Montana Women's Prison

by Victoria Christie

I was fortunate to facilitate a series of six Reflect sessions sponsored by MSU-Billings' Montana Women's Prison Initiatives. All six sessions were potent and poignant in their own ways, but I'll never forget my first visit to the prison. After clearing security I met my group of eleven women and asked everyone to introduce themselves. Having earned the privilege of attending courses while in prison, the women were tentative, reserved, and expectant. I approached the group as I would any other, assuming an interest in meaningful discussion and a willingness to be respectful and civil.

I hoped the poem I'd brought with me—"The Lanyard" by Billy Collins—would draw them in, since all people experience a mother and many of the women were mothers. In a preparatory interview the case manager told me that without exception the women in my group who were parents had had their parental rights terminated. The big themes for the discussion were relationships and forgiveness. The poem playfully grapples with what people owe one another—in particular, what obligations children and parents have to each other. In addition to giving him life, the narrator acknowledges his mother's "thousands of meals, clothing and a good education." He in turn gives her a lanyard that he made on a rainy day at a boyhood camp.

I started the discussion by asking them to consider a time when they felt they owed someone something—not money—but something in return for having been helped or guided or cared for. Then we read the poem twice. When several women smiled knowingly, I knew the poem was a good choice for the first of our series.

In the poem's last lines the narrator says:

And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

"So, is the boy now 'even' with his mother?" I asked, adding that we could ask both the man the narrator becomes and the mother this question as well. Laughter about children and the way they see the world was the first response. One woman said, "My mom has never given up on me, not even while I'm in here." Another told of how she tries to provide some emotional stability through a sister who watches her son. "But I am not enough," she said.

"Are we ever enough for one another?" I asked. A lively discussion settled on the notion that people disappoint one another and are disappointed by people they love. One woman asked, "Is it possible to be in relationships that completely satisfy?" "As children," one woman said, "we see the world so differently. I now understand the way my parents acted; it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what they did but I understand if I stop to think about it." What do we do with disappointment? "Try, just try to be the people we need to be," a woman said. "I don't think I can repay my mother except by turning my life in a different direction. That's my lanyard."

To conclude I asked the women to write on index cards what was either interesting or useful about the ideas we discussed. Several expressed surprise that they were able to talk openly about their own kids, and about themselves as mothers. Several indicated that seeing other points of view—while still being able to express their own—was useful. One of the women commented aloud to laughter as she handed me her card, "My take away is I'm going to write to my mother!" We went from a quiet group to one that laughed together about human experience.