I have a very dear
friend who a few years ago made an absolutely horrible and very
destructive life decision. This decision had a huge impact on his
future and resulted in a number of serious consequences, the most
obvious of which was a five to ten year prison sentence. Having
known him well for years prior to this decision, I chose to remain
friends with him after. My choice to remain a part of his life meant
that our friendship would be reduced to letters, fifteen minute phone
calls and long lines waiting for short visits at three different
correctional facilities spread across our beautiful state of
Pennsylvania. During my pregnancy, I continued frequent visits to
his current home, SCI Pine Grove in Indiana, PA.
Visiting an inmate
is always a weird experience. The guards have always been very kind
and welcoming to me and I noticed that the facilities themselves for
the most part go out of their way to make visiting areas as unprisony
as possible, while still minding safety and maintaining order. I
believe that this is mostly for the children who visit parents and
siblings there. I often saw and appreciated guards who would joke
and act silly with young kids as they performed their drug screens
and searches to make the experience a bit more pleasant and less
scary for them. As a trauma therapist who has worked extensively
with kids and adults who were traumatized as kids I always took note
of and appreciated this extra effort on the corrections officer's
part.
Their efforts to
make the visits as pleasant as possible were usually overshadowed
however, by the general unpleasantness of being in a prison. The air
itself becomes oppressive as you walk through the long corridor that
connects the visitors center to the actual visiting room, which is
located inside of the facility walls. Every step that you make, even
as a visitor is carefully examined and you are immediately informed
if you step one small foot over a policy line. With that and the
experiences of walking through metal detectors and participating in
drug scans, visits tend to be uncomfortable at best. For a pregnant
person, this discomfort is multiplied. I can't count the number of
times that I had to explain to people that it wasn't a big deal that
my friend wouldn't be out by my due date because he wasn't any
relation to the child that I was carrying.
The drive from my
home to Pine Grove takes exactly an hour and a half and as my
pregnant belly became larger and my pee breaks more frequent and
urgent, I could not imagine any way that the trip could possibly be
more miserable. Suddenly, I needed to stop once each way for a
bathroom break and then as the months ticked on, twice each way. What
was already a pain in the ass trip was now a pain in my straining
bladder as well. By the time I was one month from my due date and
stopped making the long drive to visits, I had learned every gas
station and restaurant between here and Indiana.
Not wanting to be
so far from home so close to my due date, I took the month of June
off from visiting. My plan had been to start again a few weeks after
my son was born but it turned out, that after having Archer I
couldn't pull myself away from him on my days off to make the long
trip and I just didn't feel comfortable having him with me in that
environment. So my visits, which had been so important before,
quickly fell by the wayside. But my guilt of abandoning my dear
friend eventually got the best of me and when Archer was about three
months old I left him with my husband and packed my car for the
tedious drive to Indiana.
To visit a prison
is usually pretty light packing. You aren't allowed to take anything
with you into the prison, no purses, jackets, sweatshirts, not even
your license into the actual visiting room. At Pine Grove you may
carry your locker key and a small debit card that holds money for
snacks only. Usually I would leave with just my license in my wallet
for the trip. But not this time. Now, I was a nursing mommy and
that meant breast pads, nursing bras and pumping equipment. At that
point in nursing I was feeding Archer every two hours on the dot if
not sooner. This meant that I would need to pump right before I went
into the visiting room, visit for two or so hours, and then pump
immediately after before my drive home. So that morning, bright and
early, I walked my big butt and my little pump out to the car for a
road trip.
Anyone who has
known me for any length of time, knows that I was late to my own
birth and have never caught up since. Time management is not my
strong suit. This does not play well for prison visits any more than
it does in the outside world. In fact, it's worse. By the time I
left my house, I had only given myself the time that I needed to
physically drive to the prison. If I took the time necessary to stop
on the way and actually go into a bathroom somewhere on my route,
then it would put me past the sign in time for visits and I would be
required to wait until after lunch and shift change to get in, which
would in turn screw up my pumping schedule for the rest of the trip.
I realized this
when I was about halfway to Indiana. So, being the proverbial good
sport that I am, I simply pulled off to the side of the road into
what appeared to be the parking lot of a closed building and promptly
set up my pump. Sitting there looking at these two intrusive
funnels, I found myself making a disturbing discovery. Due to the
very strict policies of the prison regarding attire during visits and
the brisk weather that day, I was not wearing a shirt that was
anywhere near pumping friendly. I had absolutely no entrance for
easy access to where I needed to be.
I felt my
optimistic outlook for the day shrivel away with the last of my pride
that I had left after having a baby and fueled by an overall sense of
frustration I took a deep breath and as quickly as humanly possible,
shimmied out of my shirt and into my pumping bra with my car facing
the highway, just praying that everyone there was responsibly
watching the road and not the naked lunatic pulled off to the side.
Pump in place, I covered myself with a random blanket that I had
stashed in the back seat since who knows when and put my car into
drive preparing to pull back out onto the highway. I glanced in my
rear view mirror to see a line of about ten cars sitting behind me
waiting patiently. “Wtf?” I thought before realizing that the
closed facility in which I
was parked was actually a very open recycling plant. “Son of a...”
With red cheeks and a working breast pump I pulled back out onto the
highway, begging God that no one would hit me, sending these hard
plastic funnels barreling completely through my chest cavity. I
played the image over and over in my head of the poor police officer
who would have to try and figure out that crash scene...
I
pumped the rest of the way to Indiana and ended up taking my pump off
while parked under an obviously haunted bridge to avoid having to do
so in the prison parking lot. I made sure to enjoy my visit knowing
that it would be my last until Archer was weaned.
On
my way home, I pulled into a gas station and pumped in the bathroom
like a respectable grown-up. True to my word, I haven't been back to
visit my friend since. I feel guilty about this abandonment of my
friend often but remind myself that Archer is my only priority now
and I never need to feel a moment of guilt for that. I can say with
confidence that my days of pumping in the car are definitely behind
me.
Becoming a mom
alters your priorities in a way that you could never have predicted.
Things that used to be important barely matter now. Sometimes there
can be feelings of guilt associated with that, but I think that it is
important for all of us mommies to stop beating ourselves up over
things that at the end of the day, really don't matter. If you can
look into your child's face and know that the choices that you made,
regardless of how they turned out in the end, were what seemed like
the best thing for them at the time, then you have done your job.
And if you are a
mommy who finds herself in the position of needing to pump in the
car, I have three words for you... Button down shirt.
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