Wake up to your luck

I met my friend twenty- five years ago when she was an inmate in the Women’s Prison in Madrid and I was working there.

The new department for mothers had been opened one or two years before and I had just come back from my own maternity leave. Being a mother for the first time and starting to work again is a very sensitive experience. I had been working with mothers in prison for 5 or 6 years at that time, so apparently in some ways I was used to nearly all the problems they had to face, both as mothers and as inmates.

However, the way I perceived their imprisonment was absolutely changed as my point of view had been widened because of my personal circumstances. I felt in the deepest way how incredibly hard situation it is to be separated from your kids for a long time. It was a huge effort for me to spend only a few hours far from my little baby. The fear of my daughter being hurt -or worse- was a threat that lived in my mind.

These were the outlines of the context where I discovered my beloved Antonia.

As soon as I started working after my leave, all my peers told me what she was like.

Aggressive, violent, bad- mannered, heavily addicted, were the adjectives most of them expressed to describe Antonia.

A few days before I returned to my work, she had had a violent argument with another inmate. As a result of this, she was going to be moved to another prison.

Of course she didn’t want be moved. The conditions in the new Mothers Department were, at that time, the best in the country so she came to talk to me about the idea of having once more the opportunity to reform her bad behaviour.

That conversation was the beginning of our long and uncommon friendship. It began as a professional relationship but has been reshaped to a personal one.

What was in that talk that made me strongly beg the Director not to move Antonia was a powerful belief.

Antonia was in prison voluntarily. She had three children and the youngest one was living with her in the prison. The other two were in a school under the care of the Social Services. She had taken that decision as she was determined to abandon drugs. She was able to make me feel her enormous love for her children. Not only with her words but because of the difficult decisions she had taken before entering freely to jail. I admit that my new circumstance as being a mother made me connect profoundly to her feelings.

Recovering from drug addition is not easy and I was aware that strong determination is the first step. I had heard that argument many times. The difficulty is to keep alive that decision for years.

Many years have past and she is completely recovered from her addition. Moreover, she has been working as a therapist in Proyecto Hombre since she finished her treatment.

Looking back the events I can say that she was lucky having a new opportunity but what I think that made possible her recovering is her indestructible will-power.

Likely being luck is mixture between coincidence and ability to take the advantage of it.

                                                                                               Mrs Raga