Thank you to everyone who took the time to visit this blog and read I’LL BE HOME FOR CHRISTMAS! Your comments were encouraging and I was happy to make so many of you laugh.
If you’ve read my Home and About pages, you may be wondering how a “nice lady who knits” came to write about George Leroy’s stint in the county jail. Funny you should ask. My life is not nearly as sheltered as my knitting would imply.
It happened like this. My husband was deployed to Iraq, and, as usual, Murphy’s Law of Deployment kicked in. It left the washing machine and the cars alone, and did not, for once, send me or any of my five children to the emergency room. I even had one less child at home, our oldest having moved out several months before. Unfortunately, mere weeks after waving good-bye to my soldier, I was visiting our oldest son in the county jail. Jail visits are difficult experiences. There are rules to observe, not the least of which is to make sure you know where the end of the line is as you wait to sign in. There are some folks you definitely do NOT want to cut in front of. I saw all kinds of people. There were buddies of the incarcerated, some of whom got picked up on outstanding warrants when they presented their driver’s licenses to the guards. Others were law-abiding parents like me, bewildered and out of place in our Sunday clothes, hoping no-one thought we were criminals, too. And then there were the wives and girlfriends, young children in tow. Watching the little kids who came to visit their dads in jail was even harder than seeing my own kid behind the plexiglass. Many of them misbehaved, not because they were ill-mannered, but because their worlds were turned upside down by their father’s incarceration. Their noise bounced off the cinderblock walls of the visiting area, while their mothers tried to talk to their dads through the grilles set in the plexiglass about how they were making ends meet now that he was in jail.
One evening I met one of my son’s friends from his high school days as I waited in line at the jail. She held her newborn baby in her arms. She was there, she explained, to visit her husband, who had been picked up on a DUI right before the baby was born. My heart, previously filled with sadness for such situations, caught fire. I got mad! I wished I was on that young father’s visiting list so I could tell him that it was time to stop messing around, grow up, and be a dad.
Of course, I wasn’t on his list. All I could do was make an admiring fuss over the baby and give the beleaguered mother a hug. And say some prayers when I got home.
My experiences at the county jail stayed with me long after my son moved on. I’LL BE HOME FOR CHRISTMAS was written to process what I saw and felt in that place. It helped me to say, in story form. the things I want people to know about the impact of a dad’s incarceration on his children. Please be kind, like the baseball moms, to families like the Marlins.

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