‘I want your visits with my girls supervised from now on!’ my ex-husband had snarled into the phone early in the piece.
‘They already are,’ I snapped back. ‘You know those six Corrections Officers who man the Visitor Centre? They aren’t cardboard cut-outs.’ Honestly, the guy could drive me completely nuts at times.
There were multiple skirmishes like this during which he tried to control what happened to me behind bars by interfering with my access to Shannyn and Sarah. I fought tooth and nail to keep regular contact with them, though I was only allowed a paltry thirty-six hours a year in addition to my two twelve-minute phone calls per week (six minutes per daughter). It seemed incredibly punitive considering I was a non-violent offender.
My ex-husband, I’m sure, saw me as nothing more than a convicted criminal trying to call the shots on parenting from prison. But as far as I was concerned the issue wasn’t about a mother’s right to see her children – it was about the children’s right to see their mother. He didn’t seem to understand that.
‘Oh yeah, great,’ he’d say, ‘I’ll bring them to see you so they can have barbecues with the murderers and armed robbers.’ I do understand that having had no contact with prisons before he had every right to be concerned, but he didn’t give allowance to the fact that I naturally would also share that same concern and would never endanger them.
I made a point of never complaining to the officers about him. I didn’t need to – they figured him out all by themselves just by watching him. All the women in the unit were like family to me so they knew about my problems with my ex-husband and word got around among the people on their visitor lists, too. He would sit in the Visitor Centre and try to bad-mouth me to the mothers of other inmates. ‘Kerry is this’ and ‘Kerry is that’, he’d say. But they knew better.
‘Oh well, Kerry just helped my girl get parole,’ they’d respond. ‘She’s getting out next month. Please thank her for us.’
Before too long my ex-husband had created so much unnecessary drama about visitation that Brendan Money decided to step in. Beginning at the next visit, the girls’ father was forbidden from entering the Visitor Centre at all. Instead, officers stopped him at the front gate and escorted Shannyn and Sarah in to see me. This was a huge deal and had never happened before: the moment the officers took possession of the girls, they were legally responsible for them. Every time the girls visited from then on their father had to sit outside in the car park while they spent time alone inside with me.
I was keenly aware that I wasn’t the only parent in DPFC who struggled to keep relationships with their children alive, let alone in bloom. A lot of the women faced similar difficulties; an unreasonable and uneducated family member who thought taking children into a prison visitors’ centre would expose them to harm. With trained Corrections Officers watching their every move – along with their access-starved mothers – there are few safer places for a child to be. There had to be a way to point this out to thick-headed spouses and ex-partners, so finally I came up with an idea and went straight to Brendan Money.
‘There are a lot of people who aren’t seeing their kids because it’s thought the prison isn’t a safe place,’ I pointed out.
‘Yes, I know,’ he said.
‘Well, we’ve got to make them aware somehow, so I’ll write a children’s book but I need you to pay for it and publish it.’
‘Kerry, one day you’re going to realise that you don’t run this place,’ Brendan replied with a smile on his face.
‘That’s fair enough but in the meantime I need you to support this book.’
He did.
With the encouragement of my adorable friend and tutor Carolyn Beasley and the wonderful Michelle Gale from the Parenting Program in the prison, I set about writing a book called Shannyn and Sarah Visit Mum. We decided it should be a colouring-in book that not only engaged and educated the children of female inmates, but helped inform their fathers or carers. The idea was that if you were the wife or partner who ended up in prison you would be given the book to sit down and read with your children while they coloured in. The story took them through each step of what to expect during a visit to DPFC: how the officers were friendly and there to help, why Mummy had to dress in a special green zip-up jumpsuit, how the sniffer dogs were very busy hounds who would never hurt a soul. I envisaged pictures of the dog squad coming into the Visitor Centre and the smiling officer talking to the kids: ‘This is my work dog so he’s not allowed to be touched.’ By the time a child started visiting prison they shouldn’t be surprised or frightened by anything. It was a friendly book and I loved writing it, but since I was barely capable of drawing stick figures I needed to find an inmate to illustrate it. A woman named Donna Parsons said she was a handy artist.
