I used to think if I wrote enough and visited enough and did everything a good prison wife does that I could keep the light of hope burning, but I soon realized that hope is indeed not entirely external, in fact it is very internal. We have to want to hope that things will one day get better or the status quo will even out or we will be satisfied with what we make of our lives. Prison puts a damper on life. It can deaden our loved ones hopes and dreams, even their soul. It can do the same to those of us on the outside. How do we protect ourselves against a loss of hope in the face of incarceration? I had some very dark days in the beginning of my husband's jail time and subsequent prison time. I lost all interest in activities in things around me and I lost hope because in my eyes his sentence was long and I never thought I would survive it. You see that is another point I want to make. Hope is about survival. you survive the pain, the haziness, the unknowing, the disappointments and the loneliness. Our hope lies in our loved ones. Our hope then becomes externally based on a living, breathing being that counts on us to an extent for their own hope. Sometimes we have to hope for them when they cannot see then end in sight.
So to bring things to a close I am feeling tired, a little hopeless, but not void of hope because when I do not hold my own hope, my husband holds mine for me until I am ready to myself again. Hope can come from our families, our children, our pets, our friends, our work, our activities, but it has to come, it has to be there for this sort of relationship to survive. So hope on, I will try my best, even in the wake of just wanting "normalcy," I will draw my strength and hope from within myself and from Isaac and I will use it to remind myself that whatever the circumstances it's loss would be more detrimental than anything.
