Sitting tall with her hands resting against her chest, 31-year-old Charnal Chaney takes a deep breath on her yoga mat as the sun comes up over the Anacostia river in Southeast Washington, D.C. in September 2020. Affirmations “I am enough, I am whole” play from a phone speaker, harmonizing with the melodies of birds chirping and distant cars on the highway. Chaney begins most mornings this way, going to the gym and then practicing yoga and meditation before waking up her two eldest children for school. 

This early morning routine isn’t part of a training schedule for an event, but an everyday practice towards healing the trauma that accumulated from her upbringing. Chaney’s first memory of her mother, Lashonia, is visiting her in prison, and it would be 18 years before she would connect with her outside it’s surveilled walls. Today, she’s a yoga instructor for women and children, working to use how her mother’s incarceration shaped her to empower and educate others in Ward 8, a more impoverished area of D.C. with chronically limited mental health resources. 

The Prison Policy Initiative reports that women and girls are the fastest growing segment of the prison population in the United States, disproportionately impacting women of color and growing 834% since 1978, more than double the pace of men. More mothers are being incarcerated than ever before, impacting family structure and child development of people like Chaney. In 2018, there were 9,484 children living in the District of Columbia, an area with one of the highest incarceration rates in the country, who had experienced a parent be incarcerated, according to the National Survey of Children’s Health. 

Chaney was three when her mother was incarcerated. Her grandmother would take her to visit D.C. Jail, where she and her mother could spend time together in designated small rooms. Though she has faint recollection of the details surrounding this early time, she has a strong sense of the feelings she worked to suppress as a little girl: disappointment, heartache, and confusion. Her voice cracks as she works to unravel her memories, noting how her grandmother discouraged her from showcasing these emotions to her mother during visits. 

“One day she was like, ‘Every time you cry like that, or you act like that, it makes your mom sad, she already gotta be in and be away from you. So you can’t act like that. It isn't making it better,’ and, I don't remember crying ever since then,” Chaney recalls.

As Chaney speaks, her lips quiver ever so slightly. She has a tendency to fidget with her hair or her clothing during moments of contemplation with others, yet her sometimes timid nature is immediately interrupted by her wide smile and attentive eyes. Sitting in her apartment, her living room is colored by the presence of her own children: open backpacks resting against a wall in the living room marked with crayon scribbles. It is clear that her past is layered. 

The District of Columbia has no state-based prison system of its own, meaning residents convicted of felonies are sent to federal prisons. After a period of time at D.C. Jail, Chaney’s mom was transferred to a federal prison 300 miles away in Danbury, Connecticut, which she remembers taking seven hours to get to as a little girl. In 2004, The Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C.-based criminal justice research and advocacy center, reported that 84% of parents in a federal correctional facility were housed more than 100 miles from their place of residence at arrest, making visits difficult and expensive. 

Chaney’s visits with her mom became less frequent after her transfer, but from the ages of 9-13, communication was cut off completely. No phone calls, no visits, no interaction whatsoever. It wasn’t the distance that caused the rift, but her father, who had recently come home after a short time being incarcerated. He felt her mother’s sentiments were shallow and insincere, and that their correspondence had a negative influence on Chaney. 

At the height of this, Chaney remembers her mom making attempts to communicate that she was thinking of her, that she wasn’t forgotten about. She would try calling the school to talk with her, at times sending women she was locked up with that had reentered society to go try to take Chaney’s picture there. 

When Chaney was 13, a judge granted her mother access to see her. It was at this time that Chaney learned from her father what she was incarcerated for: double murder. Around 11:30pm on a night in 1993, a split-second altercation ended in the shooting of two women in front of a dental office in Southeast Washington D.C.. 

Though communication resumed, it would not repair the broken identity Chaney was developing in her pre-teen years as she grew into a slender athletic figure, with high cheekbones and a fiery spirit that increasingly mirrored her mother’s. “They would say, ‘Oh, you're just like your mother, or you're gonna wind up just like your mother,’ she said of the resemblance. “So trying to live up to what I thought she was, the life that she was living or who she was or trying to be, I think it definitely made me not be able to see myself as me,” Chaney said.

Chaney would go on to attend 11 different schools, moving around between family members as a result of an abusive stepmother and bad behavior in schools. While the vast majority of children of male prisoners are living with their mothers, The Sentencing Project reports that only about a third of the children of incarcerated women are living with their fathers, often falling under the care of grandparents and other relatives.

