BEING ANGELINA’S MOM
It is a Saturday morning in early November, and two white vans pull into the parking lot of the Arizona State Prison Complex-Perryville in Goodyear, a minimum-security facility for women. Six young girls jump out, all bright colors and chatter, eager to get inside.
Seven-year-old Angelina Rocha is the first to walk through the metal detector, as she’s learned to do, smiling up at the corrections officer.
Another corrections officer is standing behind a steel mesh door. A large German shepherd is pacing back and forth at the end of the leash she’s holding.
“Hi, puppy,” Angelina says to the drug-sniff- Watch photographer David Wallace’s video of Shantel and Angelina Rocha’s journey at aznarratives.azcentral.com. ing dog.
She knows to back up against the mesh so the dog can sniff her, and not put her fingers through the holes. Even when the dog stands on his back legs and puts his paws against the gate, rattling it, Angelina doesn’t flinch.
She’s been coming here for two years. She
knows the drill.
The other five girls, ages 7-12, follow Angelina through the metal detector and over to the dog behind the mesh door. They also know the drill; all of their mothers are here, serving time for such crimes as selling stolen property and identity theft.
The girls are members of Girl Scout Troop No. 2220, part of Girl Scouts Beyond Bars, a 21-year-old program active in 25 states that is designed to preserve the motherdaughter relationship.
A buzzer sounds, and the first of two heavy steel doors rumbles open. The girls hold each other back so no toes get run over.
They rush into a small holding area and pay no mind to the door now closing behind them with a solid thud. Because here, through a big window slatted with metal, they can see their moms.
The second door finally opens, and there is no holding them back. En masse, the girls run to their mothers, squealing.
Being a parent can be difficult under the best of circumstances. Trying to be one — and a good one at that — in a place like this, from behind locked doors and barbed wire, can seem impossible.
Shantel Rocha hugs and kisses her daughter, then steps back to look at her, never letting go of her hands. They grin at each other.
“Did you get my card?” Rocha asks. Angelina nods. “You did? Did you like it?”
Angelina presses her face against her mom’s arm. “I love you,” she says. “I love you, pumpkin,” Rocha says, hugging Angelina again.
They will have just two hours together. Rocha will make the most of every minute. She will ask about homework and this week’s spelling test, weave her fingers through Angelina’s long hair, and rub her back.
Because no matter what she has done, why she is here, she is Angelina’s mother first.
*** There was a time when Angelina lived with her mom and dad and an English bulldog named Ottie Raider Rocha in a house in Buckeye. Every night, her mom tucked her into her bed with the white wooden headboard with Disney princesses on it. Her dad called her “Boo,” like the little girl in the “Monsters, Inc.” movie.
Angelina’s mom worked for a small health-care company, starting as a bookkeeper in April 2006 when Angelina was just a year old. Six months later, Rocha was promoted to operations manager, in charge of all finances.
The first time Rocha wrote herself an extra payroll check in late 2007, she knew it was wrong. But there were problems with money at home — the house would eventually be lost to foreclosure — and Rocha told herself she would pay the money back before anyone found out.
But then she wrote another check. And another.
Over the next 13 months, Rocha would write 49 checks to herself for a total of $166,005. Investigators later would find corresponding deposits to her personal bank account.
The thefts created difficulties for the company, which was forced to lay off employees and close three of its four clinics. The cause of the problem went undetected until Rocha left in December 2008 and the company’s finances immediately improved.
Rocha was arrested Dec. 1, 2009. In October 2010, she pleaded guilty to two counts of theft and one count of fraudulent schemes and was taken into custody at the county jail.
Rocha begged the judge in a letter to sentence her to time served and put her on probation. She could work to pay back the money. She wouldn’t have to leave her daughter. “She is my life,” Rocha wrote. A month later, she was sentenced to three years in prison. Angelina, who was then 5, would be cared for by her grandmother, Rocha’s 57-year-old mother, Debbie Northern.
Before Rocha left, she had hugged Angelina hard. She hadn’t made any promises. She could barely choke out her words.
“I love you,” Rocha had told her daughter. “With all my heart, I love you.”
Her regret is overwhelming, almost physically visible as she talks about what she did.
“I was so stupid,” she says simply, and she looks away.
She almost whispers, “I hurt so many people.”
