PRISONER EXPRESS

If I had to choose a single word description of my family it would have to be: unconventional. Actually, I straddle two distinct families, and I don't feel like a part of either one. My parents divorced when I was very young. Their first and only child, I am the only one to come out of their union. Both of them remarried, and each of them had more children with their new spouses. Consequently, I have one family with a mother, a stepfather, and two half- sisters; and another family with a father, a stepmother, a half- brother and a half- sister. My family divorced his second wife, making her my ex- stepmother, and recently married his third wife. I don't even know what to call her.

When my parents divorced I lived with my mother. It was just the two of us until she met the man who would become my stepfather. Once they married we all lived together. Over the following four years my mother gave birth to two daughters, and I became a constant reminder of my father and of my mother's unhappy past with him. My stepfather did not like me, and he made that very clear to me by treating me like an imposition. He cherished his own children, but he found it difficult to simply tolerate me. Social workers took me away from my mother's home to protect me from abuse, and I was placed into a foster home. The Court decided the abuse was too brutal to ever allow me to return home, and made me a "Ward of the Court".

Around the same time my mother had remarried, my father married his second wife. Together, they had a son and a daughter. I hardly saw my father: a weekend around Christmas time was the norm. My parents hated each other. They will always hate each other. They would verbally abash each other for my edification, telling me how awful the other one was, as if trying to win me over while trying to make me hate the other. I loved them both and I never took sides. My mother took that especially hard, like I had betrayed and rejected her by not hating my father. My father didn't seem to mind that I wouldn't take sides. I think he just wanted to use me to hurt my mother. It worked.

After the social workers had taken me away from my mother and stepfather and put me into a foster home, I was bounced around to several different foster homes. When I was eleven years old my grandparents, my father's parents, took me into their home thinking it better for me to live with them than with strangers in a foster home. My mother hated my father's parents almost as much as she hated my father. Spiteful, she objected in court to me living with my father's parents, and she forced social services to remove me from their home. Her intention was to have me placed back into foster care, but her plan backfired. My father had agreed to take me in. A social worker gave me the choice between living with my father or living in foster care. I was more than happy to go and live with my father and his family.

Within eight months social workers took me away from my father's family; again, to protect me from abuse. I was placed in a shelter care home, temporarily, and then I was placed in a group home. The Court deemed both of my families' homes unsafe for me, and I was made a permanent Ward of the Court. It was like I had dropped off of the face of the planet. None of my family members came to visit me. Nobody called me. Nobody so much as wrote me a letter. I understood: they didn't want me. I grew up angry after that, fighting, rebelling against the authority, and getting into a lot of trouble. I was put into juvenile detention camps, boot camps, and more group homes until I turned eighteen.

On my eighteenth birthday I was legally an adult, and I had to appear in court to be cut loose from the system. My mother didn't come to the hearing, but my father showed up to ensure that he no longer had to pay the county for my care. I had nowhere to go and I wound up homeless, staying over at the homes of high school friends for a few days at a time, like a drifter. Eventually I wore out my welcome, and I found myself living on the streets. I started drinking, heavily. One night, fifty-two days after my eighteenth birthday, I was involved in a drunken fist --fight with another homeless man. He was severely injured. I was arrested for hurting him, and put in jail. He died nearly three months later, allegedly from a brain injury that prosecutors claimed I had caused. I was convicted of second degree murder, and sentenced to fifteen years to life in prison.

I haven't seen any of my family members in over a decade, and I haven't seen my mother or her family since I was a child. I write letters to them once in a while. Nobody writes back. My mother contacted me a few years ago and gave me her phone number. I call her on occasion, but I don't really have much to say to her. She does most of the talking. She tells me about her family, about what is going on in their lives. I listen, an outsider looking in, and wish I could be an insider. I straddle two families. I know about them, but I don't really know them.