Parenting Together While Living Apart
Navigating the Early Days of Incarceration
When incarceration began for our family, our daughter was 5 years old. We were lost and facing what seemed like an impossible situation. We wanted to plan ahead, but it was difficult to speak about the situation or how things would be because we didn’t know anything. We made what we thought were some smart decisions, like getting durable financial power of attorney, adding Grandma to the list of individuals with “Educational Rights” for making school decisions, and getting life insurance in case anything happened. While those decisions helped us with the worst-case scenarios, we were unable to prepare for what day-to-day life would be like for an incarcerated family.
We’ve mentioned it before, and we’ll continue to explain it, but when one member of the family goes to prison, the entire family goes. It is difficult to separate yourself from the difficult experiences that one family member faces, even if you are not the person that is actually locked up. Of course, the experience is much more difficult for the incarcerated family member, but for us, we made a commitment to stay together which meant that our young child was exposed to some things that were difficult for the family to adjust to.
Establishing Communication and Routine
Since the sentence included a mandatory minimum, we knew the release date from the very beginning. While mandatory minimums are unproductive and create more harm than good, this was a benefit to us that we did not have to wonder when the sentence would end. Other families are left wondering when their incarceration will end. When the sentence first started, we thought there may be some tools and skills that we could learn from the DOC. Bo took a class called “Inside, Out Dads” once he was processed through the diagnostic center and sent to the facility where he would remain for the next six years. It sounded promising enough, but “Inside, Out Dads” was taught by an instructor that was a self-proclaimed “dog dad” and had never been incarcerated. From the start, what seemed like a good opportunity was tainted, and the experience turned out to be worthless.
So with no guidance, we did the only thing we knew how to do. We tried to communicate with extreme regularity, clear expectations, and love and compassion to account for the difficult situation that we all found ourselves in. Since our daughter was only 5 when our experience began, she was not a very large part of our communication at first. Once he was settled and in the facility he would remain at, we quickly established a bedtime routine that accounted for family time. Bo would do whatever he had to do to be able to call immediately after 9:00 pm count. We delayed sleep until we heard from him and stayed up reading until we were able to say goodnight as a family. This practice was difficult at first because he was in a warehouse-type building with only 4 phones for nearly 150 people. He would have to stand in line and deal with threatening behavior to keep from getting pushed around in the phone line. Sometimes we were up waiting until pretty late, but we continued this practice due to the importance we felt it had for our family. We also were lucky that our daughter was able to handle the later bedtime when we waited for his calls.
Introducing Gratitude into Our Lives
As she grew up, it became increasingly important to her to say goodnight before falling asleep. Bo also had to work extremely hard to process his phone call experience. Some calls were easy to make without any trouble, and sometimes he had endured frustration and physical challenges to get to the phone. He made a valiant effort to try not to let those frustrations show through the phone.
About halfway through the sentence, we established an additional part of the bedtime routine that has stuck with us even after his release. The last thing we share with each other before saying goodnight is what we are grateful for from each day. We take time to think about something real and share it as our final thoughts of the night. We learned this from a volunteer in Celebrate Recovery at the correctional center. So even though “Inside, Out Dads” didn’t turn out to be a helpful tool, we gained our nightly gratitude routine from his time in prison, and it will be something that stays with our family forever.
Making Visits Memorable for Our Daughter
Another important element of parenting while incarcerated revolved around maintaining the relationship between Bo and our daughter. We sacrificed a lot to visit every two weeks once he was settled in his facility. We traveled 150 miles each way for a four-hour visit. This made for a ten-hour day, which was difficult for a 5-year-old. We kept the trips eventful by giving car presents along the way and making sure we had plenty of treats to keep us sustained. Car presents were little gifts that we kept a collection of and wrapped so there was always something exciting to keep us motivated to travel. We would find little workbooks, toys, pens, or fidgets for $1-$2 that we could use as incentives for long hours in the car. We watched movies on the tablet until she started to get car sick, and when we couldn’t do that anymore, we listened to kid-friendly podcasts, playlists, and audiobooks to help pass the time.
