Radford Noone Research Service

climbing your family tree

Mighty Drofdar

The Haunting: Reflections and Revelations

 

 

 

Prison volunteer work by its very nature is haunting, and at so many levels. In a myriad of ways, the prison reminds me of those cheap carnival haunted houses, where you go to be thrown out of your normal existence for a few minutes. There you experience something that is outside the hum-drum and daily grind of life. The difference is that unlike the plywood and pre-fabed easy to dismantle metal walls of the carnival houses, the prison walls cannot be physically dismantled. The concrete walls, metal bars, and clank of the steel doors are a reminder that this is not make believe. The prison can only be dismantled from within. I can’t remember any of the side show carnival spooky houses that I went to in my youth. They were forgettable when I walked off the fair grounds. However, I take the prison home with me after my shift is over. I’ve talked to other volunteers and apparently they do too.

             If circumstances were different, I could really be friends on the outside with some of these guys the way they are now. That’s disturbing enough. I discussed this very point with Randy. I’ve seen his family history, and we’ve worked extensively on it so I know his family dynamics pretty well. I told him one day that a hundred years from now his descendants will look at his family tree and wonder what planet they were on. He grinned and said he knew it.

I told him when he shares with me the things he did that brought him to prison it’s hard for me to relate too because I don’t recognize that person. While I’m in his presence, I’m talking to someone who has had many years of incarceration which has allowed him to mature and grasp the significance of what is important and what is not. In our discussion, I mentioned to him what convolutes my brain into a pretzel is before he came to prison and became this “other person,” I wouldn’t have given him the time. Then to be fair to Randy, I also told him he probably wouldn’t have given me the time of day either. Then came the spooky insight.

We were two lives going along, living in the same city, actually not that far from each other, with very little in common before he came to prison. We’re only about seven years apart in age. He had his life and what he felt was important going in one direction and my concerns in another direction. There was no reason why our paths would have ever crossed – ever. The realization was that he would find himself in prison, and I would find myself as a volunteer in the same prison. Then our paths crossed. Yet in this strange and unnatural environment we would go on to contribute to each other in ways that were beneficial and positive. He taught me about the prison system and helped to integrate me into this foreign world. Where I needed this help to emotionally get me into the prison system, he needed help to emotionally get him out of the prison system while remaining incarcerated. We worked well together in these areas. In the process, we both learned to communicate with each other with dignity and respect. My only resolution to how two people from two vastly different backgrounds could meet on a common ground is the choices we make and the backgrounds we come from.

By working with him on his genealogy I realized some of the family dynamics that contributed to his choices. Then looking at my genealogy I realized some of the family dynamics that contributed to my choices. How conscious and unconscious we were hinged back into those family dynamics. However as we both separately struggled through family life, divorce, and some very low moments, we made choices accordingly. His choices would lead him to prison. There he was given the opportunity to build upon what he already had and excel in a way that leaves me speechless. He has received an education and is exploring what it means to be a family and what functional really means. I see him on a quest to learn and grow as he asks me questions and continues with his family history research. He is seeing himself for the first time in terms of his family history – part of a whole. Now is he an angel? No. But neither am I.

My life’s choices gave me an education long ago, and I was always on the quest to better myself and learn. However, it really wasn’t that long ago when I finally figured out what functional really meant myself. After years of living in turmoil I felt like I had finally reached a space where I was safe enough and brave enough to explore what I wanted out of life rather than what I felt everyone else wanted for me. It took me years to comprehend that the answers weren’t “out there” waiting for me to discover, but inside of me already there just waiting for me to wake up. In so many ways Randy and I share parallel paths of self discovery.

Randy’s father is a pivotal figure in his life. His parents divorced when he was young, and he went to live with his father. He tells me about his father in a matter of fact way, and, from what I see, without judgment. Certainly his relationship with this man helped to shape some of his decisions and lifestyles that weren’t for the best, then again this could be said about any father-son relationship. What catches my attention the most about his relationship with his father is that it also has allowed Randy to evolve into what he is becoming today. It would seem as though they both have matured and come to terms with life. Randy said that he started noticing the change in his father about two years prior to going to prison. From my side of the desk, I can see that not all father-son relationships are as good as he and his father have – my own included when my father was living.

From what Randy tells me, I think I’d like the man that his father is today, although I will never meet him. His influence and involvement in Randy’s life has brought him through some very difficult times. My father ignored me, and the entire world, in favor of becoming a hermit on his southeast Tennessee farm for the last twenty plus years of his life. I’m emotionally raw as I think about who had the more functional father-son relationship here. The convict wins, although on the surface, society would think that I was the winner.

