I grew up in an upper middle class neighborhood in Brooklyn, Mill Basin. It was the home of mobsters and hard-working store owners, business owners, teachers, city workers and the such. A stray artist also lived there too – at least one…my bohemian artsy mother.
I grew up attending Jewish services on the High Holy Days at the synagogue down the street. I walked to school with my fellow 3rd grader friend Rozy from 3rd grade on…no parental accompaniment needed. It was safe then.
Well, there were a string of robberies that occurred in the neighborhood when I was about 8 but once the mobsters moved in on my block with their statuaries on their lawns and blinding night lighting- the robberies stopped.
I heard about a friend’s neighbor’s father going to prison for years because of being in the mob and him taking a fall for someone else. I was shocked. Even more shocked later on when the friend’s neighbor grew out of being the innocent kid she babysat to someone who ran numbers. But I understood what happened- it was all in the family.
Guns were kind of exciting in my father. My mom, dad and I used to go target shooting as a family. Guns were toys.
How ironic that in my early twenties I acted in a play reading called Toy Gun about some innocent black kid in a Halloween costume being killed by a cop who thought his gun was real.
My dad always carried at least one gun…one on his ankle, underneath his pants and he called it a throw away and talked about how police carried throw aways all the time. Talk like this was the norm as was seeing a machete when a 21 year old guy I was ‘hanging out with’ showed me it when I went over to his house when I was 15.
There was the time my mother left my father , got a restraining order and told the judge that my father put a gun to her head. But when she took him back several months later and they declared their undying love for one another- I just KNEW in my heart that she must have lied…because why would she take a man back that threatened to kill her. I knew he loved guns and had gangster friends but I wasn’t afraid of him. I hadn’t witnessed the threats.
The first time I went to prison was to visit my father at Riker’s Island after he had been arrested in relation to my mother’s death. She died by gunshot wound to her head. The murder weapon, a 38, my father’s, but it was never recovered. There were 8 hours between the time my mother was shot and the discovery of her body. The police were called by my father’s lawyer to say, “There was a dead body in the house” (I grew up in). There was a clean-up during those 8 hours.
I was terrified for my life. I was in a nightmare that I would surely wake up from. I believed that if I just closed my eyes over and over and over again I could go back days, weeks , months and undo everything that now robbed me of my mother.
That day at Riker’s I learned I could go through time and places as a robot, look into the faces of the fellow visitors in the prison and pretend I was alive. I learned that although I couldn’t keep food down, I could keep going. I could stand on my feet and stand tall long enough to not collapse in the face of pain.
The second time I went to prison was a couple of years later. My father was moved to a cushy prison upstate. Seems where he was there a threat to him. Someone didn’t like Jews. And since everyone in prison claims they shouldn’t be there- they probably saw this 67 year old graying man that looked like a pussy cat- not knowing that he murdered his wife and had wise guys as friends. My father found religion in jail.
I made the choice to visit my father in prison after a year of not speaking with him. I had written him a year before pleading for him to tell me the Truth about what happened the night my mom died. I gave him an ultimatum. Tell me or don’t write me back. He stopped writing me. But the problem was that he lived vividly in my head.
As I was returning to NY to do a ceremony at my mother’s graveside I decided to take the day before that to visit my father in jail. Would he be surprised? Shocked? Happy? Angry? Would my aunt- my mother’s older sister who he married be there? I despised her.
An old friend and old boyfriend came with me for the drive to Upstate NY.
We got to the prison just after visiting hours started. My father was already in the Visitors room sitting with ‘her’ My ex-boyfriend took over and went over the table and sat with my aunt as my father turned to me with a beaming smile. He walked over to me and was genuinely happy I was there. I was happy to see my father.
What did I learn? I was in charge of my life and could make my decisions- to see him, to not see him. It was a choice. I choose to see him because my obsessive thinking was hurting me and I needed to put a stop to it.
We kept in touch after that. Him calling me from prison and me spending way too much money receiving his calls. We briefly reconciled when he got out before I realized that his master plot was to win back money that I had inherited from my mother- claiming that by NY law he was deserving of more of the ‘cut’. Didn’t matter that she actually died because he shot her in the head with his gun.
The pain from losing my mother and father in one night, losing my relationship with my brother (who was my father’s step son) for years (we are now reconciled) and being shocked into the awareness that my father was a sociopath led me to do whatever I could to feel better. Luckily for me instead of drugs and sex I was guided to therapy, energy healing, writing my story into a one-person show and getting a master’s degree in Spiritual Psychology where I learned how to set healthy boundaries, how to love myself again and how to tap into the power of forgiveness to free myself from my bondage to him.
Part II will be my journey of giving back to prisoners by sharing my perspective on self-forgiveness, setting healthy boundaries with those that are toxic to us and the power of edutainment.
