Redemption

This essay was published in the anthology MAYBE BABY (HarperCollins, 2006)

When I was 27 years old, I told my cellmate Lalo that I was never going to have kids. I was at Lompoc Federal Penitentiary, a maximum-security prison in California, beginning a seven-year sentence for bank robbery. We were locked in our cell at night, a cell the size of a parking space. Lalo was on the top bunk, talking about how much he loved his young boys, telling me I should have kids too.

"Are you crazy?" I said to Lalo. "I'm a thief, a criminal." I could barely wrap my head around all the time I had to serve and was feeling lonely, pathetic, and scared. But I was clear about one thing: I would be a fucked-up father. I was reckless and violent and had been in and out of jail for years.  As far as I was concerned, Lalo was a total failure as a father. He had two children while committing crimes and had abandoned them to do this 15-year hit in prison. "You think leaving kids at home while you do time is a good thing?" I said. "You've gotta be nuts."

The truth is, I'd known since ninth grade that I would never have kids. I grew up in East Los Angeles and the way my childhood played out----with death and brutality and sexual molestation all around me---I just assumed that any kid of my own would go through the same hell. I had already lived through it once and didn't want to go through it again.

My parents had me when they were both 16. When I was nine, my mom died of kidney disease. I was shocked by her abrupt disappearance, left feeling empty. She had abandoned me. Three years later, a 22-year-old female neighbor seduced me. We snuck around and had sex for several years. In the beginning it was fun. But over time I began to realize that she had taken advantage of my desperate need for attention after my mom died.

Around the same time, my dad turned brutal. He sometimes beat the shit out of me and my younger brother. I don't mean he slapped me or hurt my self-esteem with scolding remarks. I mean he was a sadist. He once tied a belt around my brother's neck, lifted him off the ground, and spit in his face. Other times, he made us pose in the push-up position and hit us on the back with a baseball bat when we tired and fell to the floor. He punched us in the mouth and kicked us in the ribs when we were down.

But things changed when I turned 16. During a particularly vicious beating in which my father fractured my rib and elbow, I stabbed him in the neck with a knife. He survived and never hit me again.

In high school, some of my friends talked about having kids. But not me. I knew that my rage, like my father's, could easily spill into my own son. And truthfully, a part of me feared that my son would be willful like I'd been, that he could one day grow up and stab me in the neck in order to gain his own freedom.

After high school, I worked in restaurants and tried junior college. But I had no concentration and dropped out of both work and school. I couldn't see myself working through college, training at a good firm, slowly working my way up the ladder to high pay. I didn't have the patience for all that. So at age 22, I began a life of petty crime, bouncing checks, stealing, and conning my friends. Then I graduated to stealing cars and strong-arm robbery. I went on a 14-month bank robbery spree, hitting over 24 banks in Southern California.

I was full of rage during my crime days. One night, I was watching a Lakers game on TV with my friends. When the Pistons led by 12 points in the fourth period, I got up and threw the TV against the wall, smashing it into pieces.  As my friends sat there petrified, I walked calmly to my bedroom and brought out another television.

I was finally caught when a teller handed me a stack of bills with a transmitter in it. The police tracked me down seven miles from the bank in Los Angeles. I was sent to federal prison where I continued to commit crimes like gambling, making knives, brewing prison wine, and smuggling drugs.

Two years into my prison sentence, Lalo was stabbed to death in his cell as he slept. We hadn't been cellmates for months, but I was swept up in the homicide investigation with five other Mexican men. We were locked in solitary confinement, under investigation, for almost two years. I went partially crazy. I imagined the cell walls were moving. I heard voices. One night, I hallucinated that I was being visited by a short bald boy. I awoke from that vision terrified that I couldn't tell the difference between reality and fantasy.

When the administration finally figured out who the real murderer was (none of us), we were placed back into the general prison population. But that long period in solitary broke my criminal spirit and I began to imagine a life outside of prison. I was so tired of it. I hated having no say in the food I ate, the clothes I wore. I hated having my movements restricted. I hated the everyday humiliations, like receiving only one roll of toilet paper a week. God forbid that any one of us should get diarrhea and go through our single roll in three days.

But more than the tediousness of prison, I wanted to change. I'd been raised in a fanatically Christian home and so stories of redemption were not new to me. I had squandered my life and hit rock bottom. At my absolute lowest, I felt humbled, like the prodigal son, and began to think about reform. I was willing to try and understand my rage and insecurities. I knew I would never rob banks again.

