Unbreakable Mind & Body

51. Inside A Prison: Visiting My Dad When I Was Young

• Tiana Gonzalez • Episode 51

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A snowy hill, a swing set, and two kids smiling at the camera—what you can’t see is the watchtower just beyond the frame. I share the story behind a photo taken inside a New York State maximum security prison, where weekend trailer visits promised a temporary version of home.

We pull back the curtain on how those visits worked—groceries through security, IDs surrendered, counts called in the cold—and why a teenager would choose to spend precious weekends under prison rules. Along the way, I talk about what happens when the myth of a parent collapses and how I stopped confusing endurance with loyalty.

The conversation moves from edge to softness, from hyper-vigilance to accurate naming of what hurts and what simply disappoints. We explore the idea that people love only to the depth they love themselves, and how to protect your heart without hardening it beyond repair. 


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Disclaimer: This show is for education and entertainment purposes only. This is not intended as a replacement for therapy. Please seek out the help of a professional to assist you with your specific situation.


SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Unbreakable Mind and Body Podcast. I am your host, Tiana Gonzalez, a multi-passionate creative, storyteller, and entrepreneur with a fierce love for movement. This is our space for powerful stories and actionable strategies to help you build mental resilience and elevate your self-care practice. Together, we will unlock the tools that you need to create an unbreakable mind and body. Welcome back to the show. I'm your host, Tiana. This is a special episode. It's story time. So yesterday I posted a photo on my Instagram story, and it got a compelling and overwhelming response from my network, from my community, that people wanted to know more about the photo. So let me paint the picture for you. This photo was taken when I was in high school. So we're talking mid-90s. I graduated from high school in spring of 1996. So I'm thinking this photo was taken probably uh either in the winter and like towards the end of the year of 1995 or you know, early 1996. This photo was of my brother and me. We're standing on a snowy hill or snowy mountain. There's a swing set behind us. Further back, you can see a trailer, and then beyond that you see a very high stone wall. This photo was taken within the walls of a New York State maximum security prison. And the question that I had asked my community was do you want to hear more about this? To which everyone who voted in the poll said yes, they do. So what the fuck was my brother, Emmy, doing inside of a prison in what looks like a residential space? Allow me to explain. I don't know, by the way, if they still have this program or not, but back in the day, at the maximum security prisons, there were trailer visits. And so we would go to the jail, we would buy groceries, we could cook food, bring, you know, pre-made food that could be reheated, or you could just bring groceries and run through security. You also pack for two nights, and everything you bring is heavily searched. All the bags are emptied and then repacked. You go through the metal detectors. There's a long list of things that are considered contraband, which you're not allowed to bring inside. And once we get through processing, we are allowed to basically live in a small trailer with the person who is imprisoned. And it's basically the remainder of that day that you arrive, spend the night, you have the whole next day, spend the night again, and then you leave early in the morning on day three. So it's really about two days when you add up the hours, but it feels like it's three just because of when you are entered into the space and then when you exit and go through processing again. And I'm sure you're asking yourself, what the fuck were we doing sleeping overnight in what appeared to be a trailer or like a family corner of a maximum security prison? Wouldn't that be dangerous? Well, yeah, I think yes, it could be dangerous. But what I want you to realize is that within these very high walls, there was a section of the prison that was closed off from everything else. And so we were basically in a corner of this contained space. And within this corner, there were six trailers, and it really was three trailers split in half. So when I say trailer, I'm talking about like something that you would uh hitch on to the back of your truck or like a trailer park home, something like that, like a trailer home. So there was running water, there's a bathroom, if I remember correctly, there were two bedrooms, and then also the sofa in the open common space pulled out into a couch as well. So it was designed to allow for families to visit and spend time together. And what's super interesting is that I don't remember how many times we did a trailer visit. I know it wasn't a ton because it was something that, you know, there were certain privileges that needed to be earned in order to make that happen. And then there was an application process, and then I'm sure behavior was examined, and all of this is what I'm talking about that my father would have had