One of the things I don’t talk about much in all of the re-entry struggles is the effect on my kids.

My 10yo daughter has a huge amount of trauma from my incarceration.

This is a thread about one of the manifestations of her trauma...

My (then 6yo) daughter was at school the day I was disappeared into the system...she came home to an empty house. Now that I am home she has enormous amounts of anxiety about leaving me and going to school

This means that her school attendance is shocking. Some days I just cannot get her there. There isn’t a week that she doesn’t miss a day, sometimes many

She’s a great student: bright, curious, intelligent, friendly, kind, social...but her fear of losing me (again) is visceral, and has a distinct physicality to it

This morning she didn’t go to school...again. I went through the throws of begging, pleading, bribing, threatening, cajoling, encouraging...I try the softly softly approach, the hard ass, the angry, the caring, the loving....literally nothing works

And then, at 8:32am I finally gave up and gave in. Worn down, by her hours of pleading, I hopped in the shower to have a big cry, and when I got out this note was by my bed:

Now as a criminalised blak woman, having a kid who has attendance issues brings down the weight of the state onto me-truancy mob, welfare mob, education dept...they all want a piece of me

But here’s the thing...instead of pathologising me as the irresponsible blak mother, when will the state turn the mirror back on themselves?

We don’t have any services in SA that support kids with parental incarceration trauma, or any services that understand that children of incarcerated parents really struggle both while their parents are inside and on their return

It’s a significant gap in support services in this state & there appears to be no political will to resolve it. The children of criminalised parents need support. Their parents need support.

If we want happy, functioning families, we need to acknowledge not just the wrongs of the parent, but also carefully scrutinise how state carceral violence affects children, which in turn affects families, in turn affecting communities.

If we were to honestly consider the impact of parental imprisonment on children, we would never imprison a parent again. Let that be motivation for you to stand with us, and imagine abolition

{and pls don’t slide into my DMs to tell me that I’m the problem. I have reckoned with my fuck ups, and readily admit my errors, this is not a tweet offering myself up for your judgement}