*** Being locked up was unreal, Rocha says, almost like watching a movie. She felt disconnected from what was happening — the searches, the regimented schedule, the rules. She didn’t belong in this cold, hard place, yet she did.
“I was ashamed. I was so, so ashamed,” Rocha says.
“I didn’t want anyone to see me here. Not my mom or my dad. Not my brother or my sister. I didn’t want to put them through anything more.” And especially not Angelina. Prison was no place for a child, Rocha thought. Angelina was just in kindergarten, learning about the weather and how to read. She believed in fairies. Rocha did not want her daughter to see this place or her in it, wearing prisonissue clothes, being watched by people with guns.
“I felt like I had failed her,” Rocha says.
The adults came to visit anyway; there was nothing Rocha could do to prevent it. And her resolve about not seeing Angelina lasted just a month.
“I miss her,” she told her mother. “I need to see her.”
“I knew you would,” Northern said. She had started the process that would allow the girl to visit, but it would take another month, after Rocha was transferred from county jail to the state prison. Rocha finally got to see her the Sunday after Christmas.
“What’s wrong, Mommy?” Angelina had asked then.
“I’m just so happy to see you,” her mom had said, wiping away tears.
That first time, Rocha says, “All I could think of when I was holding her was, ‘How am I going to let her go?’ ”
She did, of course. She had to, and it was the first of at least 100 such goodbyes.
*** The Sunday visits have been regular since then.
But with Rocha in prison, three generations of a family are disrupted. Northern is mothering her granddaughter instead of her daughter. Rocha can’t mother her own daughter, not in any normal sense of the word.
And Angelina lives in a world divided by a fence that leaves her worried and confused.
All of that surfaces at their Sunday visits, subtly at some times, loudly at others.
To be Angelina’s mother from prison, Rocha had to learn to hold tightly to some things and to let others go.
“My goal is to make sure that Angelina knows, without an ounce of doubt in her body, that I am always there for her,” she says. Even when she can’t physically be there.
In those few hours on Sundays, Rocha asks about tap class and a cousin’s birthday party. She listens to Angelina read aloud.
Northern sits nearby, playing solitaire. When she tells Rocha that Angelina talked back to her during the past week, Rocha frowns and reminds her daughter to be respectful.
They play Uno or dominoes in the crowded inside visiting room or go outside to the small yard to play freeze tag in the diamondshaped shadows thrown by the high fencing.
When it comes time for goodbye, there are always tears, not only from Angelina but also from Rocha, who waits until the heavy doors shut behind her family before she lets herself cry. And every Sunday evening, after Angelina leaves, Rocha writes her a long letter. There always is more to say.
Rocha also draws pictures and then cuts them into pieces for Angelina to put back together. She makes mazes for Angelina to trace with a pencil, and cards with hearts glued to strips of papers folded like an accordion so they pop out when opened.
Angelina saves them all. At first she kept them in a big envelope; now they fill a white laundry basket in her bedroom closet.
Angelina doesn’t always read the letters or let her grandmother read them to her. She says, “It makes me sad because I miss her.”
She likes having them, though. She looks at her mom’s handwriting, the hearts she draws at the bottom of the pages, the X’s and O’s. They are something she can hold onto.
Two or three times a week, Rocha also calls Angelina. She relishes the sound of her daughter’s voice and clings to every detail so she can picture them in her mind: Angelina’s new classroom. Her friends. Who has a hamster and who doesn’t.
But as most parents know, talking to young children on the phone isn’t ideal.
“How was your day?” Rocha asks. She wants to know everything. “Good.” “What did you do?” “Nothing.” And Angelina hands the phone to her grandmother, so she can play on the computer or rush into dance class.
There is so much Rocha can’t be a part of. She is missing out on parent-teacher conferences, shopping for school uniforms, bedtime stories and haircuts.
The hardest time was when Angelina was 6 and needed surgery to repair a problem with her kidney. Rocha stayed on the phone with her mother as the surgery, which was expected to take a few hours, stretched to six.
“Talk about a mental and emotional wreck. I was a mess,” Rocha says. She felt helpless.
Finally, some relief: Angelina was out of surgery and waking up and her mother could put the phone to Angelina’s ear.
“How are you doing, sweet pea?” Rocha asked.
Angelina was groggy, her voice faint: “Mommy, it hurts. I want you.”
