Week 13

This is my last week of fall term, which means I am in finals land.  Lots of papers to write and things to finish up, but the payoff is several weeks off before I start my next batch of classes.  I probably won’t be updating this blog until mid January when the second half of my internship will begin.  In my down time,  I hope to take a few days to escape to one of my favorite little cabins in the woods and spend some time mentally, physically, and spiritually detoxing.  It had been a draining term, and I find that my brain is working at a much slower pace than it used to!

With the small amount of brain power I have left I have been thinking about family and how the are created and destroyed.  Two people in my life had babies this week.  One to a single mother struggling with feeling ashamed of having a child out of wedlock, and the other to a married couple who are just about as close to the all-American ideal you could imagine.  A baby from my church died, and an inmate I work with is waiting to become a parent in the near future and dealing with the reality of not being able to be with the baby.  I also know a family who wants to adopt and another couple who are accepting that children aren’t in their future.

I have noticed that the theme of family comes up frequently in the pastoral counseling I do at the prison.  Inmates often have a love-hate relationship with their family of origin and with the family they created as an adult.  Being ripped away from that can be a blessing and a curse.  Many inmates create families in the prison.  These relationships are often short lived and developmentally feel more like a young adolescent type of bond, but others are quite genuine and endure the many difficulties that come with an incarceration.

The thing that is striking is how strong the longing for a family is, and yet how little they know about healthy relationships.  Most of the people I counsel are in multiple relationships via pen pals, and many talk about being engaged to people they have never met because they live in another prison, or even in another state.  I have had to give up on trying to track these relationships because they are often so numerous and short lived that I can’t keep them straight.  Many inmates have had several failed marriages in both the legal and nonlegal sense.

People seem to be hard wired to need family.  This need contributes to the amazing amount of relationships between inmates and with inmates via pen-pals.  Sadly, very few people I work with have a relationship with someone on the outside.  If they had one when they became incarcerated  it didn’t last too long.  And yet there are many people on the outside willing to take up relationships with people serving time.  A quick google search found about a dozen websites set up for just this purpose.  Inmates have reported to me that they enjoy writing with pen pals because it helps pass the time, they hope to fall in love and get married, and because the person writing to them might gift them some money.

Research has shown that prisoners are mostly honest about their crimes.  They are less honest about their age and length of incarceration.  The more violent or sexually related their crime is the less honest they tend to be about it as well.

And yet the more violent the crime, and the more publicity it attracted, the more attention the prisoners get.  It somewhat boggles my mind, and I have watched several episodes of Prison Wives on Netflix to try and understand it better.  I think it all boils down to loneliness.  Inmates are surround by people, but not in an intimate way, so they are lonely and longing for companionship.  People on the outside who write to prisoners are often unfulfilled and living lives disconnected from family and friends.

I see this hunger for family when I am doing a pastoral counseling session.  It can be a difficult balance this need for family with the unhealthy relationship patterns that many of them have deeply established.  These patterns are so comfortable are like ruts in the road, they may not make for the smoothest ride, but it’s hard to get off the path and make a new one.

The first step is acknowledging that the need for family has lead to dysfunctional relationships and that they have led to suffering.  It’s hard to change what you don’t know is happening.  I got to watch an inmate come to this realization recently.  It was quite powerful.  I don’t know what this “ah-ha” moment will lead to, but I am grateful to be a witness to the beginning of something, whatever that may be.

My week of thinking about family ended on an up-note when I discovered that one of my chickens had hatched several new chicks.  The interesting thing about it is that they aren’t all her eggs that she has been laying on.  It’s a collection from several of my hens but none of the other ladies wanted to sit on them.  In fact, I don’t know if any of the eggs were hers!  It is fun to watch her maternal instincts kick in as she cares for her new chicks.  It shows that family is what you make of it, and that sometimes it comes in the most surprising ways.