I didn’t know it at the time but Donna was a former professional wrestler from Wales who was known in the ring as ‘The Welsh Dragon’. She was serving a twenty-three-year sentence – one of the longest in Victoria at the time – for the murder of her husband. He had been having an affair with a girl called Kerry who had long dark hair – just like little ol’ me – so muscle-bound Donna convinced two mentally challenged hit men that her husband was hurting her. One day when Donna was out with the kids, the hit men ambushed him with a crowbar and a knife and he bled to death inside the family home. To set an alibi, Donna – who stood to gain $1 million in life insurance – sent her two young children in first to find Daddy’s body. I wasn’t Donna’s biggest fan from the very beginning, but after she started working on the book we became legendary mortal enemies for the rest of my sentence. Her main problem was that she couldn’t bring herself to draw a smile.
‘Donna,’ I said as she started sketching out pages, ‘why do all the mothers and children look grief-stricken?’
‘What?’ she snapped.
‘They all look like they’ve just been told the world is going to end! This is supposed to be a happy book, with a positive message that makes the kids feel reassured about coming in here,’ I pointed out.
‘Yeah, I know that.’
‘Well, do you think we might be able to turn those frowns upside down?’
She didn’t take my constructive criticism very well. Pretty soon it was on.
‘Oh, you’re going to take over and do everything yourself, are you?’ she said, fuming.
‘What’s with the frowning, desperate-looking people?’ I replied. ‘It’s a fucking kids’ book, not the Australian Police Journal!’
Donna wasted little time in getting personal. ‘I think your kids are better off without you.’
‘Well, I think that dog you’ve drawn looks like a fucking horse!’
That was it: I had criticised Donna’s drawings so she downed tools. ‘I’m not touching this book,’ she said. ‘You’re a fucking bitch, Tucker.’
Thank Christ! While I wasn’t thrilled to have made a bitter rival out of a wrestling champion, I was relieved that she wasn’t going to stuff up the book anymore. Little did I know a familiar figure would do his best to ruin the process anyway.
Tania Herman kindly finished the illustrations – complete with grinning mums, kids and officers. Unfortunately, because of her high profile, we couldn’t put her name on the cover to credit her with bringing some happiness to the project. But the book did bear my name – my first ever published work – and the title celebrated the sacrifices Shannyn and Sarah had been forced to make because of my mistakes. The prison ordered 10,000 copies, which were to be stocked in prisons, barristers’ chambers and legal offices throughout Victoria. Then my ex-husband found out about it and was not prepared to give his permission to have our girls’ names used. His purported reasoning? ‘People will find out who they are and they could be in danger.’
Seriously.
From where I stood, though, it was purely about ensuring I did every day hard. It was clear I was achieving things within the prison, which meant I quite possibly was going to be a different person when I got out, so he wanted to pull the strings whenever he could. He wanted permission for this and permission for that. I was devastated at the prison – we all were – when Brendan Money said we were going to have to pulp 10,000 books that were meant to do nothing more than make thousands of children’s lives easier. I almost wept as he told me the news in his office.
‘What a terrible, terrible shame,’ I said.
Thankfully Brendan knew how good an idea it was and came to the rescue. ‘Just change the names,’ he said, ‘and we’ll print the book again.’
The next time the girls came to visit I held them close and told them what had happened. ‘We can’t use your names in the book,’ I said. ‘But you can pick any other name so long as it’s not your own.’ They conferred for a minute and came up with a solution.
‘I’ll change my name to Shannyn,’ said Sarah.
‘And I’ll change mine to Sarah,’ said Shannyn.
I laughed out loud and hugged them tight. In the end they picked the names of their cousins and then changed them again, and nowadays Rhiannon and Sasha Visit Mum is still found in prisons and legal firms in Victoria.
‘Mummy, I’ve missed you so much, when can you come home?’ Rhiannon asked.