Rocha felt like her heart stopped: “That was so hard to hear. The guilt that I felt was overwhelming.
“She needed me, and I couldn’t be there.” She chokes up even as she recalls it.
On the phone, Rocha spoke softly, saying, “You’re such a strong girl. I appreciate what you are doing.” And then she talked about all the things they would do together again one day — see movies, go to the toy store — until Angelina fell asleep.
Rocha talks often about she gets home. She wants to remind Angelina, and maybe herself, that it won’t always be like this.
The separation hasn’t gotten any easier over time, not for either one of them. There is no getting used to being away from your child, or your mom. The little time they get together is never enough.
In 2011, Rocha learned about Girl Scouts Beyond Bars. The program is designed to nurture the mother-daughter bond while teaching both how to develop their strengths and make good decisions, says Carolina Grimaldo, who runs the program for the Girl Scouts-Arizona CactusPine Council in Phoenix.
The hope is to keep daughters from making the kinds of mistakes their mothers made. National studies report children of incarcerated parents are five to seven times more likely to be imprisoned themselves.
Once girls are in the program, they report getting in less trouble, doing better in school, and getting more involved in community activities, according to a 2012 evaluation by the Girl Scouts.
Although it seems unsettling for a child to be inside a prison, research shows that children fare better if they have contact with their incarcerated parents, Grimaldo says.
To participate, the mothers must have exemplary behavior and attend parenting classes. The program is funded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention and through grants. Rocha and Angelina attended their first troop meeting in August 2011.
For the mothers, it is a chance to parent in a close-to-normal scenario. The troop meets in a classroom with windows that look out onto the small yard in the visiting area. The moms and girls raise their right hands, and Angelina leads them in the Girl Scout pledge: “On my honor, I will try; To serve God and my country —”
She hesitates, and her mom leans over and whispers to her. Angelina continues: “To help people at all times, And to live by the Girl Scout Law.”
On this day, they make finger puppets out of knitted gloves to represent their families and talk about respecting one another.
Angelina scoots her chair over until it is touching her mother’s. Other girls climb onto their mothers’ laps. And as they work together, gluing on yarn hair and googly eyes, they talk. Their moms hang on every word.
“I don’t know if I like you wearing all this makeup,” Rocha tells Angelina, tucking her long hair behind one ear. It is play makeup, sparkly eye shadow and lip gloss.
“She’s growing up so fast,” Rocha says. “I want to put a brick on her head to keep her from getting any taller and keep her baby teeth from falling out with Super Glue.”
Angelina looks around for scissors to cut a piece of ribbon.
“Go over there and ask Jaime,” Rocha tells her.
“Who’s Jaime?” Angelina asks.
“The one in orange,” Rocha says. The moms all laugh.
Angelina frowns at her, a hand on her hip, then laughs, too.
“I want everyone to have smiley faces,” Angelina says.
“OK,” Rocha says. “Should I make them out of yarn?” Angelina nods. “Does everyone need a nose?” her mom asks. Yes, everyone needs a nose. In these two hours together, Rocha peppers Angelina with outside-world questions, too:
Have you learned any new words?
Did you decide what color you want to paint your bedroom? How is everything going? Unlike their Sunday visits,
there is no Nana or strangers at a table nearby. They can pretend not to see the corrections officer near the doorway. They are just moms and daughters at Girl Scouts, like any other moms and daughters. They could be anywhere.
And while the girls are together, they don’t have to pretend that their mom is at work or on vacation, so that’s why none of their friends has met her and she can’t volunteer at school.
“It gives us time to just be us,” Rocha says.
Like other troops, the girls meet outside the prison and go places like the zoo or museum. They sell cookies and go to camp. When their mothers get out of prison, they can stay in the troop and their moms can volunteer to help.
That is someday, though. Today, the girls seem to know instinctively when time is running out. They grow quiet, put away the craft supplies and nestle against their moms.
Angelina lays her head on her mom’s chest: “I
wait until you get home.”
It’s not long now. Rocha is scheduled for release in 25 days, a year early for good behavior.
The girls reluctantly get up and, with their moms and Grimaldo, they form a friendship circle. Right hands over left. They squeeze hands, one at a time, and talk about what they learned.
Then Angelina climbs up on her mother’s back. Rocha gives her a piggyback ride back to the door where the girls entered.
