Two days removed from her second stint in jail, this time for “simple escape, battery … stuff like that,” Shania sat in the conference room at a youth shelter on the outskirts of the French Quarter.
She had only one thing on her mind: seeing the daughter she gave birth to in the short span between her two jail sentences. The father was a man she met while in prison.
“I don’t even love him. I don’t love my baby daddy,” she said that day in early February. “He’s just another person to me. But, you know, I must got some type of love for him, if I had a baby for him. But I’m not in love with him.”
Leaving her newly born daughter to serve her time nearly broke her, said Shania, who is being identified only by her first name to protect her privacy.
“I thought I was a person that could never be broken. But it broke me hard. It broke me down,” she said. “I was like, damn, what are these feelings that I’m feeling?”
Shania, 18, hasn’t experienced much love in her life. She said she wonders if she even knows how to give it, much less receive it. She blames this on her mother, who has largely been absent from her daughter’s life because of her extensive criminal record, which began in 1999, one year after Shania was born.
Her mother’s rap sheet includes solicitation, possession of marijuana and crack cocaine, possession of a stolen car, theft, and armed robbery. In 2011, she pleaded guilty to cruelty to a juvenile and received a two-year sentence.
“I had to go to the hospital,” Shania said. “Her boyfriend called the police. It was happening a long time, years.”
The absence of her mother, despite the pain she inflicted when she was present, has made Shania question her worth as a daughter, as a person. This is a common reaction among the children of incarcerated parents, according to experts: feelings of depression, anxiety, and anger.
And often times, this emotional tumult results in the children following in the footsteps of their parents, despite the best intentions to forge a different path.
“She made me feel like she wished she would have had an abortion with me,” Shania said. “She made me feel abandoned out there. She didn’t have my back when I needed her to. She didn’t talk to me when I needed something about boys. She didn’t talk to me when I needed her to tell me about what’s going on in life. She wasn’t there to tell me none of that.
“She’s just been in jail.”
During one of her mother’s prison terms, Shania said she was sexually abused.
She smoked weed to dull the pain. It was her only escape. She didn’t have anyone to talk to.
“I feel like s— and I feel like I’m still going through it like (it was) yesterday. I just started crying like, I just started crying like…”
Shania let out a long breath. “It’s hard,” she said. “When I think about what be going on with me, it makes me bust out and cry anywhere.”
All that hurt and pain, and the feelings of abandonment, Shania said it feels like there is a “fire in my body that’s never gonna be put out. And I always look for somebody to put it out but …”
Her voice trailed off.
When asked what that fire feels like, Shania said, “Anger. Nothing but anger.”
When asked whether she is worried it will consume her, she nodded.
And if it does?
“I’m gonna be dead.”
Shania said by all rights she shouldn’t be alive, that she had a lot of close calls, a lot of guns pressed against her head during a time when she spent most of her days robbing people and selling drugs.
“I was out there cold-hearted like I was getting money. If it wasn’t about the paper, I didn’t want to talk. That’s how I was with anybody,” she said. “If you flashin’ your money in front of me, what that mean? Don’t tempt me because you know I’m gonna take it. So you setting your own self up for that kill.”
Shania described one near-fatal encounter that happened about two years ago when she was 15. She was smoking with some people “across the river.” One person, a man around the age of 20, had a stack of money in his lap. So Shania took it.
“He pulled out the gun and he was like, ‘Get on your knees.’ So I got on my knees. I was like, ‘F— it. You can kill me and get (your money) back, but you’re always gonna remember that first body that you caught.”
Shania remembered not being afraid. She knew who he was, she said. Not just his name or his people, but who he was, inside. He was, most likely, just like her, she said, the child of an incarcerated parent, the victim of abuse and neglect. And that’s why they found themselves where they were, surrounded by the guns and violence and drugs, ready to kill, ready to die, because in the end, it didn’t seem like there was much more to life.
“He scare a lot of people but he don’t scare me, because I know deep down inside of him, something had to go wrong with his family and his life for him to feel that way,” Shania said. “Everybody dies, but not everybody lives.”
Despite all the pain her mother has caused, Shania said she wants to rebuild their relationship. “Because that’s my mom and I love her, no matter what she done to me.”
Sitting inside Covenant House, the youth shelter where Shania was ordered by the court to stay upon her release from jail, she said she understands that she could be trapped in a cycle, one in which each new generation of her family repeats the mistakes of the last. But she vowed she would be the one to break it. She doesn’t want her daughter to go through what she did, to grow up without a mother, to live a broken life.
“I’m not going to be a statistic. I’m gonna get on my grind for my daughter. She didn’t ask to come in this world so I’m gonna take care of her. I laid down and had her. I can put on my big girl drawers and take care of my child because you ain’t got nobody like momma. Ain’t nobody like momma.”
A week after Shania talked to reporters at Covenant House, she was arrested for simple burglary. She was sentenced to three years and is currently being held at the Louisiana Transitional Center for Women in Tallulah.
At the time of her arrest, Shania’s daughter was in the custody of her father. She is 1 year old, the same age Shania was when her mother was first arrested.