Mothers

When Mom is in Prison: Chappaqua Librarians Participate in Summer Program Reading to their Kids

June 3, 2017 by Janie Rosman

(L-R): Chappaqua Librarians Robbin Friedman and Miriam Lang Budin holding books read to kids with moms in prison.

Learning to read is a joy for children and their parents as a little one’s first sentences and their comprehension increase with their vocabularies. Sharing these moments can be challenging from afar, more so when the parent is incarcerated.

Miriam Lang Budin, head of children’s services at Chappaqua Library and children’s librarian Robbin Friedman, found a way to use books and reading to ease the pain of children who visit their mothers who are behind bars.

“About four years ago, I was invited to see preview screening of the film Mothers of Bedford (2011),” Budin told members of the Rotary Club of Chappaqua during its March luncheon.

The documentary by filmmaker Jenifer McShane details five incarcerated women at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. During the course of several years, McShane spoke with them, their children and families, the children’s caregivers, and prison employees and volunteers to understand parenting from a distance.

“It was an extraordinary movie about the women who are incarcerated in this maximum-security prison,” Budin shared. “Some of the women are pregnant when they arrive so they give birth at the prison. If they’re privileged enough, then they can keep their babies until the babies are two years old.”

Moved by the film, she “wondered how the library could help them in their heartbreaking situation and knew books were the perfect answer.” Research led her to Hour Children®, which runs family programs at the Bedford Hills facility and at the Taconic Correctional Facility.

This will be the fourth summer she and Friedman will read to children visiting their mothers, one component of the facility’s Summer Program. Local families open their homes to inmates’ children for one week each during six week-program, allowing them to spend time more time with their mothers as contact is otherwise by telephone or mail.

Rebecca Sussman, Teen Program Coordinator, Hour Children’s Center, explained the story time program, one of many for families. “From Sunday through Thursday–six times during July and August–children stay with host families in the area and visit their moms during the day,” Sussman explained. “Some of them (children) are siblings, some of them know each other during the years, and some come (to the readings) with their mothers,’ Friedman said. “We never know how many people will show up when we’re there; sometimes up to 36 people (mothers and children) attend.”

All programs take place in the visiting room, behind which is a children’s area that looks like a nursery, and where Friedman and Budin read to the children.

“The visiting room is open to any child of any age; (however), kids from ages 5 to 17 are eligible to be hosted by families during the summer. Their presence evokes a positive reaction in parents who are reluctant to participate. “That’s the goal: to get everyone involved,” Friedman emphasized. “Reading is a good way to get everyone engaged.”

How do they hold everyone’s attention given the vast age range? “We bring picture books or early readers and poetry,” Budin said, “as there’s not enough time to read chapter books or novels, and one child can read a poem or an older child can read to a younger child.”

One favorite is Mirror Mirror: A Book of Reverso Poems by Marilyn Singer. The author’s poem can be read forward and backward, and the latter will have a different meaning. Another is We Are in a Book! from Mo Willems’ series.

“The book has lively dialogue and engages the reader,” Budin explained. Elephant Gerald and Piggie realize they are characters in a book that’s being read, and once they’re more at ease with this, they become upset that the book will end.

“Hello. Will you please read us again?” the characters ask whoever’s reading the book.

Budin and Friedman agree their efforts are well-received. “We get thank-you letters and lots of positive feedback from the families,” Budin said, adding, “sometimes we see families again the next year.”

Both are glad they found a way to work with the population and find it “fulfilling to serve people who would not otherwise have had the same opportunity,” Budin said. Each child who participates in the reading program goes home with a new, age-appropriate book to reread with another adult or by him/herself.

Those who are interested in offering books can visit http://hourchildren.org/. Families interested in hosting children for one week during the summer can contact Deb Rigano, Summer Program Coordinator, at drigano@hourchildren.org.

Latch-Key Love (Thanks, Mom!)

April 16, 2015 by The Inside Press

By Dan Levitz

When I was in first grade, my Mom went back to work and informed me that I would be coming home to an empty house two days a week. She assured me that she’d be 20 minutes away by car and would come home immediately if I ever needed her. She gave me a house-key tied to a shoe-string and put it around my neck. She told me that if I didn’t lose it she’d upgrade the string to a silver chain before long. The only time she ever actually had to come home was when I fell off my bike, and, by then, the string had progressed to a gold-filled chain. Years later, a father to small children myself, I asked her if she was out of her mind having a six-year-old come home to an empty house. She replied with absolute certainty, “I knew you could handle it.” She was right, and I believe that experience nudged me in the direction of being an independent person.

In 6th Grade, our teacher assigned a 50-page term report about a specific country. This was way beyond anything I felt I could ever accomplish.  I knew I’d have to write a lot of words about Japan but, beyond that, I had no clue. We had almost the whole year to work on it and, literally the night before it was due, I approached my Mom, handed her my wildly chaotic and disorganized notes and asked her to turn them into at least 50 typed pages, single-spaced please. At the time, I couldn’t really understand the pained expression on her face, but I clung to the fact that months earlier she’d said she’d type it. It never occurred to me that she might have needed more notice. My grade wasn’t great, but  I’ll never forget that she stayed up most of the night typing for her  screw-up son.