“Ready?” Rocha asks, and she lets Angelina slide down.
“I don’t want to leave you,” Angelina says, her face falling.
“Be a good girl,” Rocha tells her. And then she kisses her dozens of times on her face and neck until Angelina squeals.
The girls all back toward the open door, waving and blowing kisses.
Rocha makes the shape of a heart with her hands and presses it to her chest. Angelina does the same, and the door slides shut.
*** On the other side of that door is the part of Angelina’s life that Rocha can’t see or touch.
Angelina lives in her grandmother’s Phoenix home. She’s in the second grade now, and tall for her age. She likes to dance but not read. She wishes she had a hamster.
When she was 5, Angelina was too young to understand that her mother was in prison.
“The only thing we ever told her is, ‘Your mom messed up. Now she has to work there and pay back the money,’ ” her grandmother says. “We never said the word ‘prison’ to her.”
At school, one of Angelina’s friends told her that her mother worked at ADC, or Arizona Department of Corrections. Angelina was thrilled:
mom works at ADC. Does your mom know my mom?”
But last September, Angelina asked her grandmother for the first time, “Is my mom in prison?” Northern answered simply, “Yes.”
Knowing the answer didn’t make it easier to understand. Having a parent in prison is hard on children, particularly when they are too young to express their feelings. Some children regress and act younger or have trouble in school. Angelina has done both.
She used to get A’s and B’s. Then her grades dropped to C’s and D’s.
And when she visits her mother in prison, her grandmother says, the normally compliant 7-year-old sometimes throws tantrums.
“If you act up, we can walk out as fast as we walk in,” Northern cautions Angelina. But they never actually leave. Northern knows mother and daughter need one another.
“I feel like she has been through so much,” Northern says.
Northern has had to cope with her own feelings of loss. She didn’t tell her coworkers that her daughter was in prison, just that she was away. She never imagined that one of her children would end up in prison, and certainly not her oldest.
Rocha was the one in the family to whom everyone turned for help, Northern says. She was there for her siblings and her mother during a divorce and when Northern was diagnosed with breast cancer. Rocha worked hard, sometimes two jobs at once. She was the responsible one, her mother says.
“She’s very intelligent. What she did was stupid,” she says. She still doesn’t understand it.
At 57, Northern found herself with a kindergartener. She was now responsible for getting Angelina to school on time, paying for child care and worrying about math worksheets and asthma attacks.
Angelina’s father had lived at Northern’s house but left a month or so after Rocha went to prison.
“I’ve been dealing with a lot,” Northern says.
Eight months after Rocha went to prison, Northern was laid off at Honeywell, and her panic was twice what it would have been if she had only herself to worry about. But she was Angelina’s legal guardian, and the girl’s health care was through Northern’s employer.
Northern found a new job within a few months. But whereas she used to make $60,000, her new salary was half that. She already had dipped into savings to help pay her daughter’s attorney fees.
Now Northern leaves work at 5 p.m. near 32th Street and Camelback Road and drives to pick up Angelina from the babysitter in the West Valley. From there, they stop for dinner and then go to the dance studio where Northern volunteers in the office, helping Angelina’s aunt, who works there. Angelina often falls asleep in the car on the way.
Northern spends about 20 hours a week at the studio, working most evenings until 9:30 p.m. and a chunk of every Saturday. Rocha wishes they spent less time there so Angelina could do her homework at the kitchen table and get to bed earlier. But Northern enjoys the people and the work at the studio and had been doing it before Rocha had gone to prison. She didn’t want to give it up.
So on an evening in midNovember, Angelina sits in a small office off the lobby, eating a turkey sandwich and finishing her homework while her grandmother works on a spreadsheet on the computer.
“I want a hamster,” Angelina announces.
“No, you don’t,” Northern says.
“Diego has a hamster,” Angelina says.
“Good for Diego,” her grandmother says.
The banter is affectionate. Angelina keeps close to her grandmother; when Northern pushes her chair back from the computer, she bumps into the girl.
“Are you my shadow?” Northern asks, smiling and reaching to smooth her granddaughter’s hair.
Angelina nods vigorously. She even sleeps with her grandmother even though she has a room of her own. Experts say it is common; it helps children feel secure.
“Nana snores,” Angelina divulges.