to do on his end. And then on our end, it's also a huge time commitment because I'm missing part of a day of school, and there's travel to get to the prison. And then here's the other part of it that's really important to remember we were minors, so there had to be someone who had authorization to act as our guardian for the weekend. For example, in the event of a medical emergency, somebody who had a reliable vehicle, somebody who also had a clean record. And you basically give up your rights. You have nothing when you go into a prison. So everyone would get fingerprinted, we would have to show ID, everything would have to check out, they would look at your birth certificate, social security card. Um, if you were an adult, whatever your ID was, maybe a driver's license or a passport. And they kept records of everyone's information. And so you're giving up your rights to go into the prison, and now you are under the rule of the prison. And so within that corner of the prison yard, which was not the yard where the guys had their gym time and free time, it was just a different space. There was also a tower, a watchtower, obviously. And every few hours throughout the day, each prisoner would have to go step outside to be accounted for. They call that the count. And if anyone was missing anywhere within the prison, whether they were like if they weren't at work, they weren't in their cell, they weren't on the grounds, if they could not be accounted for, everything got shut down, nobody could go anywhere, move, or do anything. We would have to stay inside of the trailer. The prisoners would stay outside, whether it was freezing cold or not, until every single body was accounted for, and then they could go back inside. And so I'm sure you're wondering why the fuck would we want to do this? Well, it's ironic that my neighbor's vacuuming now while I'm trying to tell this story. Go figure. Sorry for the background noise if you hear it, but I'm going to continue. So we lived with my father up until he went to prison. From early childhood until I was 12, my dad was my primary caregiver. My parents split up when I was around four, and we left with my dad. Obviously, not by our choosing. We didn't know what was going on. And I say we, I'm talking about my brother and me. And so when I turned about nine years old, my parents went through the lengthy ordeal of getting a divorce, fighting for custody. And believe it or not, even in the 80s, with the help of very powerful attorneys and some manipulation, the judge awarded my father full custody and my mom visitation rights every other weekend. Insane. That would never happen nowadays, but it happened in the 80s in Westchester County, New York, which is right outside of New York City. So once my father went to prison, we had to switch households. We packed up our stuff, we moved, we changed schools. There was a lot of emotional damage done. And then there was also the shame. We weren't allowed to talk about what was going on. We had to keep it a secret. And I couldn't really show my emotions at home because there was this very blurry, messy environment we were in where by me expressing sadness about missing my dad, it somehow would be turned into a slight against my mother. And there was a lot of resentment and anger and fighting. And the first I would say two years or so, it was brutal because I didn't know how to navigate this space. I quickly learned what ticked my mother off, what not to say, what not to do, how to stay below the radar, just survive so that I could get out of there once I got into college. It was a very hard way to live. And it was really challenging because I really needed parental guidance. And my mom was very much a friend most of the time, but then would discipline me from time to time. And it was just so confusing for me. And I have to say, my dad made a lot of mistakes too. Before he went to prison, there were times where my parents were fighting about, you know, something that maybe my mom did when she had us for the weekend. For example, maybe she had a guy friend pick us up in his car and drive us somewhere, or pick us up and give us a ride back to where my father lived because she didn't want to drop us off late. And maybe the train or the bus was running late for whatever reason. And so, in thinking she's doing something good, we'd then get upstairs and dad would say, like, oh, you know, who dropped who just dropped you off? I was watching from the window. And we knew we were going to get in trouble for something that an adult decided that we had no control over. And so it was this crazy sort of thing because as a child, as a young kid, I had no way to like just be safe. I was always being scolded, reprimanded, or disciplined nine times out of ten for things that I had did not do or had control over, but I took part in. And so I was the one that was responsible. I was the one that took the blame. And I really wish that I was exaggerating and sharing this, but it's actually true. So going back to the weekend visits, we would do anything to get that feeling back of being relaxed, watching movies, playing board games, eating food, spending time with dad. That is all that me and my brother wanted. And so, yeah, we would beg, we would save our allowance, and we would do whatever we could to try to make regular visits, but