel, I was more afraid of what would happen when I saw my father. Would the man who showed up be anything like the one I’d been imagining, and would I be anything like the daughter he thought he had? Would he be proud of me? How were we going to make this relationship — the real one — work? I lived in Brooklyn, and he would be staying with his sister in Indiana. More importantly, he had been in prison for thirty years and had no contact with modern technology. I was all about technology. That's how I communicated with everybody I knew.
He didn’t even have an email address, while I was tackling multiple inboxes every day. He’d only seen photos of cell phones, but I was blocking apps in an effort to get my time and attention back. The social aspect of the internet I’d always enjoyed had recently begun to feel like something I was trapped inside of, something at odds with my desire to be close to people. And yet, I was constantly logged in, logged on, or scrolling. We were on opposite ends of this technological spectrum, but if we wanted to know each other, we would have to meet somewhere in the middle.
Before I fell asleep, I made another list. Way To Talk With My Dad that I Won't Hate. Despite decades of receiving handwritten letters from him, the form didn't make the list. That was his preferred mode of communication. Now that he was out, and we both had options, we could find a way that included my preferences too. I didn't know what my dad would want from me, but I knew what I wanted. I wanted my preferences to matter. And if they couldn't matter to him, then we had a longer road to walk than I'd planned for. But you can only plan for so much. First I had to show up. I had to meet him. I had to let the future of whatever we could become play out. "Let the world work," I told myself. "Let it show you what can be."