Toward the end of my last year in prison, I found it hard to imagine any woman would want to be with me, much less have children with me. In one of my final letters to a friend, I wrote that I expected to remain single for the rest of my life, that I felt disqualified from ever being in a healthy relationship.

But when I got out of jail, I soon learned that I could attract women, even women who were willing to start a family with me. I had girlfriends who said they felt safe with me. They told me I was the marrying kind because I was patient, a good listener, and I asked a lot of questions that made them feel seen and heard. For the first time in my life, I was told that I was "present" and "mindful" in a Buddhist sort of way. (Some Buddhist pamphlets had indeed found their way into my cell, and they did influence my thinking about myself and the world.)

But I wasn't sure if my change took.  I still brooded a lot.

Then I started dating a woman who was bipolar. (She was one of the women who said she could marry a man like me.) Her sister was schizophrenic. A crazy uncle had killed himself. I began to wonder about the moral implication of passing mental illness on to a child. Wouldn't that be like having AIDS, knowing full well your child would be born with the disease? I pondered the issue for a while but let it go after I broke up with the woman.

Near my ninth month out of prison, I began having fantasies of killing myself and went to see a psychiatrist. He told me that I was chronically depressed and prescribed drugs that made me chatty and personable. No more brooding Joe.

At the time, I was living in Los Angeles, and one night I had a birthday party. My friend Ofelia showed up with a woman named Diane, who was down from the Bay Area. As the night progressed, I liked what I noticed about Diane. She listened well and asked thoughtful questions with a kind voice. The party lasted until morning and afterward we drove to eat breakfast at L.A.'s famous all-night diner, the Pantry. When we pulled up, I got to see Diane display her talent for parallel parking. I liked her immensely.

I was now at the top of my game. I was writing a memoir, working as the L.A. correspondent for Pacific News Service, having my op-eds published in the Los Angeles Times, and making friends. It felt good to be living an honest life. One year out of prison and seemingly out of the dark woods, I felt optimistic about my life.

Three months after I met Diane, we started dating when I moved to Oakland to be near her. I loved Diane in so many ways. I loved her work---she was a program officer at a foundation that funded nonprofit community health clinics. I loved her humility. I even loved the way she stood at the sink when she brushed her teeth---erect, like the ballerina she once was.

With Diane, everything was new and possible. Being with her made me feel for the first time that I could be a good husband and father. We had conversations about what kind of parents we wanted to be and the conversations didn't scare me. The idea of having children with Diane felt natural and right.

After dating for 18 months, we got married. We bought a house in East Oakland, got a dog and named her Olive, and purchased a VW Passat station wagon. We were preparing a home and life for children. After four years of marriage, we decided to start trying, timing the baby's birth with the completion of my memoir.

But things didn't go as planned. I wasn't close to finishing my memoir and constantly felt pressured by the encroaching deadline. Two weeks after the book was due—-I still hadn't turned it in---one of my dearest friends died in a car crash. The grief of his loss paralyzed me and brought up a lot of my ancient grief for my mother.

Diane and I were also experiencing a serious financial crunch. I wasn't bringing in any money with my writing and was feeling terribly inadequate. My stress was compounded by an onslaught of ferocious suicide fantasies. In one, I saw myself walking into my kitchen, choosing a large knife and cutting myself open from sternum to crotch, zigzagging the wound all the way down. I truly wanted it to happen.

These hallucinations were so vivid and jarring that I told Diane that we had to stop trying to have kids. Even if I didn't kill myself, I didn't want to pass on this mental illness to our child. I didn't want our children to be tortured by the deep lows I was now suffering. I didn't want them to fantasize about carving their chest open with kitchen knives.

Diane was heartbroken. She felt that she had been cheated. She had married a man who said that he was willing to have children and now I was telling her that I couldn't. I suggested that she leave me and find a man who wasn't as fucked up as I was. I wished I'd never met Diane. I despised the whole soap opera aura of my suicidal tendencies. I felt like an attention-starved actress. I hated that my life had turned into an after-school special. Most of all, it was a horrible to know that I was causing Diane so much grief.

Once, at our lowest point, Diane cried out, "Okay, I won't have children. But you are going to have to pay for all the therapy I'll need to get over it." Tears flowed and our house was full of dread and silence.