then most especially the trailer visits. And I remember the first trailer visit got totally fucked up because my aunt and uncle, they're not married, they're brother and sister. My aunt and uncle volunteered to bring us up for the weekend for the trailer visit. So they are the siblings of my dad, my dad's younger brother and younger sister. And something happened, and my uncle was trying to smuggle something in that was contraband, and they caught him and he got arrested, and the whole trailer visit was put on kib. I had cooked, I made a big ZD, my parents gave me money. When I say my parents, I mean my mom and my stepdad gave me money to go grocery shopping. I put in the time. I'm in fucking high school. Okay. I'm also in a bunch of AP classes trying to get the best grades possible so that I could get a scholarship and go to a great college and get out. I also was uh part of the Spring Musical and vice president of the National Honor Society. So there was a lot of pressure on me. And then I had taken time away from all of that, which should have been my priorities at the time, but it took my attention away from that so that I could handle this visit for my father and for us, and it got ruined. And it took me a lot to get over that because I had put so much effort and time and money, especially as a kid, you know,$50 when you're 16 and you don't have a job and you're you're getting uh, you know, an allowance of maybe five to seven dollars a week to to do some chores and you're saving it, you know, losing money on groceries is a big fucking deal. It's heartbreaking. And it's crazy to me because I think about like who were the first people that broke my heart, and it's my family, it's always my family. So this gives you context into who I am, right? Because people have told me, you've got an edge. There's a little bit of gangsta going on there. There's like a little bit of thug in you, and it's absolutely true. Because as a kid in my own home with my own family, I had to learn how to protect myself, I had to learn how to stick up for myself, I had to learn how to defend myself. One of my cousins hit on me, and I'll never forget it, and it disgusts me even just thinking about it, because we were close when we were little, and then a comment was made, and I just lost it because it was completely out of context, and it made me look back and think about all the times that we had spent together when we were little, and I didn't realize that I was actually being hunted, or that it was predatory by you know, the the scenario, and it it just gave me the ick and it made me realize like, oh my god, I'm supposed to be able to trust these people, I'm supposed to be able to trust this person, and I can't, and I won't, and I've removed myself from that. But going back to that trailer visit in the picture, you can see my eyes are sunken in, I have dark circles, I look exhausted, and I'm smiling because I'm happy, but I'm also scared because I remember at that particular trailer visit, it really started to hit me that I was inside of a prison. I was a young girl in high school choosing to go in to a prison for my dad for a feeling of some kind of semblance of normalcy or cohesion as a family, and it was a fucking lie. I don't regret doing those things, you know. My mother always tells me, even to this day, that I love hard and that anybody who's even getting a fraction of what I'm capable of giving is lucky. She was hard on me, she was always hard on me, but but she always gave me that compliment. She used to say it all the time, Manty, you love so hard, you love so hard that it hurts me to see how much you love people. And it's true. So I used to volunteer my time, make efforts to go see someone in prison, to put myself in prison. Those are some real unique experiences, and I had kind of forgot about it, tucked it away, didn't give it too much thought. You know, once I moved on with my life, once I got to college, the visitations really started to dwindle. I didn't have a vehicle of my own where I went to school. It was a little over a three-hour drive from where I grew up, where I called home. So it was challenging to be far away from home and also far away and disconnected from my dad. He could not call me at school on the campus, and he would write to me and I'd write him back. But it was really, really challenging. And so I remember the times I could go see him would be maybe during my winter break and during my summers. And I will never forget this one time that he reprimanded me because I had not gone to see him in months. And I remember looking at him. I was probably, I don't know, 19 years old, maybe 20. Because at this point, as soon as I turned 18, I started going to visit him by myself. I didn't want to put the burden on anyone else. I didn't want to deal with the stress and the drama and the bullshit. I just took that responsibility on fully uh as my my own thing. And so I was, you know, taking the bus up to see him. And then eventually I did get a car. I got a car right before I turned 20 years old, right before, I'm sorry, I was 20. I got a car right before my senior year of college, right before I turned 21. And so I remember being in the visiting room and he's reprimanding me because I had not been there in such a long time to visit him. And I I remember looking at him, I