I have to make an admission, one that may put so much that comes later—my terrible sadness, I mean—into context. But it is also the one that also sounds completely insane, given the specifics of my life, my situation, my own lived experiences. Anyway though, here it is, the truth, the thing that I believed down to the core of me: I never imagined I would be a single mother.
When I say never, I mean never. I mean not once during my pregnancy. Not once during all those times I was huge and pregnant and I wanted someone to make my tea and no one was there, or even when I worried about how people saw me at doctors’ offices, waddling and alone. I did not see myself as a single mom then or even when I was the only one waking up at 2:30 am, at 5:30, to feed my baby.
Various reports tell us that there are a growing number of women who choose to single-handedly have a child, a coparent being either unavailable or else not of interest. If these reports are true, I certainly respect their choice. But it was not mine, nor was it the decision of scores of other sisters who wake up one day suddenly alone, their partners having been put out or else having slipped out, to be with another person, to be alone, or to be, for whatever reasons, just someplace else. For most of us, I suspect, single parenting is less a choice than a place we end up.
A few months into Nisa’s life, when things came undone for me, for our family, I spent a great deal of time being jealous of this woman I knew. Despite the outward courtesy I extended to her, I don’t believe I harbored even one kind thought about her then. And when I could, I lobbed any petty remark at her. I was really trifling.
I would look at her and think how she seemed to have it all: a great job; what appeared to be extraordinary respect from her peers; a gorgeous husband and beautiful baby; a stunning house—a home she owned, unlike me, still a renter in a city fast closing out those of us unable to scrounge up the money to make a six-figure deposit on a seven-figure home, because that’s what homes can cost here in New York, even in some of the most dilapidated of neighborhoods.
But the point is, I wanted her life to be my life. I thought that each time I saw her. I wanted what appeared to be the neatness of her life, the prettiness of it. I wanted the fancy borders and silk curtains of her life. I wanted the no prisons of it. I wanted anything, anything, anything that would move me away from being considered by anyone as strange or pathological, off-center or incapable as a parent.
And then one day—or this is how it seemed from the outside looking in—one day it all ended for her, just like that. The husband was gone, the house was gone, the job was gone. What had been so beautiful before, if it really was beautiful before, now seemed especially cruel.
She had known the top of the mountain, so to speak. She had known a place I had never even seen and so had no true idea of what I was missing. But to know it, to have touched it, and then to have it taken, snatched up and away! And it was a while before she said it, before she claimed her space, this new space. In the beginning, just after the sudden split, she saw in the husband she was now separated from, a coparent and said so.
Specifically she said, “asha, I understand the details of your life, but mine are very different. I am not a single mother like you are.”
And I realized that I used to believe things like this, even if not say them, to all the sisters I knew from the prisons. I started considering again all those mothers I would see each week waiting for a bus or van or on a line in the rain waiting to get into a correctional facility, child in hand. When I first became a mother, I believed arrogantly that those among the group who identified themselves as single parents claimed that term because their man wasn’t as good as mine. Their man must not have supported them the way Rashid supported me. I was a married woman and felt every part of being married. I was not a single mother. Not like them. That’s what I thought. I thought it just as that sister with the disappearing man thought it about me. Both of us were wrong.
Inevitably, she would come to know what I would come to know. She would, of necessity, modify herself as I modified myself. It happened a few months on, when the responsibility of child rearing had firmly planted itself in the corner of her checkbook, her social life, her sex life and work life, in her corner but not her ex-husband’s corner. Then she would say something else. But at first, there was disbelief, rejection.
I completely understood.
I do not care that it is prevalent. Raising a child alone should not be asked of any one person. Even two parents is far too small a number, far fewer than what it really takes to nudge or nurture or sometimes shove a child up through to maturity. We do it, of course, on our own. And many do it exceedingly well. But that’s not the point.