Mum looked sadly at both of them and said, ‘I hope it’s very soon too but it won’t be before Christmas. It might take the judge a long time to decide when I can come home.’ Sasha was more interested in the green jumpsuit that Mum was wearing. ‘You look like a Teletubby, Mum,’ Sasha laughed.
Very soon the visit was over. Mum kissed them both and said something she used to say to them every night: ‘I’ll always love you both more than the stars in the sky and the fish in the sea.’ Rhiannon and Sasha smiled and knew that Mum was still Mum, and they would be back to visit again very soon.
If only that part were true.
After three years behind bars my weekly visits with Shannyn and Sarah had become monthly, and sometimes even further apart. Eventually – as their little lives filled up with friendships, sporting commitments, outings, hobbies, birthday parties, sleepovers and school – I would be lucky to see them once every two to three months. There was no point fighting it, and the daughters I’d once had an almost physical attachment to became distant facsimiles. They were my ‘prison babies’.
When they did visit it would be for three hours. Sometimes, if they’d been out to a party with their father the night before, Sarah would just go to sleep in my arms. Quite a few Sunday afternoons were spent holding them in silence, which was OK because there wasn’t a great deal for us to talk about. I couldn’t say anything about their dad, but to them he was the centre of their universe and they were forever bringing him up. They’d talk to me about their friends but it’d go in one ear and out the other. I didn’t know those mythical kids so I didn’t really want to hear about them; to me it was just a wasted conversation. I couldn’t gel with the girls’ social lives or even their schoolwork. Although prison visits were meant to bring us closer, the reality was they underscored just how far we’d drifted apart.
I would still speak to them on the phone twice a week for six minutes each, but that became weird, too. Strangely it was over the phone that I really noticed them growing up – more so than during personal visits. At first they were tiny, squeaky little mouse voices that sounded frightened to be on the phone to someone in a prison. It made it feel like they might be in trouble, and a prisoner was going to tap them on the shoulder. The whole six-minute thing was a nightmare, too. I’d try to coax them into a conversation and at the four-minute mark they’d finally start to loosen up, and I’d have to say, ‘Oh, sorry, kids – we’re going to have to wrap it up in a minute or so.’ They must have felt like I was some oddball psychiatrist: ‘Tell me everything. OK, time’s up!’
As time wore on they grew into their voices. The squeaky mice had morphed into nine-, ten-, eleven-year-old children. I went from being greeted as ‘Mummy!’ to ‘Yo’ and ‘Hey’ and even ‘Wot?’ But I could always tell how they were feeling. I had developed a kind of bionic ear that could detect minor variations in the soundwaves they emitted. I could press the phone to my ear in a way that I could almost see them. I always knew when they were trying not to cry, when they were really happy or if they were just having a bit of a nod at my joke. I knew their voices better than anyone in the world. I still do today.
I had to get used to the reality that other women had filled in part of the gap that I had left in their world. I knew when their father’s girlfriend had been over because they’d come into the Visitor Centre with bows in their hair and I’ll always be thankful to her for that. Other times I’d know that they’d stayed over at his later girlfriend’s house after a night out because they’d come in looking like little rag dolls in slept-in clothes. No matter how they presented, though, the painful fact was their lives were moving on without me.
Although the visits were infrequent and the six-minute phone calls could be strained, there was a way that at least I could feel connected to the girls that I had complete control over. Every day I would sit down in my cell and write them a card that contained a new joke. After I burned through all the joke books I could get my hands on, I put word out among the program officers that I needed more. Before I knew it I had a pile of books in my cell. I’d spend all the money I hadn’t used for my phone calls on stamps, cards and pens at the canteen.
I sequenced the cards, too. In the very first ones I wrote, ‘Today I thought of you 100 times.’ The very next day I told them I thought about them 101 times, then 102 times, 103 times … right up until I was thinking about them more than 1600 times a day.
It wasn’t until years later that I found out how much it had meant to them to go to the mailbox every single day and find a card waiting for each of them, and they have kept every last one of them all of these years.