Wide Open Spaces
Five years ago, on Mother’s Day, Katie was sitting in prison, far from her kids. She couldn’t hug them, she couldn’t kiss them. It was at that moment she decided she would completely change her life so she could be with them again. But changing her life required a lot of help that didn’t exist in prison. Then one day, she opened a book in the prison library and a brochure fell out. It was for a place called Benevolence Farm, and they could help her change her life.
If you want to help Benevolence Farm continue helping formerly incarcerated women in North Carolina, you can shop the Farm’s products here or make a donation to their programs here.
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Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.
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Nora: No matter your relationship to motherhood, there is one universal truth: motherhood is complicated no matter who -- or where -- you are.
Katie: I was reminiscing about Mother's Day in prison, and I actually spent two Mother's days there.
Nora: How old were your kids when you went to prison?
Katie: I think they were six and 13. I think it might have been six and 12. Yeah, it was six and 12.
Nora: In the United States, 172,000 women are in prison, and more than half of them are moms.
In jails - where the majority of people are there because they can’t afford bail, but haven’t been convicted of anything - 80% of the women are moms.
Kristen: The majority of people experiencing incarceration as women are leaving behind children.
My name's Kristen Powers, and I'm the executive director of Benevolence Farm.
Nora: Benevolence Farm is a legit farm in North Carolina. It’s a place where women leaving prison in the state can come after their release and have a place to live and work. They grow flowers and herbs on the property, and the women are paid $15 an hour to make, sell and ship products like candles, soaps and salves made from plants grown on the farm.
Kristen: There's so many different stigmas that that come with a record and then there's so many reasons to women end up in prison, in fact, sometimes tied to their motherhood.
because of something their partner did to their child. But the child, the child or the mother was not did not intervene in the right way or in the way that we would think of a mom should.
And, you know, the criminal legal system doesn't take into account the human factors of domestic violence, intimate partner violence, substance use, trauma. And yet we see moms incarcerated for so many reasons, often just tied to like the the perception that they didn't do what was right for their kids.
I think we're harder on moms who make mistakes. And and I think there's Maybe there's this view that, well, I see men in TV or social media or in my neighborhood more more likely to be incarcerated. So maybe that's more normal. And so if a man or a woman is incarcerated, there must be another layer of wrong here or or something really must must be messed up on this case for for a mom to get incarcerated. And that's, you know, even despite this massive increase of incarceration of women nationwide, like, I think up to 2021 since the war on drugs, like risen 500%. And so it's not maybe in everyone's forefront of what they see as incarceration, but it's certainly there.
Nora: Kristen’s work at Benevolence Farm focuses on a woman’ life AFTER serving a prison sentence. Because getting out is truly just the beginning.
Kristen: When you're released from prison, they give you $40, maybe a bus ticket, and then they tell you good luck and you're really left on your own. And in some circumstances you are legally required to have an address or you go back to prison. And there were so many women where they were like, I can't go back home. I shouldn't go back home. For whatever reason. My you know, my family may not be able to have me back home or will not welcome me home. And we never skirt over the fact, like people in our program have caused harm as we all have some. You get imprisoned for in other harm you don't. So, you know, they're potentially the communities from which they come are not healthy for them or their families are not in a space where it's healthy for for those families to welcome them home. So we have people who who their home plan in prison where their case manager says homeless, they don't have anywhere to go. And in the state of North Carolina, you're supposed to have a home plan. Some of our folks can't go to the homeless shelter or a domestic violence shelter because of their records. So for those folks, they just might be trying to find a park bench to sleep on or a friend or in some cases some really unsafe housing situations. And then employment obviously is a big one because like we were saying, you get $40 from the prison in an Alamance County anyway, where we're located, you owe $40 of probation fees within 30 days. So you're already operating basically on $0. But the third thing that that we find really important, too, is like we offer this space to to just like exhale, to just breathe, to pause, Like you don't have to enter this rat race of where's my next meal coming from? Where am I sleeping tonight? And so that that allows them some space to process what's what's happened to them and what is happening to them, and then to plan and to make make a goal or step forward so that they can actually reset and move forward and pursue a life that they actually are excited to live.
So it is such a larger community impact than people realize. I think they in the United States is a very individual focus on things. But the ripple effects are so much broader than than we realize, unless you've been through it yourself.