“What are you talking about?” Northern says. “So do you!” And they both laugh. It is almost time for Angelina’s dance class to begin. She takes hip-hop on Wednesdays, tumbling on Fridays and tap on Saturdays. She likes hip-hop the best.
“It is hard work, but it is fun!” Angelina says. Since her mother has been in prison, she has learned to do a cartwheel, and she can do the splits.
*** Angelina will see her mother at prison for one more Sunday visit and one more Girl Scouts meeting before Rocha comes home.
To participate in the Girl Scouts program, the mothers also attend a parenting class once a month that Grimaldo runs in the same classroom in the hour before the girls arrive.
It is then, without their daughters, that the mothers can talk openly about the hard stuff.
At the last troop meeting, when one mom chided her daughter for picking on a younger sibling, the girl retorted, “How do you know? You aren’t there.” The words stung. Grimaldo, a social worker, explains that children express feelings of anger or abandonment that way. They say hurtful things because they are hurting.
Sometimes when Angelina visits, she is moody and contrary but can’t explain why. Rocha wants to help Angelina learn to express her feelings.
The women talk about setting goals — short- and long-term, for while they still are incarcerated and once they get out — and how to break those goals into manageable steps.
To do that, they will have to eliminate two words — “I can’t” — from their vocabularies and from their daughters’ vocabularies, too, Grimaldo tells them.
Angelina says that a lot, Rocha offers.
“What do you tell her?” Grimaldo asks.
“It may be hard, or it may be difficult, but when you say, ‘I can’t,’ you’ve already failed,” Rocha says.
It is an attitude that will help Rocha when she is released, Grimaldo says. Often the transition into regular life is difficult.
“Call me when you get out. We have a lot of work to do,” Grimaldo tells Rocha.
*** Angelina stands on the frame of the open passenger door of her grandmother’s car, swinging one leg back and forth. “I’m excited,” she says. It is Nov. 28, 2012. Her mom is getting out of prison today.
“Why is it long?”
The little girl has been very patient. She has waited for two years, one month, one week and one day, each day crossed off with an X on the kitchen calendar. She’s waited through two birthdays, two Christmas mornings (and the requisite two Christmas Barbies), lost front teeth (top and bottom), two Halloweens and four parentteacher conferences.
“I can’t wait any Angelina says.
Angelina is excited, but a little anxious, too. Her mother keeps saying that things will be different now. Angelina’s not sure if that is a good thing.
But on her last visit to the prison, when it was time
so
to leave, Angelina wrapped herself around her mother’s leg and wouldn’t let go.
“I want you to go with me,” she cried.
Her grandmother suspects it is like waiting for Christmas: The closer it gets, the harder it is to wait.
As for herself, Northern says she won’t actually believe it is real until her daughter is in the car, buckled in, and they drive away.
“I am glad that it is over,” Northern says, gazing up at the tall fence, the double row of barbed wire. The past two years have been long for all of them.
Prison rules say that people picking up released inmates must stay near their cars. Northern and Angelina were allowed to leave a plastic bag, the handles tied in a loose half knot, with the corrections officer at the gate. In it were new clothes that Angelina picked out for her mom to wear home — soft gray pants, a pink flowered blouse and black wedges.
Angelina has dressed up. She’s wearing a purple-and-black leopard-print top and a black flouncy skirt with fuchsia shorts peeking from underneath.
At 8:30 a.m., her mother crosses the yard in prison-issue orange pants and stiff canvas jacket with ADC stenciled on the back and then disappears into a low concrete building. Angelina groans. But then, finally, her mother reappears, dressed in the clothes Angelina picked out, and the huge gate rumbles to one side and stops with a clanging. Rocha walks through, a little hesitantly in wedges after two years of wearing only tennis shoes, and makes a beeline for her daughter.
“Don’t come back, Rocha,” a corrections officers calls as she passes. The recidivism rate for inmates released from ADC in 2008 and tracked over the next three years was 17.9 percent.
“Don’t worry, I won’t,” Rocha says.
Angelina jumps down from the car. And when Rocha is close enough, she sets down the white cardboard box marked with her last name and inmate number. She folds her arms around her daughter, her long hair falling over Angelina like a blanket.
Rocha doesn’t let go, and Northern, smiling, picks up the box and puts it into the trunk of her car.
