Tracie Adams
All My Love, Monitored and Recorded
There never seemed to be a good time to see the jail’s number on our caller ID. The phone ringing didn’t surprise us, but it sure pissed us off. Our oldest son, adopted at age eleven, would call from jail, usually while we were eating dinner or having a family game night with our other three kids.
“You have a collect call from an inmate in Pamunkey Regional Jail. This call is being monitored and recorded for security purposes. Please refrain from discussing the inmate’s case, as any and all communication may be used in court.”
This call came during family movie time, all of us strewn across couches and beanbags in front of the fire, snuggled under favorite blankets, watching a DVD of a comedian on the large projector screen. My oldest daughter grabbed the remote and hit pause. The whining and exasperated groans weren’t just about pausing the fun. Our lives were on pause again as our son was incarcerated for his second felony conviction.
Shuffling toward the kitchen with the empty popcorn bowl, I swung my hand wildly at the kids to keep the noise down. I strained to hear my son’s voice on the pay phone in the loud recreation room where he stood in line to make his ten-minute call before lights out.
“I need some money to buy tennis shoes. They won’t let me play basketball in these shower shoes, but it’s all I got.” His voice trailed off as he reached the last word. This wasn’t the first time he had asked for things to help make his incarceration more tolerable.
When he was covered in an itchy rash that the prison doctor dismissed as hives, I called his counselor and told him my son needed treatment for scabies.
“How do you know it’s scabies?”
I wasn’t surprised at all when the counselor called back to tell me that it was in fact scabies and my son was doing better. Sometimes a mother just knows.
We took him books the first time he went to jail when he was sixteen. This was now the second time. There would be a third, but we didn’t know it yet. We slipped our offerings through the guard’s bulletproof glass and then we waited in line to be searched before going through the metal detector. Sundays were our visit days.
“Jail isn’t supposed to be fun. If you’re miserable, maybe you won’t want to go back.” I ran my finger along the empty popcorn bowl, licking the salt and crunching the unpopped kernels. I turned my back away from the kids in the living room so they wouldn’t see me crying again.
“You have thirty seconds,” the recorded message interrupted us.
“You know I love you, right? See you…” it cut me off before I could finish. I stood at the sink, sending all my love to a dial tone pressed against my ear. I never knew if I was making the right choices. It wasn’t like I could ask my friends what they were deciding for their incarcerated kids.
I pictured him lying on his bunk in his cell. Was he missing home, missing us, or was he mad that we gave him what we thought he needed instead of what he asked for?
Adopted children are born from hearts, not wombs, and the scars of birth heal differently. I feared for his future, but mostly I feared that he would never know how much I loved him. The phone calls were our lifeline, always cut short just before I figured out the right way to love him.
Tracie Adams, a retired educator and playwright, writes flash fiction and memoir from her farm in Virginia. She is the author of the essay collection, Our Lives in Pieces. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, longlisted at Wigleaf Top 50, and published widely in literary magazines including Cleaver, Dishsoap Quarterly, Trash Cat, Epistemic Lit, SoFloPoJo, Fictive Dream, and more. Visit tracieadamswrites.com.