Nora: One person who has been through it is Katie, who you heard at the very top of this episode.
When I first see Katie, she’s at the end of the gravel driveway waiting for me to arrive at the farm
Nora getting out of car: All right. I think we're here.
Nora: Hi,Nora. Hi. Hello. I just pulled up to the location.
Hi, guys. I'm Kristin. Kristin. I'm Katie. Katie. Nice to meet you.
Nora: Katie is tiny, with pale blonde hair pulled into a tight ponytail, black glasses and a sweatshirt that could swallow her up…She’s a staff member at the farm, so she and Kristen gave me the full tour of the farm: the barn, the raised garden beds filled with the remains of last year’s herbs and veggies, the chickens…
Kristen: so Cleo's our mascot, she has her own crown. And so the women really resonate with that. Mr. Hawkins is the only man on the farm. He is a rooster, so he also does his own thing.
Nora: Katie. Tell me where we are right now. Like what room we're in.
Katie: So we're in the workshop at Benevolence Farm.
Nora: Okay. And we're in a we're in a basement.
Nora: This is a basement, so you’re going to hear some running water and maybe even some people walking above us.
Katie: So over here we have these are our dried herbs, and these are the herbs like lemon balm, lavender, spearmint, calendula. And these are the herbs that we have harvested and dried and put on the shelves because we will infuse grapeseed oil. We infuse this out into the greenhouse. And this is how we put our herbs into our body hair products.
Nora: What's your favorite one? Your favorite herb.
Katie: So it's a big toss up between lavender and hibiscus.
Nora: It's very calming. Like, I can feel that in the back of my head.
Katie: Yeah. And I like when I just can't deal with life anymore. I will go in my bathroom, cut off all the lights and put like three of these handles on my tub.
Nora: Katie helps me find outlets for the equipment. She lets me sniff all the candles and soaps. She smiles sweetly and nervously when we sit down for the interview. Because we’re not just going to talk about her job here at Benevolence Farm. We’re going to talk about what brought her here originally.
In 2018, Katie arrived at a state prison in North Carolina. A week into her sentence, it was Mother’s Day.
Katie: My first Mother's Day was very traumatic. My grandmother died on Mother's Day that year, and I was in prison. And I had just gotten there. I was there for about a week and I did not have any contact with my family. So it took about two weeks for my family to answer the phone and to let me know that she had passed. My second Mother's Day was a little bit easier. The women who are incarcerated, they celebrated us. And that was amazing to me. They didn't do that on my first. I don't know why, but the second one they gave us, you know, a special meal and the churches came in and brought like little gift bags for us. So it was really nice. We don't have a lot, but what we did have, it made it special.
Those are the only two mothers Day that I spent without my children. And it was really hard. I, I can't even describe it. They. Yeah. That even thinking about it kind of brings back, like, emotions. Because I've always. Even though I don't have full custody of my children, I've always been a part of their life. And when the state told me that I wasn't going to be able to experience almost two years of each of their lives, it it tore me down. And I have spent the last three years building myself back up so I can be the mother that they deserve.
Nora: There are logistical things we all need to parent- stable housing, money, food being just some of them.
But there are also emotional needs. As a parent we are the person who has to guide our children through this world. Teach them. Nurture them. Keep track of when school starts and get our kids there on time- a real challenge in the BEST of circumstances.
We need to know when our kids are struggling with things like reading or math skills and help them at home.
We need to guide them through their emotions as they feel them for the first time. And that’s why parenting is the hardest job. It requires so much of us all the time.
And for Katie, none of that was lining up when she had her kids.
Katie: So I have some mental disabilities and when I am unhealthy, I am no longer on meds. I'm not managing my mental health in any way, shape or form. And my disabilities have consumed me. I have paranoid schizophrenia, and so my reality may not be the reality of what others are.
I was in a very abusive relationship and somebody that controlled everything about me, anything and everything. And he manipulated me and he monopolized me. And I didn't have any control over my day to day life or my children.
I was lucky. My mom stood up and fought for my children when they like, entered the system. My mom was not about to allow her grandchildren to go into the system. So she got my two oldest ones.
Nora: Katie’s oldest son spent some time in foster care when he was 6, but Katie’s mom got him back. She also adopted Katie’s daughter, who she’s been raising since she was just 3 weeks old.
Katie: I have two other ones and I do not have a relationship with, and it breaks my heart every day. And it's not very often that I talk about them, and it's because it is just so much pain attached.
