So it’s been a while. Probably too long for that matter. It’s normal, I guess. You get out of prison, at first it defines you and then you just sort of get on with life. You know, like a normal person. We pretend we are normal. We pretend it never happened but at the end of the day, we are just pretending.
Whether we like it our not, the prison experience is part of our very being. Much like a dormant disease, we can ignore it, we can live with it but it is always there. And when you least expect it, you are reminded of it.
I’m rambling right now as I sit here n the way back from Madrid with my youngest daughter who I took to a Taylor Swift concert. Yes, I took her to a Taylor Swift concert in Madrid. While I always viewed my parenting style as somewhat unorthodox (not to be confused with modern orthodox) this was a new one even for me. I even asked a few trusted confidants if I should do it. They all said yes. It was clearly the right decision but also it is something that pre-prison me would never have done. It seems post-prison me has new advisors. Probably for the better.
But, I digress. I live in the little town of Surfside, Florida. When I say little I mean the whole area is 8 blocks by 10 blocks with under 10 thousand people. That’s it. Now here is the thing about little towns; it doesn’t take much to become famous or in my case, infamous. I don’t say that in a good way. Around two years ago I was put on the planning and zoning board-and as a non-voting member. This is an unpaid position. In other words I did it to help out. Or maybe I did it just to prove to others, or just myself that six years post release things were back to normal.
Well, I was wrong. As happens in small towns, someone didn’t like me-happens more than you think! Well this person called a person who considers himself a reporter who wrote about me 15 years ago and he decided to show up at a meeting, video me, and write what might be the least newsworthy expose’ if you will on the former felon who now has a powerful board position. As if anyone really cared in 2023. I said it then and I say it now: it says more about this “reporter” that he didn’t have anything else to write about aside from the scandal de jur that someone who served all of 11 months in prison was serving on a planing and zoning board! Oh the humanity! I do wonder, actually I don’t wonder what the tone of the article would have been if I had gone to prison for a non-white collar offense. I am sure the article would have shown how I really made something of myself. I wrote about this years ago in an earlier blog. When I violent criminal succeeds post prison he is an example of what can be done with a second chance. When a white collar felon succeeds it just means he got off easy. Go figure.
Anyway back to the present moment on the plane from Madrid. When I went to prison, my oldest was almost 13, my middle was 10 and my youngest was almost six. Now as I write this I am amazed at how great my kids turned out. I believe I am saying this objectively, but can we really be objective when it comes to our kids? As the joke goes, we know Mary was Jewish because she believed her son was God! Well now, my oldest is 21, my middle is 19 and my “baby” is 14. She got to go to Madrid with me.
So I ask myself. Why? Why go to Madrid to see Taylor, aside from it being much cheaper for better seats which includes the cost of flights and hotel. The obvious answer is that I am crazy. Accurate but not the reason. What I did realize is that we all want our kids to look back on their childhoods as happy times and not sad times. While it is true that my incarceration has shaped my children’s characters it should not be what defines their childhood. We have to remember that kids are not adults and adults are not kids. The experiences from our childhood are embedded in our brain a lot more than experiences in our 30s. I barely even remember my 30s!
I want my kids to have great childhood memories. Think of it as page 1 of a Google search. We want the bad stuff on page 2 and the good stuff on page 1. There is a whole industry dedicated to this very task. Obviously the memories created are invaluable and with kids growing to ever faster we need to capitalize on the time we have before they don’t want to be seen with us anymore. At the same time when Emma looks back on her childhood I want her to remember her trip to Madrid for three days to see Taylor Swift before she remembers the Sunday visits to a prison camp in Miami to see her dad clad in his spinach green prison uniform.
It is so easy to screw up our kids. The fact that I have not managed to do so just goes to show you that so much of what we do as parents is luck. It really is. The fact that you need a license to drive a car but not to raise a child is totally screwed up. We all want our kids to be proud of us. We want them to respect us. Most important, we want them to be good people and better parents than we were. Make memories. Good ones.
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