Diane was pissed off and I understood that. But a big part of me felt misunderstood. She was angry because she couldn't have a child and saw me as being selfish in my refusal to have one. But my thinking wasn't, "Let's not have kids so that we can live unencumbered lives with lots of travel and fine dining." I was twisted up in a psychological knot and feeling strangled by self-hatred. My thinking was more like, "Let's not have children, Diane, because the stress of it might send me over the edge and then I'll kill myself and leave you a widow with a newborn child." So Diane's pissiness irked me and made me suspect that she didn't really understand the gravity of my condition. At times I felt like she wanted to say, "Give me the child I've always felt entitled to and your mental health be damned."

During those hard, strained months, my suicide fantasies hit with more frequency. One day, while driving on the interstate from Los Angeles to Oakland, I imagined my car crashing into a pole, my head bashed in. I unbuckled my seat belt, sped up to 110 mph, and started sizing up the poles at the side of the road. Finally, I scared myself enough to pull off the highway and park at a gas station, where I slept for two hours. When I got home, I told Diane that I was falling apart and that I needed help. The next day she helped me admit myself to a psychiatric hospital, where I was diagnosed with a bipolar disorder.

Doctors gave me a combination of drugs that made me sleep all day. The hospital was a strange place to be. My mind had royally screwed me but I was still the sanest person on my ward. One morning at 3 a.m., my schizophrenic roommate woke me up out of deep sleep, cursing and carrying on a very loud argument with the devil.

While I was in the hospital, I thought a lot about children. I couldn't foresee a time when I would want them. In fact, I felt the choice had been taken from me. Why would someone with a debilitating mental disorder ever subject kids to the same condition? I believed that not having children was the moral thing to do.

After eight days, I was released. I felt fatigued and tender from the months of extreme confusion, but I didn't want to lose my wife. She was the only stable thing in my life. I told Diane that our marriage had been solid before my mental collapse and deserved the chance to be strong again. We were exhausted but didn't want to separate. We agreed that we would take a year to try and salvage our marriage.

While my bipolar problem had an easy solution---pills----our relationship was another matter. Our home was still a painful place because Diane wasn't sure I was completely well. She was afraid that I would crack at any moment. We could wish for a best-case scenario. But Diane knew that so much of what she wanted to accomplish was out of her hands and in the hands of something more precarious---my mental health. Sometimes I would hear her crying in the next room.

It was a rocky time for me too. It was hard to face the damage I had done to our marriage. Before I went to prison, I had emotionally terrorized every girlfriend I ever had. When I thought about changing in prison, I swore to myself that I was never going to make people organize their lives around my moods again. Now I felt I had resorted to old habits, bad Joe up to his old tricks. I felt that I was a big fat failure at reform, a hostage to stupid hope, and quite possibly a fraud. In my worst moments, I couldn't shake the feeling that suicide seemed the suitable end for such a pathetically bungled life.

But over the course of five months, I began to regain my form. The pills were allowing me to feel like my good-natured self again: playful, peaceful, and secure in the fact that my mind wouldn't betray me. I felt that I had turned a corner.

And Diane did too. She could see how badly I wanted to repair our shattered trust. I was being extra loving, lingering longer in a hug, kissing her more often, and spending more time in her arms before we went to sleep. My bipolar condition was in front of us and as long as I stayed on top of it, with weekly visits to my psychiatrist, who monitored my drugs, we felt like we wouldn't be blindsided by my mental illness again. Doom and gloom were replaced with tentative optimism.

More than anything, I felt far away from suicide. I didn't feel it in my body anymore. My fantasies now seemed like they happened to another person, much the way my robberies felt like someone else committed them. I was no longer full of rage but in a safer, tamer place.

A year and two months after I checked into the psychiatric hospital, Diane and I started trying to have a child. Our marriage took a hit and we hung tough, we survived. And this spurred us to pass on more love. That's how I view our future child: a person born from a union of great love and survival. A defeat of the ugliness I have endured in my life.

Today, I'm 43. My home life is a far cry from my traumatic childhood and stressed-out years in prison. Diane is an amazing partner, willing to talk through our problems. We are considerate with each other and I feel largely at peace. I am in the most tranquil space of my life.

It's been a long process but I've overcome my fears that I ever would beat my kids, go to prison, abandon them, or pass on a mental disorder. I'm optimistic that I'll be a good father---knowing, alert, and good-humored---and if nothing else, I'll have some really great not-quite-bedtime stories to tell my kids one day.

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