Rocha looks up at the sky and then back down at Angelina.
“It’s all over, baby,” she tells her. “It’s all over.”
*** Their first stop on the way home is at an IHOP Restaurant for pancakes, or “panicakes,” as Angelina used to call them when she was little. She says the word correctly now.
They sit at a booth, Northern on one side, Angelina and her mom on the other. To celebrate, they order hot chocolate.
Rocha asks if Angelina has decided what color to paint her bedroom, something she promised they would do together when she came home. Rocha can’t wait to meet her sister’s new baby and Angelina’s teacher. She nudges Angelina, who has her legs curled under her: “Sit like a lady, please.”
Angelina complies and draws a tic-tac-toe board on the paper menu.
“Do you know how to play Sudoku?” Rocha asks. Angelina shakes her head. “I love Sudoku. I’ll teach you.”
When their food arrives, they take hands and pray. Then Rocha reaches over to cut Angelina’s waffle.
Angelina takes the knife from her. “I can do it,” she says.
“Oh, a big girl,” Rocha says, raising her eyebrows. “She can do it all by herself now.”
Over the next few months, Rocha will learn a lot about her daughter. She will marvel at how good she is at dance, beaming at the Christmas recital, camcorder in hand.
She will be surprised by Angelina’s creativity when she glues pennies around the border of her school project on Abraham Lincoln.
And she will discover that her daughter needs to be sure of her.
One day Angelina called out to her from another room, panic in her voice.
“I thought you left,” Angelina cried.
“No, baby,” Rocha told her, holding her close. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Rocha turned 39 in February. She will be on parole for three months and then probation for seven more. Because she was in minimum-security prison, she was able to leave every day on a prison bus, still dressed in orange, to an office job as part of a work program. Now she has a permanent job there. She is paying restitution.
After work, Rocha picks up Angelina from the baby-sitter, and then Angelina does her homework while her mom makes dinner. If there is time before bed, they play Clue or watch a movie. Rocha is catching up on the ones she missed: “Brave,” “Dolphin Tale” and “Madagascar” (the third one). Angelina has a list of the ones she wants her to see.
Northern has been spending less time with Angelina now that the girl comes to the dance studio only when she has class. Sometimes when Northern gets home at night, Angelina is already asleep. She misses her little shadow.
*** On a Saturday morning in February, Angelina and her mom cover the carpet in Angelina’s bedroom with plastic and cover the trim with green tape.
Angelina thinks her bedroom is “too baby” now, still decorated with Tinkerbell and Disney princesses. She plans to replace the Jonas Brothers poster she took down with one of Justin Bieber and put up Hello Kitty decals and mirrored peace symbols.
“Angelina, you have more paint on you than on the wall,” Rocha comments, and the girl giggles.
She seems happier, quick to laugh and more lighthearted than she seemed just a couple of months before.
All of her grades are better. In reading, she is up to 101 words per minute from 43 last semester. Her teacher told Rocha, “Mom, just keep doing whatever you’re doing. It’s working.”
Angelina’s behavior is better, too, or at least when she acts up, she knows what to expect. In fact, Angelina says, she picked her own consequences. If she talks back, for example, she has to sit on her bed for an hour.
No more makeup, not even the play stuff. Angelina sticks out her bottom lip. “Not yet,” Rocha says. Rocha knows there will be difficult conversations ahead. Rocha says she will be honest. She will explain that what she did was
wrong, and that she accepted responsibility and took the consequences. She hopes her daughter will respect that and learn from her mistake.
She will tell Angelina, “I don’t want you to go down the same path. I made a stupid decision, and I paid the price for that stupid decision. “I want better for you.” For now, Rocha focuses on what is most important. She has become an integral part of her daughter’s life again and doesn’t have to just imagine things like volunteering in Angelina’s class at school any- more.
“I like when my mom comes to school,” Angelina says. She doesn’t know why, she says, shrugging. She just does.
“She gets to be proud of me,” Rocha says.
Angelina looks at her out of the corner of her eye, smiling, and says, “You’re cool, Mom.” “I cool.” “No, you’re not.” Out for pizza one night, Rocha and Angelina ran into a boy from school who waved and called, “Hi, Angelina’s mom!”
Not Rocha, or Inmate No. 258716. Just Angelina’s mom.