Brad is young enough to be my kid, and I’m just a few years older than his parents. Like many of the guys, Brad has showed me pictures of his parents from his family files. So I have actual faces to go with the stories he tells. He has a mother and a father who come to the prison to visit him. I can’t imagine what that would be like, to see your kid in prison white. The closest I can even come to this was when an inmate shared with me that his brother brings their widowed mother, in her early seventies, to the prison for their scheduled visits with him. His brother told him, on the side, that when they turn off the main road to go into the prison driveway, that their mother’s hands start to tremble. So not only do I feel compassion towards men like Brad, but also for their parents. Brad’s parents have stood by him (not all parents do) while at the same time being angry at him – and Brad is honest about that.

Brad and I have an understanding. I have friends on the outside that I’m close too and we are very open in our discussions, but with Brad we share a similar family dynamic. So when something comes up, we automatically know that the other one “gets it.” With my friends on the outside, they don’t always “get it.” When a conversation about family comes up with another inmate, Brad and I look at each other and nod. It’s rare you have a relationship with someone like that. What we have in common is a distant father and a mother who looked to their son as a surrogate husband. I remember how special that made me feel as a child knowing that I had a special place in my mother’s heart. I was her confident. Then I grew up to realize that what I thought was special was addictive and dysfunctional. I would suspect it’s not that uncommon in families where a husband and wife have learned to co-exist while dancing a dysfunctional dance. Is the dance dysfunctional if it works? Perhaps not for the parents, but for the kids it can be bad news.

Brad took the cards that were dealt to him in life and made choices based upon them. He and I were exploring this intimate part of his family history and how far back dysfunctional behaviors could be found in his pedigree. “Brad, your mother looked to you for emotional support didn’t she?” He acknowledged that I was correct. He continued, “When she was falling apart in my teenage years, my Dad made sure he worked two jobs and wasn’t around. This left me, as the only son, to pick up the pieces. He’d come home late at night after work, and I would have already spent hours with Mom trying to calm her down. I’d march down the stairs and inform Dad that it was his wife and I needed to go to bed.” I asked him if he resented that. He answered, “Yes, but at the time I didn’t know any better. That was just normal around our house.”

I continued with my thoughts, “Now you told me that you married when you were seventeen, and by what you tell me, she was much like your mother. Even though the marriage didn’t last, do you think you married to get away from your family situation?” He shared, “Looking back I think that is what happened when I married this psycho-chick with at least ten personalities. When we divorced, I remarried. This time she was actually different than my mother, but because of my crime we divorced. If I had not come to prison, I think we would still be married.” Because he’s so brutally blunt himself, I felt free to blurt out with no guilt, “If you were to be honest, do you think you came to prison to escape your family?” Thoughtfully he replied, “Yes, and the funny thing is I always knew I was coming here from the time I was a little boy. I had dreams about the walls of this place and what it looked like. I believe that it was my unconscious sanctuary from all the insanity at home.” This has caused me many hours of reflection as to the endless possibilities of what dreaming about prison since he was a little boy could mean and how it affected his choices. He continued, “My father had tuned out and I was left with the chaos.” With a deep breath I boiled it down to the bones, “In other words you were your mother’s surrogate husband?”

At this he seemed a little surprised. After he composed his thoughts in his usual calm manner he reasoned, “I don’t think I have ever thought about it in those terms, but that would be correct. Yes, that’s exactly what I was, her surrogate husband.” In my experience with life, I’ve come to understand that in dysfunctional families, there is one person who is the glue that either holds everybody together or the point person who everybody blames everything on. Sometimes they are the same person. I had to ask him if he was one or both of those positions in his family. “Oh yes, that was definitely me. I’ll go before the parole board in a couple of years, and if I get out, I’m afraid I’ll have to go and live with my parents until I can get on my feet. I can see myself getting sucked back into the whole family drama. They said that when I went to prison that the family would fall apart.” I had to ask the obvious which was -- did it? “Actually no it didn’t, they just had to learn how to do things on their own.” Where does he come up with this stuff? He’s only in his twenties. I know people with grandchildren who have yet to explore these intimate parts of their personal and family histories.

In this conversation, I understood why I like him so much and why he disturbs me. I too was the surrogate husband to my mother. However, I wasn’t the point person. My sister got that job, and it wasn’t a good thing either. When looking at Brad, I realize that in a eerie way prison was his freedom from the family dynamic that he couldn’t say no to. He was totally free for the first time in his life. It’s just too bad that there was a body count along the way for him to discover all this about himself.

                                                                              Continued……...