Parenting is all about replaying David and Goliath. It’s about having to go toe-to-toe against entities immeasurably larger than you are or ever will be: from the fast-food chains to the soft-porn music videos pumped out newer and nastier each passing minute, from Christmas and Halloween and all the other holidays that celebrate nothing but how much money one mom, one dad, one family, can spend.
You fight the health-care system, the educational system, everything out there that would make a one-size-fits-all solution for your very individual child and his or her very individual needs. If you don’t have the wherewithal to gangsta up when the time comes, Goliath will win.
He will win and then head off to fight his next David, and your loss, your baby’s loss, will be forgotten just that quick. I don’t know if it is by instinct, but I do know that at some point, most mothers get this, which is why it happens, why a woman might go into shock and denial when she wakes up one day and realizes, wow, this is all on me. I think that this is what happened to the woman I knew. This is what happened, at least in part, to me.
Initially, though, I thought of Rashid as away, but not gone. Rashid was a coparent, albeit a parent forced to live far away, like a man whose work kept him in a distant city. But I never thought of my husband as an absentee father; the first year of Nisa’s life, Rashid sent me money every month for our daughter. He sent money until his funds were depleted. And while cash cannot replace real human presence, I felt supported. I thought I could hold out across the hard first years, the lonely ones. I thought that was all I would have to do.
Rashid was going to come up for parole for the first time before Nisa turned three. That was a given. All of the appeals had been exhausted and we no longer crossed our fingers and toes, hoping for a movielike ending: Rashid, triumphing over the courts and sweeping into our lives at just the critical moment. We let that fantasy go. But if all went well, and neither of us had any reason to believe things would not go well, the less dramatic outcome would surely come to pass: Rashid would make parole and be home to help me plan and then to celebrate Nisa’s third year of life.
As my body swelled, Rashid and I had swooned over sonogram photos in the prison visiting room, and weekly we discussed our future in what appeared to be rational rather than fantastical terms, which, if we are honest, is what we had done for all those years when we believed a court reversal would free Rashid and send him home to me—now me and Nisa—before he had served out every day of his twenty-year sentence.
We were different now, things were different now. Now there was a baby in the mix. And now we had an obligation to face reality. Which is not to say that before Nisa we were completely lost in fantasy. But now there were diapers to change, clothes to be bought, doctors to be seen, child care to find. There was a real live and tiny person who could not speak for herself. We had to speak and think for her in ways we never did for ourselves, because there is nothing more real than a hungry or sleepy or wet child crying.
Rashid and I spoke then in very confident and definite terms about his preparation for parole. Unlike the appeals process, which can be capricious—judges do not like to overturn the decisions of other judges—parole and who is eligible for it has clear guidelines that govern who can and should be considered for release. Are you remorseful? Have you done good time? Have you taken advantage of what the state deemed rehabilitative? Do you have a post-release plan and a post-release support system? Is there anything that indicates that you might be a future danger to society? If it was a test, Rashid would have achieved a perfect score.
“There are a lot of people, asha,” Rashid told me one afternoon, “who have agreed to consider supporting my release. But I know they need time to weigh things over, get letters written. All that. That’s why I want to start early. So I have a whole real package together by the time I go before the parole board. By then I should be finished with my master’s too. So they’ve got to see I’m not the same kid I was then. I mean, you know?”
“Yup. I know,” I agreed. But really, did I? Did he?
He went on to emphasize how important his studies were, the master’s program he had just been accepted into at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. “You know brothers who do that program don’t come back?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the rate of recidivism is so low among those brothers it doesn’t even rate. It’s like less than one percent.”
I shook my head in disbelief and felt assured. How could I not? How could I, how could Rashid, ever have imagined that anything would stand in the way of his release? He’d done what the system had demanded he do. He’d become a person who let the time serve him, as we say, rather than simply just serving the time. This is why I knew he would be granted parole and why I did not think of myself as single. Rather, I thought of myself as I was: married, partnered, and claimed. I was not a woman who had been fucked one hot night and then discarded. I was claimed, me, asha. I was claimed and I was loved. So too was my baby. I felt this with everything that breathed inside of me, felt that with her breathing inside of me.