I had my younger two back to back. Well, actually, the last three were back to back. There was like a grand total of maybe three and a half years between all three of them. And so my mom, when she adopted my daughter, figured up how old she would be when my daughter graduated. And the answer is well into her seventies. And then to think of two more children behind her, she didn't think that well, she knew she couldn't financially support them. And also she didn't think that it would be fair to them to take them on and then not be able to give them a life that they deserve. And so she knew the adoptive parents and where they don't like me and they are very judgmental to me. They have a very ah, they had a very good relationship with my mom and they stood in court and said that they were going to keep the siblings. Like continue sibling visits and let them know that they were, you know, siblings and let them create relationships. As soon as it went to court through court, they they quit contacting everybody.
Nora: Unhealthy Katie was caught up in the substances, paranoid schizophrenia, and the toxic relationship with her child’s father.
He’d been in and out of jail and prison, and Katie had been the one to support him from the outside.
Katie: I would write him. I would send money to him. I would put money on the phone. I was in and out of jail. So I couldn't actually or in an on and off of probation, I couldn't actually go visit him. So there was never any physical visits. But I have probably spent well over $10,000 in phone calls and sending him money. And over the years we were together for 12 years. So there was a lot of time that he was incarcerated. And there has been a lot of phone calls and a lot of Katie, send me money and I need a new phone or I need more shoes or they're not feeding me enough. I need food.
He told her she had it easy on the “outside,” and if she loved him, she’d go to prison and see how hard it had been for him.
Katie: And so I did what he wanted me to. I quit going to my appointments. I quit calling my probation officer. And ultimately that was absconding. And that is the one thing that they will send you to prison for the one violation and I intentionally violated so I could show him that it wasn't as easy on the outside during a loved one being incarcerated as he thought it was… A few days before I was arrested. I went to go tell my children that, you know, this is this is the beginning to the end, and I'm going to have to go spend time in prison. And my daughter, she was six at the time. And I remember she just broke down crying. And she's been with my mom for the majority of her life. So she calls me k k instead of mommy. And she says, k k, you're not a bad person anymore. You don't have to go to prison. And prison is for bad people. I said, Baby, I did this and I have to go pay my time. Just like when you get in trouble and you have to go to time out, I have to go to big people time out now, okay. And it's fine. It's okay. We're going to get through this.
Nora: Katie, what did it feel like? Little kids say the most amazing things, right? Like they see those amazing things and like they believe them with their whole heart. So to have your daughter tell you you're not a bad person, how did that feel? Did you believe her.
Katie: At that time? No, because I knew that I had committed crimes and that ultimately I needed to pay my debt to society. So at that time, no, I did not believe her.
Nora: We’ll be right back.
Katie starts her 17 month sentence on a mission.
Katie: I would get up, I'd go to breakfast and I would come back. I'd wash my clothes, fold my clothes or whatever chore. Quote unquote, that I set up for myself that day. And as soon as I got done with my chores, I would get out whatever self-help book that I was working on. I created a business plan in prison to create my own organization, I just kept on going on and on and on about this organization that God had placed on my heart. Two years before my incarceration and that I felt like my incarceration was time for me to sit down and put together the business plan for it. And so that's what I did. I read the Bible front to back twice.
Nora: I went to Catholic school for 14 years. I've never read the Bible. Not even Once
Katie: Interesting. Yeah. It was like more like a bedtime story for me. But there is a lot of reading in prison. There's not much to do. So I would switch up between self-help books. I didn't read for pleasure. It was all learning something. I had convinced myself that God wouldn't allow me to go to prison if it wasn't for me to learn something. And as soon as I learned my lesson, I'd be able to go home. Not the case. Not at all. I learned a lot of lessons and yeah, I did not get to go home until it was my projected release date.
Nora: It doesn't matter how many lessons I got.
Katie: But I mean, I learned a lot. I did learn a lot.
Nora: What do you think you learned?
Katie: Um, well, first and foremost, patience and compassion. And I have a passion now to make someone else's life a little bit easier.
Nora: She also learns another important lesson: that her daughter’s father is not going to reciprocate the support she gave him for years.
Katie: Of course he didn't. And he didn't. He didn't make it a month.
He didn't even send me, he didn't send me one dime. He couldn't even support our children while I was incarcerated.
