Title illustration: Sunshine by Joy and Gladness by DeviantArt by Yesterdays-Paper – CC BY 3.0 DEED

Motivational quotes by Bich Tran – licensed under Public Domain – CCO

In a little over a month, my daughter will be sentenced to prison. It will be for years, not months. I am unable to fathom what this will be like. She will miss so much of what life should be. She will miss years of her daughters’ lives.

I have been obsessing for the past few days over the things that I would miss in prison. I imagine that my daughter will miss some things in prison; wouldn’t everyone?

The closest I can get to what it would feel like to miss something is when we lived overseas for a period. Many years ago, my husband and I lived in Sweden for about a half year while on a work assignment. There are definitely things that we missed, mostly food. We both missed peanut butter. I missed doughnuts; OK, I was pregnant for part of that time. The funny thing is that by the time we returned home, there were things in Sweden that I missed. They had a wonderful pourable yogurt and a kind of cracker spread that tasted like salty fish eggs that we squeezed out of a tube. There were a lot of different types of pickled herring, which if one likes it (I do), is terrific. And the chocolate…don’t get me started on that. Fantastic.

Back to the present. Yesterday, as my husband and I drove to the other side of town to visit his mother at her memory care center and then join his dad for lunch, I looked up at the sky. It struck me that it was a perfectly lovely “almost” spring day with a clear blue sky and the kind of white fluffy clouds that kids draw. I immediately thought of my daughter. So many things are overlooked until they are taken away. Will she miss the sky? I don’t know.

So many things that I have done this weekend, ordinary things, I would lose in prison:

  • Enjoying every tasty bite of a bacon-avocado, grilled chicken sandwich made just for me at the restaurant yesterday.
  • Relaxing over that lunch and just talking with my husband and father-in-law without being told when to leave.
  • Walking this morning with my husband; enjoying the fresh air as we got our steps in for the day.
  • The oat milk latte that I enjoyed this morning after our walk. It’s the reward for exercising.
  • The freedom to grocery shop for the week and decide what to buy.

And other things, that unexpectedly grip the heart…

  • Vivid pink, yellow and orange sunrises and sunsets; dazzling to the eyes. How awful to not be able to see those.
  • The brilliant rainbow I saw a couple of weeks ago that filled the sky from one side to the other.
  • The ocean, lakes, the mountains. Trees, flowers, butterflies. Every miracle of life in the outdoors.

How could my daughter not see down the road that running a scam and repeated theft would cause her one day to lose her freedom? I just don’t get it. How is any adrenaline rush from stealing ever worth the loss of freedom? I will never understand how she could not see where she was headed. I saw the specter of prison in her future when she was just twelve years old but I thought we could turn her back to an honest life. In the seventeen years since then, an upright law-abiding life was just a mirage. My daughter made a thousand choices over those years that led to this sentencing.

I will never understand why my daughter made the choices she did.