Even when I went up to the prison, taking Nisa for the first time when she was fifteen days old, and the guards, with their angry, their suspicious eyes, looked over me and looked over my baby and told me the number of bottles and diapers I could bring in—three was the limit on both—I did not think of myself as alone. Or when I argued with the guards, explaining to them that my daughter sometimes drank more than three bottles of milk over the course of six hours, which was the length of the visit, and I knew I was the only person in the whole world who knew just how much milk my hungry little baby drank, what her sleep habits were, what she needed—because no one else was there with us, so no one else knew—but even then I thought of myself as somebody’s wife. I never thought of myself as a woman sort of swashbuckling it alone out there against monsters and general ne’er-do-wells, all to secure the life of her child.
Nor did I think it later, when we had been processed into the prison and my hand had been stamped with the invisible ink that identifies me as a visitor rather than a prisoner, and I then had to fight with the guard about how he could not, absolutely not, stamp my daughter’s fifteen-day-old hand. Even then, I felt connected.
And I felt it when my breasts filled with milk and Rashid, watching me shift and frown from discomfort, leaned over and whispered in my ear how he longed for the ability to make me comfortable. But I needed to nurse or pump, two realities of motherhood not available on that six-hour visit—it’s no surprise that you can’t just pull out your breast and let your baby latch on in a prison visiting room. I mean, people frown on that in liberal areas of New York and San Francisco, but as a new mother I wondered how hard would it have been to have a chair in the ladies’ room where we could sit with our babies and feed them? But these are issues you don’t raise in a prison when your goal is most of all to fly below the radar, thereby avoiding the wrath of guards. Really, you do in prisons what we do in so many other places. Face whatever the situation is, no matter how much you want to shift, no matter how uncomfortable you are.
“I wish I could make this easier for you,” he began softly. “I swear I would do anything. I would do anything,” he continued as he rose slowly from his seat, stood behind me, rubbed my back, and then his fingers through my hair. And I leaned into him, leaned into his hard stomach, and closed my eyes and felt safe and felt a future.
And then again later, I felt it, the future, as I watched Rashid hold his tiny daughter for the first time and the tears pushed against the corners of his eyes and then they pushed against the corners of my eyes, which was also the moment when I knew, I knew, I was looking at a man for whom—for all his years of penance and prayer, all of his struggle to transform himself, all of his remorse—this was it, the moment when he understood in every part of his DNA, the complete and total preciousness of life.
And I did too. I understood it even more in the presence of my husband as he held his daughter, our daughter, and we talked about how one day, sooner rather than later, we, Nisa and I, would know father as an action word.
“When I come home,” he promised, “you’ll never have to do anything alone again.” I believed him. I can’t imagine believing such a thing now. Now, I can’t imagine relying on anyone for anything, unless perhaps if I’m paying them. But then it was different and everything possible was so close. “It’s right here, baby,” Rashid would say. “The end of all this is right here.” And he was right, of course. The end was right there. It just wasn’t the end we had bargained and planned for. But there was no one to tell us and so no way to know. It’s why we were sure all challenges would be mitigated by the love and the promise of a certain tomorrow.
On the day Nisa was with her father for the very first time, we looked at all the pictures I’d sneaked in that were taken of Nisa’s birth, and Rashid said, “It almost feels like I was there,” and I said, “I felt like you were there.” And that lie from my mouth sat there between us, a dead thing, a thing that smelled bad, but we did not notice right then. We did not notice it because we did not know it was a lie.
