As I stretched out on that sucker again, my mother came into my mind. She died broken hearted in a small apartment that she could barely afford on her Social Security. Father went on to marry woman after woman and used the law degree that mother helped him earn on other wives and their children. After my father left her, she pretty much went back to her home state of Virginia to die near the graves of her entire support system.

How on Earth could anyone allow a death like that to happen? Yet there really wasn't anything else that could be done, mother had resigned herself to her fate, refused help and smiled as much as she could. Only now do I fully appreciate all that she smiled through. Her cancer took her and she let it. She had the perfect opportunity, a 3-6 month death sentence from lung cancer. All she would have had to have done was to walk right up to the bastard who left her to die like that and shoot him in the face. Who would have blamed her?

If stealing a life is a crime, then stealing one back is the penalty.

My husband stole not only my life but he even stole my mother's death from me. I wanted to be near her yet he needed me here. He never told me that I could leave to care for my mother and he never made me feel as though I could leave without coming home to court ordered child support from some piece of trash that he found on the side of the road.

And yes, I blame myself. I take complete responsibility for every single thing that I ever did. It's all on me. But that doesn't make it one bit easier to carry around. The death of that sonofabitch did just that...I must say.

My grandmother was lucky, I guess. She died before her husband ever had a chance to leave her. Of course, not before he cheated on her. I learned that as an adult. You just don't think of grandfathers whoring around town but hell, my husband was somebodies grandfather.

My mind was swimming in thoughts that wouldn't leave me alone but I never really tried to stop them. It was like a huge mathematical problem and I felt as though if I kept on looking, I would figure out the answer and see what I had done wrong. Then my head would say, "YOU did nothing wrong!" It's just that type of thinking that got me where I am today.

At one point a lady guard slid a tray into my cell but I left it on the shelf. I didn't even want to look at it because I really doubted my ability to refrain from retching after so much as one glimpse of the culinary torture du jour.

I was so focused on my own personal nightmare that I didn't notice that the guard was still standing near my cell quite a while after she dropped off the food. I smiled at her and she smiled back. Then she let a tear escape down her left cheek and she whispered to me, "My husband is cheating on me too."

I looked up to see if there was a camera pointing at me. There probably was but it didn't matter, that lady guard walked away and I put my head back down without saying a word to her.

Eventually I was taken back to jail and back to my fellow violent offenders. They all seemed to know more about what was happening to me than I knew myself. Apparently I would be going in front of the judge again the following day for a bail hearing.

The girls all wanted to talk about what had gone on in court but there wasn't anything to tell them. "I sat in a cage all day." That was pretty much the truth. A bunch of them nodded as though they had spent their own time in holding cells.

Anna Nicole asked me if I met my attorney yet. I didn't know what she was talking about. She pulled out the morning paper and showed me a blurb about some famous attorney who was speaking out on my behalf. The picture of her was taken in front of the courthouse that I had just come from. She was in this town...for me?

Julie and Claudia, the lesbian couple, grabbed my arm and started singing Leaving on a Jet Plane as they almost skipped around the pod. I couldn't do anything else. I skipped sang along with them, "I'm standing here outside your door, I hate to wake you up to say good-bye..."

After what had to be a couple of hours, we gave up the skipping and sat down at a table. Julie pulled out some M&M's and said, "Let's see how Jean cleans up!"

Five of my cellmates came over and helped Julie "pretty" me up, jail style. What an amazingly resourceful group of women! They used the candy coating of the M&M's to color my lips, cheeks and eyelids. Then, with some sort of jail type mascara wand, they applied ink to my eyelashes. I was really quite fetching in my jail make up alone. But, when the sisters came over and did my hair, I couldn't have been more pleased.

"All dressed up and nowhere to go!", I said to the ladies standing around me.

Someone made a lesbian joke and then one of the sisters, Margaret, shouted out, "That woman is strictly dickly!" I laughed so hard than my laughter turned into tears. I couldn't make them stop so I walked over to my cot and curled up in a ball until the emotional wave that had gotten the best of me had passed.

When I finally had the composure to look up and face my pod mates, I did so. To a woman they all cracked up as if on cue.

From my left I heard someone say, "The M&M's will be gone by tomorrow, but that blue ink isn't going away any time soon."

Margaret snapped, "Girl, you ain't supposed to CRY when people put ink on your face!"

Those women helped me more than they would ever know. For a group of women in jail accused of violent crimes, what a lovely group of people they were! Melissa was to become my best friend while I was locked up. She was facing over 20 years probation for an assortment of crimes. She looked like a child to me. She was about 22 years old and as smart as any woman that I've ever met.

Unfortunately, her entrepreneurial skills were directed toward criminal enterprises such as prostitution and drugs. Except for her last arrest, assaulting a john who she claims was trying to rape her, you could almost be impressed at all she had accomplished in her young career as a madame. But every single night she sang us all to sleep with Christian music with a lovely voice.

That night was no different. I literally fell asleep listening to her singing Amazing Grace. My mother loved that song.