In a moment I can now laugh about, I remember learning how to cover up pain. In 7th grade I wanted to be taken seriously as a soccer player, so when an older boy kicked the ball hard at the goal (and consequently at me who was goalie), I bravely tried to stop it. My little wrists were no match, and the impact of the hit fractured my bones. I remember the decision I made not to cry. On the line was my credibility as a soccer player and my access to the recess game that I’d wanted so badly to be a part of. So I nonchalantly made an excuse about having to go get some water and spent the rest of the school day hiding the pain. Haven’t we all at some point hidden something painful, something that deserved attention, to preserve our place within a social group?
This childhood experience flashed in my memory after speaking with Raylene. Raylene is the profoundly kind woman with whom I’m co-facilitating a group for women who have loved ones coming home from prison or jail. Raylene’s husband recently came home from prison. As Raylene and I were prepping for our upcoming session, she told me about the time her daughter said to her “Mom, you are the happiest, saddest person I know.” She went on to explain that her sadness isn’t for anyone else to carry, she keeps it in. Coming forward and saying your loved one was arrested, is incarcerated, or formerly incarcerated comes with risks including social ostracization and isolation. Raylene knows this. According to her daughter, she does an excellent job covering up what is painful. Women with incarcerated loved ones have mastered the teeth-clenched smile. Ironically, this mastery has interfered with our ability to address the painful realities of mass incarceration — not just on a personal level, but on a larger, societal and collective level as well.
The number of mothers, sisters, daughters, partners, grandmothers, and aunties of people behind bars is staggering. 1 in 4 women has a family member in prison in the US. Yet, women with incarcerated loved ones as a group are not acknowledged, resourced, supported, or otherwise discussed in any serious way. We are an invisible “byproduct” of mass incarceration. Nonetheless, we are the very women squeezing juice out of turnips daily trying to keep loved ones out of jail and prison cells, trying to keep kids out of the “wrong” friend group, and trying to keep smiling outwardly. What’s more is that the impact has been so severe on such a large number of women, that mass incarceration is a top contributor to the women’s equity gap. This is true due to the alarming rate of women’s incarceration in the US and by virtue of skyrocketing incarceration regardless of gender. My organization has tracked mental health, physical health, economic, and opportunity cost damage to women with incarcerated loved ones caused by mass incarceration, and worked to uplift these impacts in our Because She’s Powerful report.
I’m in awe of how much women keep inside. This week I sat with a woman at a group session as her five-year-old son played nearby. When we finished our meeting I asked her how she was doing. “Worried,” she said. When I asked why, she disclosed that due to impacts of a recent incarceration, she had been evicted that day. Our tearful conversation was mostly quiet whispers of reassurance and strategizing. A mental list formed: Figure out where she goes tonight. Check. Figure out how she gets her son to school. Check. Exchange phone numbers, promise to connect tomorrow, and figure more of this out together. Check. Driving home, I cringed at the knowledge that I sat beside her for hours not knowing that on that very day she had been evicted and was homeless. What were we doing in that meeting that could have been more important than finding her a place to stay? It is imperative that we make it easier for ourselves and other women to connect around what is really on our hearts, and break the invisibility of what we’re going through.
I’m motivated by a conviction that huge windfalls for human rights sit on the other side of organizing women. Afterall, it is women who have been the (regularly unacknowledged) engines of progressive social change in nearly every major social movement. Formations ranging from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to the Madres de la Plaza del Mayo (and even groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving) have all succeeded because of the women they organized. And not just any women – it is only by centering women who live at the intersections of systems of harm, that the right kind of systemic change can happen.
So let’s get practical for a moment. How do we build power? I believe that the more privilege you have the less practiced you are in covering up pain for the sake of belonging, and the inverse is true too. We as women with incarcerated loved ones are predominantly (though not only) Black, Brown, and working class women. So our hurdles are double, we are being invisibilized, and we are highly practiced at managing *quietly* through crisis. I generally deal only with who refuses to see us, because of how angry it makes me. How dare they ignore us? I have countless stories and examples of how this is happening and with an intentional agenda. But I think our focus must be inward too. We have been complicit in our own erasure. And for the good reasons mentioned above. Yet, all of this hiding has amounted to an accumulation of pyrrhic victories. We’ve traded our power. But the good news is that we can reclaim it. Breaking invisibility starts on an individual level, but it is and must be a community activity. It requires organizing.
Women with incarcerated loved ones collectively hold enormous social change potential. We exist and we have something to say.