Read Online Prison Baby: A Memoir by Deborah Jiang Stein - Free Book Online
Authors: Deborah Jiang Stein
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to dot the “i.” I also cover social justice issues for the school newspaper: race, and fishing rights for Native Americans in Seattle. The school requires wool uniforms, royal blue skirts, and jackets with top-button-better-be-buttoned white shirts and stand up for the teachers when they enter the classroom. Lunchtime meant formal training in etiquette and meals served in a white-tablecloth dining room. My graduating class consists of twenty girls. Because I stand out in my all-white class, there’s no way to disappear into the school crowd and hide my trouble-making.
Every molecule in me is packed with rage. One day at home, I face my mother in the hall outside my bedroom, my body so close to hers, her back presses against the wall. We’re the same height by now, but I’m lean and muscular and more athletic than her soft, petite frame, just under five feet. A few summers before, I trained in the butterfly and breast stroke and raced on a swim team, so the workouts shaped me with broad shoulders and strong back muscles.
We’re forehead to forehead. Then, right behind my eyes, an electric thread ignites, rearranges my cells inside. It’s as if I’m plugged into a high voltage outlet and fueled by seventeen years of fury and adrenaline. I power up to strike and aim my right fist for Mother’s face. At the last minute, when my knuckles almost graze her cheekbone, I divert my punch.
My hand pierces the sheetrock wall behind her, my fist a nuclear ball on fire. I can’t remember what my mother does other than duck. I retract my arm from the hole in the wall, my knuckles collapsed. From the nail of my baby finger down to my wrist, the outside half of my hand folds into my palm. The anger, still ablaze in me, blocks the pain at first but my hand soon begins to throb and then turns into a purple-black, mangled mass.
After three days, my mother hands me her car keys to drive myself to the hospital. “Tell them you rough-housed with your brother.”
Jonathan’s off at college, so that’s a flat-out untruth. I’ve never known my mother to lie, but she would skirt facts to protect the family image. She’d never want to admit my violence and let the world in on our problems. Big problems.
I’d just passed my driver’s test but we hadn’t been taught how to drive to a hospital with a swollen hand in the lap. My hand and arm throb all the way, my bones already set into a distorted form. I don’t feel a thing when the doctor wraps my hand in gauze and then, with what looks like a shiny hammer, rebreaks the bones before he casts my hand. No pain, no more anger, nothing but a frozen inside. I don’t even feel alone, though I’m by myself in the hospital.
When head and heart disconnect, the one thing left is total lockdown into a world of only two choices: adapt, or crash and fall. More often it’s thought of as fight, flight, or freeze. I’m living in this zone full-time.
SOMETIME AFTER THE disaster of my hand, I downed a handful of aspirin to end it all. I’d had enough, couldn’t take it anymore. My weak attempt at suicide failed and I awoke the next morning unscathed. The amount I’d gulped wasn’t serious enough to kill me but more about how helpless and hopeless I felt, maxed out and fed up with life. After this, the only road I traveled to kill myself was the self-destructive one—emotional suicide.
LEAVE HOME. That’s when I think everything will improve, the day I move out, the very second I step out the door for good. Life will change, I’m sure, and then every bit of rage and confusion and hate will dissolve into nothing but bliss. Grief will flutter away and joy will bounce right in front of me the minute I sail out the front door of my parents’ house at last with my bags packed and ready for the good life. And when I turn eighteen, then for sure life will turn golden. When I when I when I . . . What will make me better is always something outside of myself.
Why not college? I head off to
Every molecule in me is packed with rage. One day at home, I face my mother in the hall outside my bedroom, my body so close to hers, her back presses against the wall. We’re the same height by now, but I’m lean and muscular and more athletic than her soft, petite frame, just under five feet. A few summers before, I trained in the butterfly and breast stroke and raced on a swim team, so the workouts shaped me with broad shoulders and strong back muscles.
We’re forehead to forehead. Then, right behind my eyes, an electric thread ignites, rearranges my cells inside. It’s as if I’m plugged into a high voltage outlet and fueled by seventeen years of fury and adrenaline. I power up to strike and aim my right fist for Mother’s face. At the last minute, when my knuckles almost graze her cheekbone, I divert my punch.
My hand pierces the sheetrock wall behind her, my fist a nuclear ball on fire. I can’t remember what my mother does other than duck. I retract my arm from the hole in the wall, my knuckles collapsed. From the nail of my baby finger down to my wrist, the outside half of my hand folds into my palm. The anger, still ablaze in me, blocks the pain at first but my hand soon begins to throb and then turns into a purple-black, mangled mass.
After three days, my mother hands me her car keys to drive myself to the hospital. “Tell them you rough-housed with your brother.”
Jonathan’s off at college, so that’s a flat-out untruth. I’ve never known my mother to lie, but she would skirt facts to protect the family image. She’d never want to admit my violence and let the world in on our problems. Big problems.
I’d just passed my driver’s test but we hadn’t been taught how to drive to a hospital with a swollen hand in the lap. My hand and arm throb all the way, my bones already set into a distorted form. I don’t feel a thing when the doctor wraps my hand in gauze and then, with what looks like a shiny hammer, rebreaks the bones before he casts my hand. No pain, no more anger, nothing but a frozen inside. I don’t even feel alone, though I’m by myself in the hospital.
When head and heart disconnect, the one thing left is total lockdown into a world of only two choices: adapt, or crash and fall. More often it’s thought of as fight, flight, or freeze. I’m living in this zone full-time.
SOMETIME AFTER THE disaster of my hand, I downed a handful of aspirin to end it all. I’d had enough, couldn’t take it anymore. My weak attempt at suicide failed and I awoke the next morning unscathed. The amount I’d gulped wasn’t serious enough to kill me but more about how helpless and hopeless I felt, maxed out and fed up with life. After this, the only road I traveled to kill myself was the self-destructive one—emotional suicide.
LEAVE HOME. That’s when I think everything will improve, the day I move out, the very second I step out the door for good. Life will change, I’m sure, and then every bit of rage and confusion and hate will dissolve into nothing but bliss. Grief will flutter away and joy will bounce right in front of me the minute I sail out the front door of my parents’ house at last with my bags packed and ready for the good life. And when I turn eighteen, then for sure life will turn golden. When I when I when I . . . What will make me better is always something outside of myself.
Why not college? I head off to
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