Drum roll please

Last night just before getting Caleb into the bath our home phone rang, there are only two reasons this phone rings #1 - telemarketer (ohhh damn you people, I have a passion for HATING telemarketers) or #2- (the only reason we even have a home phone) my cousin is calling from prison. Sure enough the calls starts out like all of his calls do with a recording stating "this call is from an Arkansas correctional facility,it may be recorded or monitored, you have a collect call from...."

Now let me just say that I am a FAMILY girl to the "t"! I will bend over backwards to help family, love family, listen to family or just be a family (well at least for my family that is, my husbands side of the family, not so much HA) None the less this cousin and I have always been close, we grew up together, went to school together,and got into all kinds of hell becoming the adults we are today. Obviously his hell and my hell were a little different. Case in point, he is in prison, I am not!

You see this cousin of mine had a thing for fires, he is your classic pyromaniac. We all knew, thanks to several incidents from his past, that one day this would land him in some very hot water. He's had run ins in the past with the law and always found a way to get out of it (I'm sure his parents spent some mucho $$ to help him and are wishing their hind sight would have been foresight right about now). None the less in '05 his luck ran out, he was charged and convicted of two counts of arson and sent to prison. I was crushed, heart broken, pissed off, sick with worry, and lost at the thought of this skinny kid being in a place with such hardened criminals, I mean after all he is family. I didn't dispute the fact that he needed to be there, he made his bed so he should have to lay in it, right? But for months I was sick to death at the thought of him living in a prison.

Fast forward to about two weeks ago (then you get to skip all of the bad stuff like the fact that he has a little girl whom he hasn't seen in 4 years, his then wife has now divorced him, the fact that his parents turned their back on their own son, the fact that prison helped him kick his drug addiction you know all of the stuff that NO ONE in their right mind wants to ever have to live thru) so where was I... oh yes two weeks ago thanks to time for good behavior his sentence that was supposed to take him thru 2012 had been knocked back Dec. 2009 so he would hopefully be out by Christmas of this year :) Apparently here in Arkansas (maybe all over the US I'm not sure) there is a thing called a One Year EPA (or something like that) where if you have less than a year left to serve coming into the new year the parole board can make the request for you to be released, due to the overcrowding of the prison system in general and as of last night when he called guess who was one of only 8 people in the state to be released :) He should be home by Valentines Day and I could not be more excited for him.

After getting off the phone with him last night my mind stared to wonder though, how do you ever go about returning to the real world? Seriously, I mean how do you walk thru those gates and start your life over again as a free man? Like for instance, he has no drivers license, no job, no house, no relationship with his only child, no money and nothing to call his own. How do you get used to the fact that no one is there to tell you when to eat, what to eat, where to eat, when to shower, when to get up, go to bed, when that's all you have known for so long?

I am sure life as he knew it before will always be nothing but a memory, and this new life he is about to begin will take a lot of time, effort, blood, sweat and tears to put together but you can bet you sweet asses that I will be there to help him in any way I can, because we are family and blood is thicker than anything else in this world!