The night before a visit isn’t relaxing. It’s preparation.
I get gas so I don’t have to stop in the morning. I make sure I have a roll of coins because we’ll be eating out of the prison vending machines. No outside food allowed. No forgotten change. Everything has to be planned.
The day of the visit, we wake up at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., depending on the weather. My child is still half asleep when I lift him out of bed. I get us dressed in the quiet dark of early morning, trying not to think about how long the day will be. Then we start the 3.5-hour drive.
Sometimes I stop at an Enroute rest stop. Sometimes I drive straight through. If we arrive early and there’s a little buffer of time, I’ll recline the seat and close my eyes for a few minutes. Not real sleep. Just enough to function.
Our visit starts at 8:30 a.m.
We walk into the prison building and begin the first search. This is only the primary screening. I take off my jacket. I walk through the metal detector and pray it doesn’t beep. If it beeps and you can’t clear it, you don’t proceed. It’s that simple. No matter how far you drove. No matter who is waiting for you on the inside.
If you pass, you’re allowed through the barbed wire gates and into the institution. Then comes the line for the dog search. The dog does its job, sticking its nose into uncomfortable places. You stand there, trying not to flinch, trying not to feel embarrassed. You surrender your dignity because the only thing that matters is seeing your loved one.
Then there are the doors.
Three thick metal doors, each one controlled by a guard. They open one at a time. They close behind you with a heavy final sound that you feel in your chest. Each door is a reminder of where you are — and where your loved one cannot leave.
Finally, you enter a small, stuffy room set up like cafeteria seating. Hard chairs. Vending machines humming in the background. Families scattered around the room, all carrying their own invisible weight.
And then you wait.
But the moment you see your loved one walk in, everything shifts.
The exhaustion. The humiliation. The early morning. The drive. The searches. The gates. The doors.
It’s all worth it.
For five hours, we get to just be together. We eat vending machine food like it’s a five-star meal. We talk. We laugh. We catch up on life. For a little while, we forget the system. We forget the sentence. We forget the barbed wire and the doors.
For five hours, we are just a family.
And then the visit ends.
The goodbye never gets easier. You feel the system again — the structure, the rules, the bureaucracy. The reminder that you get to leave and they do not. You walk back through the same metal doors, past the same gates, into the free air that suddenly doesn’t feel so free.
Then you drive 3.5 hours home.
You put your child to bed. You unpack the coins you didn’t use. You try to rest.
And you count down the days until you do it all over again.
Because love doesn’t stop at prison gates.
DD
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