said, Are you crazy? I just got this car. I just got my own car and I'm here visiting you. Maybe you could take some of that energy and look at yourself and ask yourself, why are you still in prison after all this time? Instead of scolding me because I haven't done enough for you. Maybe you could ask yourself, what are you doing for me? And that man shut right up. He wasn't there for my eighth grade graduation. He wasn't there for my high school graduation, he wasn't there for my college graduation. He didn't buy me my first car like he had always promised me he was going to. And he wasn't there for me for a lot of really important milestones. So it was very challenging for me to maintain respect for this man after all of that. And years later, when he was on parole, and I learned the truth about what had really transpired, to which I still don't know all the details, and nor do I care, because it's irrelevant at this point. We don't have a great relationship. Actually, we don't have a relationship at all. And to me, that is an absolute shame because your children are blessings and they didn't ask to be brought into this world. So the least you could do is take care of them, right? Until they're ready to go off into the real world and do their own thing. And so for me, when I think about my dad, I'm like, what a piece of shit. You basically had me so that I could take care of you, and that's not gonna happen. But when I learned the truth, the few details, the lies, I realized that all of that time, all of that effort, all of that stress, and all of those tears were for a make-believe story, or for a narrative, or for a dream, or for something that was not and will never be. And that is one of the biggest heartbreaks I've ever had to cope with in my entire life. 47 years old, and I look back and I've had a few really tough things to overcome. But learning the truth about my father is probably one of the hardest things I've ever had to face. And realizing that my whole early childhood, when I was being taught how to protect myself and how to defend myself, I was being taught by somebody who maybe didn't really have my best interest at heart, or maybe he wasn't fully capable of it the way I needed it to be. I think that's a fair way to frame it, to say it. People can only love you to the depths of which they love themselves. So if you are somebody like me who loves hard, who would cut your fucking heart out of your chest for somebody that you loved so deeply, if the other person cannot relate to you at all, you're always gonna end up being heartbroken. You're always going to be dissatisfied and you're always gonna be a mess because they cannot understand that kind of depth and capacity. And by the way, feeling on such a deep level sometimes is not necessarily the best thing or is the healthy way to live. Because you got to ask yourself, like, why am I why am I spiraling out of control? Why am I feeling so lost right now? Why am I in so much pain? Am I really in that much pain, or is this self-inflicted? Because it's just about being disappointed and being on a different page. When you learn to accept people for who they are, flaws and all, it doesn't hurt as much because you have an understanding of the person before you, and you're not in love with the daydream or the fantasy or the facade. They say a picture tells a thousand words, and that one photograph that I had never seen before, that my brother sent to me not too long ago, it moved me in such a way, and I didn't share it right away. I had to sit with it, I needed to feel ready to talk about it. And I also wanted to just put some feelers out there and make sure that this is something people actually want to hear about. Because the interesting thing is that it gave me that edge, gave me those street smarts. I see the world a little bit differently because of my time that I spent in and out of prison visiting rooms, but also like who I had to become in order to make those visits happen. Being the ringleader, getting the information, finding the bus schedules, learning the rules, what's the state law, what kind of ID do you need? Now remember, this is in the 90s. There was no fucking internet, there was no Google, everything was by going to the library, by making phone calls and getting lost on these state roads with no street names, no signage, just like turn right after the big oak tree and then turn left at the cobblestone house. And that's literally what it was like. I wish I was exaggerating, but I'm not. Everything that happens leaves an imprint, leaves a mark, leaves something behind that that's left with you forever. And while all of these things have added the edge, they also have made me appreciate my softness even more. They've also helped me to become more vulnerable, to embrace a little bit of a softer way of viewing the world, of existing, of being. And you know, not everything needs to be so hard all the time. And not everyone is out to get you either. But that's just my two cents. And I'm gonna leave this right here. I appreciate you, your time, your attention, your tuning in week after week. You being here means more to me than you will ever know. And if you enjoyed this episode, please let me know. You can send me a text, check the show notes to figure out how to do that. And I'll catch you on the next one. Bye.