Title Image attribution: Wikimedia Commons “Noun emotion 1325508” by Arafat Uddin Licensed under CC BY 4.0

When I flew back with my four-month-old, adopted daughter, from her home country to my home, a prison scenario was not in my head as her future. I am furious; or maybe I am depressed mixed with grief. At any rate, my emotions are in turmoil, so I am once again writing this blog to try to sort out my feelings and come to a place of peace.

My daughter was arrested late last month, just days before my husband’s beloved grandmother passed away. Yes, it has been an emotionally draining month. I am relieved that my daughter is in jail though certainly there is a heaviness in my soul as well.

Charges were filed against my daughter in May or June of last year (2023). The victim who filed the charges was a young man that my daughter became involved with and then ran a cruel, systematic scam against for 8 to 10 months (see blog titled Back into the Nightmare with my Oldest Daughter). The victim’s parents contacted us last May and we immediately encouraged the young man to file a police report. I have been staying in touch with the victim’s parents since then.

Last October, a warrant was issued for my daughter’s arrest. To further complicate matters, my daughter was in the midst of separation/divorce from her husband. She had the two girls at first which worried me as I knew that charges were pending against her. She must have found out about the warrant in mid-Nov as she called her estranged husband to come get the girls. She told him she was suicidal and was checking herself into a hospital. I’m relieved that the girls are safely with their father though I belive that the hospital stay was just a cover; she was setting herself up to run from the warrant. From the time she got out of the hospital in early December, she was on the run until she was arrested in late January.

With 2 Grand Theft charges, 1 felony charge, 3 misdemeanors and parole violations, my daughter clearly chose to plead guilty with the hope of a lesser sentence. I just found out yesterday from the court portal that she will be sentenced in April. I’m sure I will be blogging after the sentencing.

My brain keeps feverishly working through all the iterations of sentencing and what is likely to happen over the next few years. If I can only find some path where everything works out in the end, but this isn’t a Hallmark movie. There is no happy ending. My daughter deserves prison for the pain she has caused her victims. Prison will only protect society for so long though. Eventually she will be let out and then the scenario is going to repeat itself. My daughter has consistently demonstrated that counseling, rehab, and ever increasingly stronger punishment has never caused her to veer from her path of stealing and lying.

Six years ago, when my daughter pled guilty to two felonies, the judge sentenced her to ten years. He then did something that was incredibly kind; he saw a young 22-year-old that still had her whole life ahead of her and set aside the sentence to put her into the county jail rehab program. She spent only nine months in jail; had she then lived an honest life, she would never have had to serve out the remainder of those probationary years.

It is a different situation now. My daughter will be sentenced just days before turning 30. She’s not the twelve-year-old we put into counseling, not the 22-year-old that the judge gave leniency to. She has proven that she will keep hurting others in her drive for easy money and the adrenaline high that comes with her stealing/scams.

We are seventeen years down the road from that twelve-year-old. I failed to stop her. Counseling and rehab failed to stop her. The legal system failed to stop her. There is nothing left but to put her behind bars where she can’t hurt anyone else.

But of course…prison will be like a college level course on how to be a hardened criminal. When my daughter comes out, she will come out with the same bent towards crime but will likely have learned even more sinister ways of conducting it. Society will not take kindly to her even if she does try to live an honest life (about zero chance of that in my opinion). She will go back to crime and this scenario will repeat for the rest of her life.

I don’t see a “feel good” movie ending in this. I tried. I can’t. I have to let it go. As her psychiatrist told me many years ago, “You didn’t break her and you can’t fix her.”

I am going to have a daughter in prison. Why me.

Why not me? Life doesn’t promise an easy road.

 

Icecream Shop clipart by Creazilla – licensed under public domain CC0 1.0

I’m going to find some little joys today. I’m sitting with a cup of coffee right now. I’m writing which always makes me feel better. I will think about good memories from this last week. My oldest son and his family were out for a visit; I loved holding the baby and playing with the two-year-old. The first evening, my husband and I delighted in taking them for ice cream/dinner at an iconic ice cream parlor that my husband loved as a boy and then our kids loved as well.  With the parents’ permission, we helped our two-year-old granddaughter eat her ice cream before (gasp) her dinner. We adults ate our “real” food first but hey, sometimes with grandkids it is fun to break the “dessert after dinner” rule.

 

More good recent memories…we had a wonderful BBQ at our house a few days ago with my oldest son’s family and with my ten-year-old granddaughter who got to meet her cousins for the first time. My second oldest adult kid (who “came out” to us about 18 months ago as a trans daughter) came too; it was the first time my oldest son had seen his sibling since the announcement. It went ok. This is part of our new normal in our extended family.

Sometimes you don’t get the big things in life. Sometimes life breaks your heart into tiny pieces and the dreams that you had for your kids burst like bubbles that are so pretty to look at but don’t last. When that happens, all you can do is to hold onto the little joys. It has to be enough.

I started crying when writing the last couple of paragraphs. I haven’t cried since my daughter was arrested. Maybe I was angry before because the grief was so dark and deep that it scared me. Maybe I can start to let go of the grief now.