I held on to it for about six months. I prayed every night. God, if he loves me, then why isn’t he here?
I think is 80% of women in North Carolina who are incarcerated are also mothers. And here's the thing. Like most people don't get visits. Most people do not get to see their children. And a lot of time those children are in the system in one way or another.
And there's there's people in there that they haven't seen their children since birth or, you know, the night that the the cops came and arrested them and those poor babies were standing on the porch crying, begging for mommy. Like, that has to be the most god awful feeling in the world. I ran. I went on the run because I would not allow my children to see that.
Nora: Katie didn’t see her kids for the 17 months she was incarcerated. Her boyfriend never stepped up or showed up. But Katie did. She finished that business plan. She read self-help books. She dreamed about what life would look like outside of prison.
But before she could pursue that dream, she needed a plan for after her release.She couldn’t live with her mom and she didn’t want to go back to her partner. She wanted to be a better mom, a more stable mom, but she had to figure out how to earn money and find a place to live. Things that can be tough when you have a record.
Whatever and whoever you believe in, God, the Universe, the flying spaghetti monster, we can all agree they sometimes intervene to give us exactly what we need. And one day Katie rented a book from the prison library and the answer to those questions fell right into her lap…literally.
Katie: I was flipping through one of the self-help books and one of the brochures they had sent out when they first opened their doors fell out.
Nora: The brochure was from Benevolence Farm. She did some research, reached out, and was accepted into the program which would give her a place to live, a place to earn money, and get support for this new chapter of life.
That new chapter comes in May 2020.
Katie: Unfortunately, I got out in the middle of the pandemic, and so when I went to prison, like, the world was normal. And when I came home from prison, like, the world had completely changed. Even Walmart closes at 11 now. Like, what in the world?
My mom at the time she was the activities director at a nursing home, And so she was not willing to risk her residents and their health to come visit me or allow my children to come visit me because they were in her household and what they contracted she would contract ultimately. And as much as it hurt me and I mean, what could I say? Like, how can I fight with that?
Nora: You can’t. Katie is released from prison, and all the roadblocks that Kristen mentioned before are intensified by COVID. Kristen picks her up from prison, but before Katie can go to the farm, she needs a COVID test, which should be easy enough…but isn’t.
Katie: She drove around from test site to test. I trying to find a place that would take me and test me for COVID, um, and just to keep everybody healthy at the house. And when the thing about it was, is that at that point they were asking for ID in order to take a quick test and the prison wouldn't let me bring home my the prison I.D. that I had and my mom had my state I.D. like four counties over. And she wasn't willing to actually meet up with anybody because she didn't want to contract anything that I could bring home from prison.
Nora: Eventually, Kristen and Katie found a testing site that wouldn’t require an ID, but at this point it takes days to get results. So she’s in a hotel room alone for 6 day, waiting to get to the farm..
Katie: So the farm is the complete opposite from prison. So when I got here, the only thing I could hear in my mind was Wide Open Spaces by Dixie Chicks. So I was like, Man, you know, I'm here for it. I'm ready to make my own mistakes. Like quit living on everybody else's mistakes.
Nora: Katie spent a few months only talking to her kids and mom on the phone. Eventually, her mom felt comfortable with a socially distanced visit and one of the staff members at the farm coordinated something special for the reunion.
Katie: We had, like this big cookout and my family came and residents that had family in the area, like, some of their family came and we just had this big old cookout and I wasn't allowed to touch them. My mom, my mom gave me an air hug the first time seeing me in almost two years. And I can imagine how bad that hurt her because I know how bad it hurt me.
I could not give them a kiss.I could not hold my baby girl and my son.
So we had to social distance six feet apart at all times.
Nora: Not being able to hold or spend time with her kids was excruciating for Katie. But that wasn’t the only challenging thing about re-entering society. What she was trying to do after prison was live her life in a completely new way.
She wanted to stay sober. She wanted to manage her paranoid schizophrenia in a healthy way. She wanted to form relationships with people who weren’t committing crimes or abusing substances. It’s a lot to take on at once, and something a lot of re-entry programs don’t consider. Here’s Kristen again.
Kristen: I think we just don't have a lot of patience in the criminal legal system. people are trying to radically transform themselves. And that takes time and that takes resources and that takes energy and it takes people around you to process everything.
And Katie – like a lot of residents – is going to need that.