Just as high school began, along with all new freshmen, I was evaluated by the school speech therapist who quickly determined that I needed to come see him three times a week to work on my serious speech impediment. Throughout my entire education this had never come up. Terrible penmanship? Sure. Sloppy work-habits? Absolutely. However, I had always thought that my ability to enunciate was one of my few natural gifts. That this professional, who, I might add, happened to lisp himself, so fervently believed that I needed to work with him was horribly upsetting. As I was self-conscious to begin with, and now terrified, I told my Mother about the situation and she said quite calmly, “He’s out of his mind; you have my permission to not go at all.” That was enough for me. I never went to see him, and, although he did become something of a nemesis, the welcome support from my Mom enabled me to defy that particular authority figure (which was not a natural thing for me to do back then).

In college, I was amazed at how some of my peers were just going berserk with new-found freedom–crazy over-indulgent behavior that sometimes evolved into self-destruction.  I was having a great time, but didn’t feel drunk with freedom because I had actually been afforded a lot of independence while in high school. No hard curfew and a general policy that, as long as I was responsible, I could pretty much do my own thing. I had friends whose parents would flip out if they weren’t home by midnight. I remember my Mom’s explanation about why she didn’t worry if I was out late, “If something happens to you I’ll hear about.” This was a simple and coolly logical approach; it’s one I may have trouble replicating as a parent, but it worked for her and ultimately was a gift to me.

My Mom was an entrepreneur. She went into business with her kid sister, which is why I sometimes came home to an empty house as a kid. The business lasted for 35 years and, besides my Father, it was clearly the passion of her life. She traveled all over the world in connection with the business, met a myriad of interesting people and forged her own path; this after her previous life of being a doctor’s wife which she found unfulfilling until she went off to work. She’s retired now but she keeps busy wheeling and dealing, happily selling the art, books, jewelry and other collections that she’s so happily accumulated over the years.

I can’t say that my Mom always knew exactly what she was doing as a parent, but I now understand that no parent ever really does. I do know that she’s always seen the best in me no matter what, and that’s not a bad place to start.

Dan Levitz has been a Chappaqua resident for 11 years. Lorraine Levitz, at 88, can most likely be found in Lower Manhattan on her daily two-hour walk.

Slipping Out from Under

April 24, 2013 by The Inside Press

(L-R) Authors Lori Toppel, Susan Hodara, Vicki Addesso, & Joan Potter. Photo by Margaret Fox — (L-R) Authors Lori Toppel, Susan Hodara, Vicki Addesso, & Joan Potter.
Photo by Margaret Fox

By Susan Hodara

“My left thumb is identical to my right thumb except for a small pink callus below its joint, permanently hardened by the regular pressure of my lower teeth. I am in my 50s–writer, teacher, wife, and mother of two grown daughters– and I still suck my thumb. The left one, never the right; an ingrained response, I know, from my earliest days.

When my first baby was born, my mother revealed that she had to stop nursing me after just three weeks because of an infection in her left nipple. My parents had come to stay in our Brooklyn Heights apartment to meet their new granddaughter. My mother and I were sitting on opposite corners of the sofa when she told me. Sofie lay across my lap and pulled greedily at my right breast; my mother perched upright on the edge of the seat cushion, knees together.

I remember her words, innocent, almost chatty, her eyes averted across the living room as she spoke. Of course I have no memory of my own first weeks, but I can imagine: the very best thing in my new life–my sustenance, my comfort, my reconnection with my mother’s body –suddenly gone. The discovery of my thumb set a lasting pattern: get the need filled, find another way. Though I don’t think about it often, I know my left thumb holds something of my mother for me.

In my childhood memories of her, she is often standing on the sidelines as my father proclaimed, announced, questioned, yelled. She is silent and passive, removed. In the memoir class, after I’d finish reading my work, Joan’s response was often the same: “But what about your mother? Where was she?”

The fall that our writing group started meeting, my father was declining into the morass of Alzheimer’s disease. Over five years our family had watched him slowly disappear. I talked to my mother on the telephone almost every day, and traveled regularly to Washington, D.C., to visit. Sometimes she cried, from exhaustion or despair.

But the more lost my father became, the more my mother emerged. As I wrote about her and shared my stories in our group, and as I learned about the others’ mothers through the stories they wrote, my understanding started to shift. For the first time in my life, I began to glimpse who my mother was.

I am the only member of our writing group whose mother is still alive, who can still ask her mother questions, compare memories from the past. When I think of the others’ stories– the heartbreaking last days of Vicki and Lori’s mothers, the spreading of Joan’s mother’s ashes–I sense the fragility of the time I have left with my own mother. I have just begun to discover her. It awakens a hunger I can hardly bear to feel.”

Excerpted from Still Here Thinking of You: A Second Chance with Our Mothers (Big Table Publishing, March 2013), a collaborative memoir by Susan Hodara, Joan Potter, Vicki Addesso, and Lori Toppel. Hodara, a longtime Chappaqua resident, is a memoirist whose work appears in numerous anthologies and literary journals, and a journalist who covers the arts for the New York Times and other publications. She and her co-authors formed a writing group in 2006; Still Here Thinking of You presents their stories of their relationships with their mothers, from their early childhoods to their mothers’ later years. Available at Amazon.com and stillHereThinkingOfYou.com.