We only knew our dreams, our push for an ever brighter tomorrow, and as we spoke of our tomorrows, Nisa nuzzled herself into Rashid’s chest and fell asleep right there, not for long, but long enough for him to take in her baby smell, implant the memory of it someplace that could not be searched or discovered or confiscated or destroyed. I could not have been convinced then, in that visiting room, watching Nisa and her father there and then, that I was single, alone.
Nor did I think of myself as single or as alone later that first afternoon that we three, our family, shared together, when the day slammed shut and the guard was yelling out that visiting hours were over. I thought, It will not always be this way. We are connected, a team, and one day, sooner rather than later, there will be neither guards nor doors to regulate the expression and existence of our family.
Even still it’s true that when that visit came to an end, Rashid nearly convulsed, not visibly, and not in any sort of way that another would notice unless you were a person who cared for him enough to really notice him, see him beyond a department number, a conviction. And I did. I loved him enough, I loved us enough, which is why I saw it, that thing inside a man, that piece of spirit that crumples up inside him when he cannot escape a situation that takes away parts of his humanity. They survive this, some do, and come back and grab hold again of themselves and assert their spirits when the time is right. But you and that man both know he will never be the same person again, never go back to a certain place in his heart. That’s what I saw at the end of the day I took Nisa to meet her father for the very first time: a man who would now have to forever traverse the world shielding a piece of his spirit and so a man who would, in a sense, never be free.
There was nothing to be said and there was nothing to be done, because sometimes there is just nothing. There is just nothing. Prisons taught me that. But even as I knew there was nothing, no salve, no immediate remedy, I did not feel apart or separate. I did not feel as though I was a single mother. I was part of a team. I was sure of it.
I was sure of it and I said it and we said it. We said it over and over, one hundred times, and then one hundred times more. Then we went about blocking out the crippling features of the life we were living, focusing instead on anything that made us feel attached to a life that didn’t have barbed wire wrapped around it. And never once did we prepare ourselves for a life without one another.
Not even just after coming home from that first visit, when I sat beneath the dim orange light of my bedroom and I was holding Nisa, waiting for her father to call us, to check on us, as he always did: “Home safe, baby?” he asked, although obviously we were. And I stared at my baby girl and I wondered how much of this prison life she would retain, how much would recede far back into her memory.
That night I wondered too if there would ever be a voice in her life that recalled one of those terrible, hate-filled guard voices, and if that voice would call her back to a bad place. And yes, of course, I wondered what choice I had made, what I had done to an innocent child. Yet even then, cloaked—not so much cloaked, but bound by my own hopes and dreams, even then I did not feel alone.
From that first visit and on visits that came after, Rashid and I made plans. We talked about finances, child care, and how long I should breast-feed. We talked about religious instruction, how we would restrict television, whether to raise our girl vegetarian, vegan, or meat eating. We committed to serving only organic foods, obviously no pork, but also no beef, though chicken and fish were fine. (In the years since that decision, Nisa has rejected our food restrictions. While there’s still no pork in her life, Nisa declared one day recently that although all those animals were really, really cute, she “still had to eat steak and lamb and stuff. It’s just so juicy, Mommy!”). And religion? I don’t practice but Rashid is still a very pious man. We argued a bit about our daughter’s engagement with religion, but I reminded him that he had come to Islam on his very own terms, walked on his own out of Catholicism. “Let Nisa decide for herself,” I pushed and he finally agreed. “We won’t keep anything from her,” I said, “but let her find her own way like you did.”
“Okay. Okay,” Rashid said, acquiescing one day, adding quietly, truthfully, that “the religion cannot be compelled. But I want her to know who I am.”
“She will,” I promised, and then we moved on to other areas that would define our baby’s life. We mulled over the kind of schools we would want our child to attend, the suburbs or the city, places our daughter should see in the world, how many more babies we wanted to have someday, and whether I should work once Rashid came home. We talked and sometimes we struggled through things. We visited and revisited all sorts of theories about what makes for quality parenting. But we did it together, we did it as a couple. We did it just like any other brand-new mother and father.