Katie: I left to go back to be with my child's father and I left for three months. a month within that three months, I relapsed. I tried to get him sober, and before I could get him sober, he helped me relapse. It turned extremely physical, and he was not in his right mind at all. And it became a life or death situation. And I left walking and I went back to my mom's house where my children were. And my mom told me that she would give me 30 days to get up on my feet. Well, realistically, nobody can get on their feet in 30 days.
And so I called Kristen in tears and I asked her if she'd give me one more last chance.
Kristen: she reached back out and she like, knew she needed that support. And that's like, what I want Benevolence Farm to be like. Once you leave Benevolence Farm, you're still part of us as much as you want to want it to be.
Katie: so when I came back to the farm on my second attempt, the farm enterprise manager at the time had told me, Are you ready to get back to work? And I was like, Hell yeah. You know, like, where's the tractor keys? You know? Like, I'm that person that I like to put myself into physical work in order to run away from my mental health and my emotions.
And so she looks at me and she crosses her arms and she says, Oh, no, I'm not talking about physical work. I'm talking about that emotional work, the hard work. She was like, Are you ready to get to work? And I was like, I mean, do we have to? She was like, Yeah, because this is this is the only way to do it. And I'm really grateful for her and my time with her and my time at the farm, because that's the moment when I realized that I couldn't just rush through everything. And I can't just keep on throwing myself into physical labor to get rid of rid of my emotions, I actually have to process them and I actually have to go through the emotions. And that's where my journey to self-love and and self-care began. And I'm very grateful for it.
Nora: When we come back, Katie starts the work.
Nora: Katie didn’t just get a second chance at Benevolence Farm…she got a third. Because healing from years of untreated mental illness, substance use disorder and trauma isn’t as easy as she thought it would be. It’s not as easy as some of us think it should be. American culture wants us to just put our minds to it, stick with it, get over it.
But Katie needed more than just self-help books and personal accountability and that natural drive you can hear in her voice. She needed real help. She needed patience and grace and therapy and care. And she needed to see herself through her kids’ eyes.
Katie: I went to prison and my son was, you know, the little boy that was making A honor roll and, you know, he would make bracelets and sell them at school and definitely into arts and craft and maybe a little bit of like martial arts here or there and definitely into gaming. And when I came home, he was a child that was running away from home and breaking and entering himself and committing crimes and getting in trouble and smoking weed. And my heart just broke. And I remember having a conversation with him when I first got to the farm. You know, I was angry because I was like, why are you making the same stupid decisions that I made? You see where it landed me. Angry, I called him. He wouldn't answer the phone. He had ran away yet again, and he wouldn't answer the phone for my mom. And my mom was terrified. She didn't know where he was. And so I called him and he answered the phone for me. I said, Bubba, that's my love name for him. It's above all, what in the world are you doing? And he was like, What? I said, No, you know, I say, you need to pack. Your things are beginning to go home right now. He said, Mama, I'm not going home. I said, Yes, you are. He said, When you come home, I'll go home. And I knew at that moment that I had to get my shit together. Excuse my language. I'm sorry I had to get my things together because I had a child that he needed me. He desperately needed me to be in his life.
Nora: The Katie you hear today is so different from the Katie who went to prison, from the Katie who first came to the farm, from the Katie who came back to the farm, from the Katie who came back to the farm again. She was able to leave the program, get certified as a peer support specialist and fulfill her dream of helping women like herself. This Katie is someone she calls “Healthy Katie.”
Katie: Healthy Katie is medicated and I go to counseling and I manage my mental health and I stay on top of if I start hearing something that I'm not sure is quite there, I will let somebody know and I will go in for a med adjustment if that's what needs to be done. I make sure that I am taking my medication as prescribed when I am supposed to be taking it, and I focus on self-love and self esteem.
Nora: What Katie is doing is mothering herself. Treating herself with the kindness and grace and love she has always deserved, and never thought she did. And the healthier that Katie gets, the healthier her relationships get, too.
