RachelWeepingforHerChildren

A Few Words from Elsa Newman: by way of Aine

You will notice that I am putting this blog entry into the first person, as though Elsa herself were writing it. The truth is that I wish Elsa herself were writing it. But in prisons there are no computers available to prisoners for such things as this. I do receive letters from Elsa, and I also receive phone calls from her. During said phone calls, I scribble notes as fast as I can go. [I’m thinking seriously of acquiring a phone with a headset…so I could use the computer to take the notes.]

The wommon is a wonder. Here are some of the things she said to me in our most recent conversation—and I use her own words, as clearly  as I can remember them with the help of my notes.

 

There are many things I would like readers to know about me. Probably the first of these is that Aine is making the occasional mistake in what she writes. I can’t blame her too much for that, because this is a complicated case. But I want to call attention to at least two of those errors, because, although some are minor,  some of them are quite important.

·        First, Aine wrote that I insisted that she use my real name. I want to be sure that does not sound prideful on my part. The thought in my mind is that my reputation is sunk anyhow. I hope that some of her blogging may assist in restoring some of that reputation. I want people to know what I am really like, a wommon who loves her children; a wommon who was a good mother; a wommon who continues to be a good mother in any fashion that a prisoner in my situation can—I call my sons on the phone, I email them by dictating my emails to a friend, who then sends them on, I send gifts, I pray for them daily; I am an attorney and I am good at what I do. I hope those of you who read this now will read looking for positive things about me to combat all the negative media hype.

·         Second, Aine seems to have misunderstood the custody question. No court has ever heard the evidence about the sexual abuse of my two sons. Although my sons are with their father, I “share legal custody to this day…I share legal custody and I have paid a great price for that.”

·         Third, let me say a thing or two about that negative media attention I received. Perhaps one example will serve, although there are others; Aine is finding some of them via the google route, and has already written about a few  of them.  I trust she will share more as she reads. The one example I want to offer—in an effort to keep this short--is possibly one of the worst, a quotation from Douglas Gansler of the The Washington Post, “They’ve let out the wommon who wants to kill her kids.” This was his comment when Maryland’s highest court had informed the world that they could find no evidence that I had commited, participated in or conspired to commit any crime of which I was accused. I was released after that trial.

·         And my final comment here seems logically to be  the first thing I ever said to Aine in the first letter I wrote to her: “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for my children.”

 

As I told my kids when I sent this to them, I did the smiles on the pigs (and the nostrils) because no one else knew how.

It's not easy embroidering a smile onto a crocheted circle.

For a while this blog may take a strange and unusual form. As I look through letters Elsa Newman has sent to me and review conversations I've had with her, I am looking for things she has said to me--things that I think she would want to say to anyone who reads this blog and cares about her.

This item is from a letter dated March 19, 2008. The words are simple...and at the same time, I see them as heartrending: "May you never have to place a call from a prison."