Mother’s Day comes for all of us whether we want it or not. It arrives like a warden’s key turning in a lock: certain, mechanical, indifferent to what it opens. For mothers in the free world, the holiday carries carnations from grocery store impulse racks; phone calls with grandchildren singing off-key; and brunch tables crowded with the beautiful noise of family. For mothers behind prison walls, it carries a different kind of weight. The specific, unshakable weight of what cannot be touched.
I know this feeling firsthand: I am writing this from inside a Texas prison, and my three children are in Michigan. Between us sits every policy, every phone rate and every visitation restriction the state of Texas has constructed to ensure that the cord connecting mother to child grows thin. The system does not announce that it is severing families. It simply makes connection expensive enough, inconvenient enough, and surveilled enough that severing happens quietly while the state keeps its hands clean. Phone calls cost money that most families can’t afford. Visits require travel that costs even more. Letters pass through officers’ hands before they reach mine.
That’s why I carry two feelings at once every Mother’s Day, and they do not make peace with each other. The first is nostalgia. My older children and I have been laughing lately, the way you do when the hard thing has become safe enough to be funny. They remind me of the Mother’s Day breakfasts they made me when they were small: scrambled eggs with shell bits in them, crunchy and confident. Macaroni letters pressed onto construction paper that spelled out “MOM DAY,” because they hadn’t quite learned the word “mother” yet. I choked down every bite. I hung every card. I meant it every time I said it was perfect. Those memories live in me like warmth that has nowhere to go.
The second feeling is yearning, and it has no funny edges. My youngest daughter is 19 years old now. My mother has raised her since she was 4 months old, while I have been here. We have not shared a single Mother’s Day in person. Not one. We both call my mother on the holiday. Me, because I want to. Her, because my mother has loved her well enough, and she knows what a daughter owes. To me, she says “Happy Mother’s Day” with a voice that is dutiful, respectful and correct. I say thank you. Then, we are quiet in a way that holds everything we do not know how to say to each other.
She calls my mother “grandma,” but she means it the way other children mean “mom.” I know this because when I disagree with her boyfriend, she tells me — with patience and a little firmness — that she is her grandmother’s baby. I always fire back with the same thing: “Well, how come I got these stretch marks after pushing you out?” She laughs. I laugh. And then I sit with the same question underneath the joke, the one I am always sitting with: Have I done enough? Have I done anything at all?
And I ask myself what every parent asks: Am I doing this right? When I was free and raising children, the answer revealed itself in small, silly ways. With my first child, I threw away a pacifier the moment it touched the floor. With my second, I rinsed it under the faucet. By my third, I wiped it on my shirt and handed it back without breaking my stride. Parenthood teaches you to release perfection, to trust the bond more than the rules. But behind these walls, I find myself returning to that question with no pacifier to wipe on my shirt, no child close enough to hand anything back to. Parenting is hard and often thankless when you are present for it. Parenting through incarceration, with the state placing obstacles in your path and the stigma of imprisonment shadowing your children’s lives, is something for which there is barely a word. Herculean does not cover it. Sisyphean comes close.
I sometimes wonder if the mothers I know on the outside share my fears. I wonder if they also lie awake calculating the exact tone of voice that will keep a teenage daughter talking to them. My friends on the outside reassure me that yes, they too, worry about their children’s choices in partners, about saying the wrong thing and watching a door close. And I believe them. But they are free to chase their children if they run. If a phone call goes cold and a daughter goes quiet, they can get in a car. They can knock on her door. They can sit at a kitchen table until the silence breaks. I cannot do any of those things. So I walk on eggshells across the miles, measuring every word before I say it, praying that the fragile thread of our relationship is stronger than it feels. When she asks for my opinion, I give it to her, and then I hold my breath. That is the part no one tells you about mothering from prison: the waiting after you speak, wondering whether you've spent one of the few chances you have left.
And yet, Mother’s Day is also something else here. Something I did not expect when I first arrived, and did not expect to need as much as I do now.
The women here — the younger ones who have come to me with their grief, secrets and fears — have given me a name I carry like a second skin: Mama Detroit. They know where I am from. They know what I left behind. On Mother’s Day, they tape typing paper together into banners. They draw flowers in the margins — the kind of flowers a child draws, round-petaled and imprecise and full of effort. They wrap stolen pens and mismatched socks in pages torn from magazines and call them gifts. They write me letters thanking me for listening, for holding what they could not say to anyone else, for believing in them when the evidence was thin. They love on me, and I love on them. For a few hours, something that was broken feels, if not whole, at least held.
These are the things I wish my youngest daughter could know about me. Not the version of me frozen at the moment the door closed, but this version: the one who still shows up, who still listens, who has kept the instinct to mother alive even in a place designed to hollow it out. I wish she could see that. I wish she knew that her mother did not disappear. She just got moved somewhere harder to reach.
When I am released, my youngest will be too old for me to stand in a kitchen proudly watching her burn toast. The window for crunchy scrambled eggs and macaroni art is closed, and I cannot grieve it back open. But I am still here. I am still her mother in every way that counts, in the stretch marks, in the late-night calls, in the breath I hold when I give her my honest opinion and wait to see if she stays. I am still the woman who wants, more than anything, to one day sit at a crowded Mother’s Day brunch table surrounded by the people I love, the kind of table you see in commercials, noisy and imperfect and overflowing. The table is the dream I am carrying through this. Not the carnations. Not the cards. Just the table and everyone sitting at it.
Kwaneta Harris is a former nurse, business owner and expat. She is now an incarcerated journalist and 2026 Galaxy Changemaker Fellow. She also serves as a senior writer and editor for Solitary Watch and a lead advisor for The Bridge at Look2Justice. You can read more of her stories on Substack at Write or Die.