Katie: So on my second attempt, I came back to the farm after my relapse and like this horrible incident with my child father and I was really struggling emotionally and mentally. And I had a volunteer came by and she was out there weeding with me. And she was actually a former resident as well. And she was telling me that at the time that she was in the program, one of the directors or whatever had told her, you know, every time you grab a handful of weeds, remember, that's like throwing out one of your faults, like something that you want to get rid of. You name that weed and you throw it as a far as you can. And like that sticks with me today in my own garden. Like when I am just like, bogged down with like, Oh my God, it's. I feel that he's acting this way, or it's my fault that my daughter can't quit crying or like she's super sensitive or like, my mom's health. Like, I'm always concerned about, like, how's your cholesterol? What's your blood pressure like? Like, I'm the cause of some of that, you know, like she went gray really early and 100%. I believe it was mostly me. And so when I'm going, like, I'm all bogged down with, like, all these negative diets, I go out to the garden and I grab the weeds, they're growing and I, I name the weeds and I throw them away. I don't go back and pick them up. It's not for me to pick up again. It's for me to leave them there and get the hell out with my life.
Nora: What's been the process of rebuilding relationships with your children?
Katie: So currently my 17 year old son lives with me and I have him full time. My daughter, I have her part part time. She's been with my mom since she was three weeks old. And so it is like me taking her from her mother. And so I don't think that's fair for her or my mom. And I'm grateful for my mom and her relationship with my daughter. And so I am basically like a really fun aunt. And I get to do all the fun things with my daughter and my mom gets to do all the discipline and it works out well and I love it. My son, on the other hand, I am the full disciplinary. And yeah, that's a little difficult.
He's a good kid. He is just 17 years old and he thinks he knows everything. And, Mom, you're so stupid. And oh, look how much you messed up. And I made it to 17, and I only have three charges. Can you say that? Actually, I can't. I didn't start raising up until I was 18 doing it. But it is a struggle. However, like, I'm just glad that we get to struggle together. Like even on the worst of days, even when I want to wring his neck because he doesn't listen or he doesn't comprehend or he can't, I'm not sure what it is, but I mean, it's slow where we're still reuniting. It's been a while, but it's a learning process and we can't just jump into it. And we have to learn how to love each other all over again where we do not have very much separation. There's still abandonment issues there. And if I did it on purpose or not, like it doesn't matter and doesn't matter if I can justify why I was gone or not. He still felt hurt when I left.
And now not only do I have to figure out how to heal myself, but I have children that are depending on me to help them heal their hurts and pains and and navigate through their emotions and and their insecurities.
Nora: She’s also working on the relationship with her mom. For years, Katie’s addiction and mental illness and the drama with her daughter’s father meant Katie’s mom had to step in and be the reliable parent to the kids.
Katie: But you also have to think like she's hurt, too.
And like, did she deserve all that? She she had a family of her own and somewhere down the road, like evilness, somewhere, somehow came into her life… And now she's, you know, in her sixties raising kids that are not hers.
She gave me the best, the ultimate compliment the other night. But she said, Oh, it's so hard for me for 15 years. I spend every night sleepless nights worrying, Am I going to wake up to a phone call that tells me my daughter is dead? Am I going to wake up to a phone call that tells me that my daughter is in ICU yet again? and for the past two years I've been able to sleep. I was just like, wow, Like that just made me feel amazing.
But like, just knowing that, like, my mom is finally at ease, like she can actually get rest now. Like, it really sucks that I put her through things like that to begin with, but like, the back end is that she's actually getting sleep now. And so, like, I'm just I'm grateful that I can give her that peace.
Nora: Like we said at the beginning of this episode, most women in prison or jail are mothers. And when you incarcerate a mother, this causes deep, familial wounds.
Katie and her family were already wounded long before she was locked up. And Katie is working hard at repairing things with her mother, her daughter, and her son.
But there are still two kids out there she doesn’t get to repair things with. Her youngest sons. Katie’s older kids don’t have a relationship with the siblings who were adopted, and neither does Katie. The last time she saw them was by accident, when she was at Wal-Mart.
Katie: We were Christmas shopping, Me and my mom and my daughter. My mom just looked at me and was like, There's the boys. And if you don't say anything, there won't be any drama. And so I didn't.
I just stood in the background and I just stared at my children and was like, Wow, they've changed. Oh, look how great they look. And like they're happy.
And so currently I am petitioning the court for post-adoption communication and connection. I don't hold any expectations out of that.
I just hope to have any type of relationship with them. And if the judge decides that, you know, I'm not worthy of that, then which is totally he can do that. He's the judge. If he does decide that, my only hope is to at least get the letters that I've written over the years, submitted into their files for when they are 18 and ultimate and ultimately and inevitably they'll come looking for me. Um, and so I just want them to know that even when I went through the, the ultimate loss, I still fought and I'm still fighting for them.
