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regulate the expression and existence of our family.
    Even still it’s true that when that visit came to an end, Rashid nearly convulsed, not visibly, and not in any sort of way that another would notice unless you were a person who cared for him enough to really notice him, see him beyond a department number, a conviction. And I did. I loved him enough, I loved us enough, which is why I saw it, that thing inside a man, that piece of spirit that crumples up inside him when he cannot escape a situation that takes away parts of his humanity. They survive this, some do, and come back and grab hold again of themselves and assert their spirits when the time is right. But you and that man both know he will never be the same person again, never go back to a certain place in his heart. That’s what I saw at the end of the day I took Nisa to meet her father for the very first time: a man who would now have to forever traverse the world shielding a piece of his spirit and so a man who would, in a sense, never be free.
    There was nothing to be said and there was nothing to be done, because sometimes there is just nothing. There is just nothing. Prisons taught me that. But even as I knew there was nothing, no salve, no immediate remedy, I did not feel apart or separate. I did not feel as though I was a single mother. I was part of a team. I was sure of it.
    I was sure of it and I said it and we said it. We said it over and over, one hundred times, and then one hundred times more. Then we went about blocking out the crippling features of the life we were living, focusing instead on anything that made us feel attached to a life that didn’t have barbed wire wrapped around it. And never once did we prepare ourselves for a life without one another.
    Not even just after coming home from that first visit, when I sat beneath the dim orange light of my bedroom and I was holding Nisa, waiting for her father to call us, to check on us, as he always did: “Home safe, baby?” he asked, although obviously we were. And I stared at my baby girl and I wondered how much of this prison life she would retain, how much would recede far back into her memory.
    That night I wondered too if there would ever be a voice in her life that recalled one of those terrible, hate-filled guard voices, and if that voice would call her back to a bad place. And yes, of course, I wondered what choice I had made, what I had done to an innocent child. Yet even then, cloaked—not so much cloaked, but bound by my own hopes and dreams, even then I did not feel alone.
    From that first visit and on visits that came after, Rashid and I made plans. We talked about finances, child care, and howlong I should breast-feed. We talked about religious instruction, how we would restrict television, whether to raise our girl vegetarian, vegan, or meat eating. We committed to serving only organic foods, obviously no pork, but also no beef, though chicken and fish were fine. (In the years since that decision, Nisa has rejected our food restrictions. While there’s still no pork in her life, Nisa declared one day recently that although all those animals were really, really cute, she “still had to eat steak and lamb and stuff. It’s just so juicy, Mommy!”). And religion? I don’t practice but Rashid is still a very pious man. We argued a bit about our daughter’s engagement with religion, but I reminded him that he had come to Islam on his very own terms, walked on his own out of Catholicism. “Let Nisa decide for herself,” I pushed and he finally agreed. “We won’t keep anything from her,” I said, “but let her find her own way like you did.”
    â€œOkay. Okay,” Rashid said, acquiescing one day, adding quietly, truthfully, that “the religion cannot be compelled. But I want her to know who I am.”
    â€œShe will,” I promised, and then we moved on to other areas that would define our baby’s