Mother’s Day comes for all of us whether we want it or not. It arrives like a warden’s key turning in a lock: certain, mechanical, indifferent to what it opens. For mothers in the free world, the holiday carries carnations from grocery store impulse racks; phone calls with grandchildren singing off-key; and brunch tables crowded with the beautiful noise of family. For mothers behind prison walls, it carries a different kind of weight. The specific, unshakable weight of what cannot be touched.

I know this feeling firsthand: I am writing this from inside a Texas prison, and my three children are in Michigan. Between us sits every policy, every phone rate and every visitation restriction the state of Texas has constructed to ensure that the cord connecting mother to child grows thin. The system does not announce that it is severing families. It simply makes connection expensive enough, inconvenient enough, and surveilled enough that severing happens quietly while the state keeps its hands clean. Phone calls cost money that most families can’t afford. Visits require travel that costs even more. Letters pass through officers’ hands before they reach mine.

That’s why I carry two feelings at once every Mother’s Day, and they do not make peace with each other. The first is nostalgia. My older children and I have been laughing lately, the way you do when the hard thing has become safe enough to be funny. They remind me of the Mother’s Day breakfasts they made me when they were small: scrambled eggs with shell bits in them, crunchy and confident. Macaroni letters pressed onto construction paper that spelled out “MOM DAY,” because they hadn’t quite learned the word “mother” yet. I choked down every bite. I hung every card. I meant it every time I said it was perfect. Those memories live in me like warmth that has nowhere to go.

Read the full article about what Mother's Day is like for moms in prison by Kwaneta Harris at The Marshall Project.