So it's part of my story and it's part of who I am today. Um, I'm sorry that it happened to them, but if it didn't happen to me, I don't think I would be sitting in this chair right now. Um, so as much pain as it causes me, I am so grateful for all the pain that I've gone through. I just. If I didn't go through these things, then I couldn't be the woman that I am today. And I'm proud of the woman I am today. So, I mean, I hate that it was like sacrificing my children, but as long as I continue to believe that they are they are well taken care of and they are loved and all the things, then I can sleep easy at night. And eventually I know that the through my faith that they will come home. They will come home.
Nora: There’s a lot in our cultural conversation right now about the challenges of motherhood. Moms are described as superheroes and expected to do heroic things like raise a whole person and work a full-time job to support a family, to be in two places at once. If you’re Katie, you also can’t ever miss a probation appointment or a follow-up call or risk going back to prison. If it’s hard for a person like me who has pretty much every advantage, then what we’re asking of mothers like Katie requires them to be SUPERhuman. And people aren’t superheroes. We’re fallible and fragile.
Even the best mothers are still growing into themselves. Every mother I know is still in need of mothering. It’s why once upon a time we had literal villages to help us raise our kids. Mothers weren’t expected to take care of our own mental and physical needs while simultaneously doing the same for our kids. Our own mothers, our sisters and our friends stepped in to help raise the kids.
Every mother I know has lost herself or her grip at some point in time -- sometimes for five minutes, sometimes for five years.
Even the best of us won’t know the impact of the mistakes and missteps we’ve made until it’s too late.
Not all mothers get second chances. Not all mothers deserve them, either. Many mothers who make mistakes are defined by those mistakes their entire lives. And that attitude is systemic. Places like Benevolence Farm, that view formerly incarcerated people as complex, entire human beings, are rare. We make it so hard for someone to get back on their feet after prison, and punish them when they fail that impossible task.
Kristen: We are more than the worst thing we've ever done. And when I talk to students or I present, you know, I ask folks to think about the worst thing you have ever done, and then they just think on it. Don't share it. Think of all the labels that come with that and think of never being able to escape that label.
Nora: Five years ago, on Mother’s Day, Katie was sitting in prison, far from her kids. She couldn’t hug them, she couldn’t kiss them. This year, it’s the exact opposite. She’s getting together with her mom, her two kids, and her brother’s family and they’re going to dinner and a movie. Someone might cook hibachi which is exciting, but if that doesn’t work out they might go to Red Lobster or Outback- so it’s gonna be a good day no matter what.
Before Katie went to prison, she didn’t agree with her daughter that she was a good person. She’s spent almost three years making amends. Working on herself. Working on her relationships. And working to help other women in her situation.
Trying to be the person her daughter saw in her, all those years ago.
Katie: When I came out of prison, I knew that I did not want to put her back in this situation to believe that I was a bad person. And so I have with a few hiccups along the way, of course, you know, I'm not perfect or anything, but I really have fought to become that good person that doesn't go to prison and that's not committing crimes. And even when you know, there are people around me that they have this idea to go do something that may or may not be within the law, I am the first person to exit stage left because I cannot put my child through that again. And…definitely I make a choice between good and bad on a daily basis, and I try my hardest to strive to be the best that I can be because she's 11 now. And you know, I am that example for her. And I want her to love herself and I want her to have the self-esteem and the self-confidence that it's going to take for her to be successful. And so I cannot expect her to do that if I'm not doing it. And so I I have to remind myself every day that I am a good person and I will continue to do the next right thing for the next right reason.
The work Benevolence Farm is doing with formerly incarcerated women as they transform their entire lives takes time. There's not much money out there for what they’re doing, where they’re doing it, and how they are doing it.
If you want to help formerly incarcerated moms, like Katie, who are working to better their lives at Benevolence Farm, we have a link to their donation site in our show notes.
There, you can donate to their bail fund, which gets moms out of jail while waiting for a trial. A donation will also support the salaries of Katie and Mona, two formerly incarcerated women who now work for the farm supporting other moms. You can also support the farm by buying the products the women make. (Also in our show notes).
We’re going to put $1,000 in the fund in Katie’s name.