The road up to the prison was intimidating and caused some anxiety for us every time we visited. The prison was about 100 years old and sat on top of a hill. The COs that patrolled the parking lot were strict about arriving in the parking lot as expected and sometimes we had to turn around and drive back down the road if we arrived too early. Once we were processed through the airlock and waiting in the visiting room, we would sing songs and cuddle while we waited for the visit to begin. We tried to make the vending machine food appetizing, and we were lucky that our visiting room had some old toys and books as well as games and paper and crayons. We would play games, eat snacks, and sing silly songs. We agreed early on that the visits would not be spent on parenting or discipline, but only on loving each other and showing each other kindness and compassion in a difficult situation. As we became regulars, we were lucky that the COs would allow dad and daughter to snuggle more and have more close moments than the rules probably allowed.
Adapting During the Pandemic
Once the pandemic hit, we weren’t allowed to visit for about 18 months. After about six months, they opened up visits for adults but still not for children. Finally, once children were allowed to visit, we could only go for two hours and we couldn’t touch any of the toys or games, we couldn’t eat and we could only have drinks from the vending machines. We would look up word games, car games, and anything we could think of to make the time fun as we sat at the table for two hours. We wrote long lists of games to play on our arms so we wouldn’t forget. Eventually, visits opened back up again in a mostly regular format. We decided to make up for lost time by spending one weekend per month near the facility and visiting on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, which was the maximum that was allowed. After two weeks, we would come back for a single-day trip. So we still visited twice each month, but for a lot more time.
These in-person moments were extremely valuable for our family. We had a lot of funny, silly, and happy moments, even though we were always sad at the end of the visits. It made it easier to know that we would be back in a couple of weeks and even though we got very tired of the visiting room, we made a lot of memories. The COs watched our daughter grow up because she was 5 when we started visiting and 11 at our last visit. She lost her first tooth in the visiting room, and one of the officers made a little paper envelope for her to keep it in for the tooth fairy. She drew them pictures and as she got older, she made them funny comics of the gross stuff that people in prison experience.
Balancing Parenting and Incarceration
While this story shares the experience that we had, we know that not everyone has the same opportunities. Some people don’t live close enough to visit or don’t have the time off work or the resources to make frequent trips. Some people don’t have the capacity to weather the long days and emotional pull that visiting a prison entails. The point is that communicating and visiting in whatever ways are possible are important, and it is just as important for the incarcerated parent to understand that they only have to show love in those moments. There will be plenty of opportunities in life to reprimand, advise, coach, or lecture our children. But when living separately due to incarceration, the most important thing to do is to share love.
Our relationship is so close and powerful because now we allow ourselves to accept the situation and recognize that things could have been different or better, but they weren’t. We accepted things as they were and made the best of them. And for us, that meant being silly, jokey, joyful, and loving in the moments we had together, in person or on the phone. We agreed that any discipline or parenting that needed to happen would be discussed by us together and then handled at home after it was clear that we both agreed. One example of this is when we became unhappy with the education that our daughter was receiving after First Grade. We had MANY conversations about the way things were going at school and together we agreed that we would begin working on a way to change schools. We didn’t make any decisions without the other if we could help it. Obviously, the incarcerated parent had to defer in some situations to the parent that was available to make the change, but he was very careful to discuss emotions and not hold any resentment for being gone when important decisions were made.
Staying Connected and Strong as a Family
We were very lucky to have a lot of friends and family that helped us out in various ways throughout the experience. We are thankful for the roles that they all played and know that they all helped us succeed as we stayed connected with each other. Because of the help that we received, we could spend our time focused on love and light. We are so thankful for the closeness that we shared during incarceration. We are lucky to have made it through with a strong marriage and a strong family dynamic. We know that our relationship with each other and our daughter would not be what it is now without the unique experiences that we endured. We worked hard and came out successful because we made our choices with the priority of family love and support.