“I feel like over the years, anytime something happened, it was just like, ‘If my mother was here, this wouldn't be happening.’ Or, ‘I can't wait til my mother come home and I would have somebody that genuinely love and care for me.’”

Following her 16th birthday, Chaney was in Richmond, Virginia, staying with a childhood friend to finish high school in a different environment. By the end of the semester, she was pregnant. Aware that the odds were stacked against her, she didn’t want to be another statistic. In June of 2008, Chaney graduated high school, just five months after giving birth to Amijah, her first child.

“I didn't want no kids. But then when I did get pregnant with my daughter, I think I just wanted somebody to love me unconditionally,” Chaney said. “So yeah. I was like, I'm going to keep my daughter.”

She would go on to have four more children: Aaliyah, twins Blake and Bryce, and Malakai.

During her time in Richmond, Chaney met Keiara Debra, growing close through a mutual friend. “I think when we met, it was like our childhoods clicked in some type of way,” Debra, 31, says of the time. “We was able to find the love that we needed.”

Years later, the two women sit comfortably spaced out on a brown suede couch in Debra’s home in Richmond. Through interspersed laughter and reflective pauses, they exchange memories from their teenage years.

Debra described the parallels in their trauma that ultimately strengthened their relationship. Chaney’s mom took someone else’s life, and as a result, that action stripped her of 18 years of life alongside her mother. Debra’s father was killed when she was eight-years-old, an act that stripped her of a life with him. The two of them had both experienced loss of a relationship with a parent, found solace in each other, and helped each other grow.

While Chaney’s self-awareness grew through relationships with others like Debra, her trauma didn’t fully manifest until her mom was released from prison in December 2011. Chaney was 21 at the time and still living in Richmond. 

After the initial excitement of reconnecting, it became clear to Chaney that she and her mom wouldn’t automatically become best friends as she envisioned they would.

“One day I was just going through something and I called her and she didn't answer the phone. And I texted her and I was just like, ‘I don't understand, like how could this be you that you just not showing up, like making me start to think that I hate you. Like all these years you made it seem like you was writing them letters like you're going to be this certain type of mother, but you're not even not even showing up,’” Chaney said of a time within the first few years of her mom coming home. “She responded and was like, ‘How long are you going to hold me hostage to my past?’” 

Chiara Shelton, a high school friend of Chaney, believes that the expectations Chaney placed on her mother when she first came out after 18 years apart limited the initial growth of their relationship. “Not only is she coming home to be a mother, but she's also coming home to be a grandmother and also trying to be in a relationship with her significant other and get herself back on her feet,” Shelton said of the time.

In 2016, The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that roughly 81,000 women are released from state prisons nationwide each year. The health systems in prisons, designed for men, frequently fail to meet the needs of women. On top of a lack of support in prisons, there is a lack in widespread services for women upon their release. On the Federal Bureau of Prisons website, the re-entry resources listed only address employment assistance and veteran assistance.

Chaney’s suppression of her emotions as a child continued to be a source of pain through moments when her mother wasn’t able to fully be there for her after her release. “It was creating a disconnect within myself, and it was hard for me to connect with my own children. It was hard for me to want to be a mother and show up for my own children because she wasn't being a mother and showing up for me.”

Ashley McSwain, Executive Director of Community Family Life Services, advocates that the immediate days following a woman’s release are the most critical. Formed in 1969, Community Family Life Services (CFLS) specializes in providing services to support women overcoming the challenges of transitioning home to the D.C. area after a period of incarceration. “Often women who do not have stable housing or a supportive network upon their release, return to tenuous situations that lead back to abuse or cause recidivism,” McSwain said in a 2020 Cision PRWeb press release. 

44-year-old G. King, a mother of four who was incarcerated for nine years, experienced challenges after staying with her youngest daughter upon her release. “Everybody had a responsibility for me without allowing me to get myself together,” King said. Before taking on her current job as a government contractor, she turned to selling water bottles on the street. 

In a first floor apartment in D.C., family photographs fill the oatmeal-colored wall above King’s kitchen table. On the other side of the room, four certificates for “Leadership in Church Ministries” hang framed together in a grid. 

When King was incarcerated in 2009, her daughters, then in their pre-teens, were split up. King’s mother raised her youngest, while her oldest daughter lived with their father, resulting in different upbringings and values within her children. 

“The relationship was as weird as it may sound,” King said, explaining how it was easy in the beginning when her daughters were small and she was able to call, write, and receive their pictures from school. “That was beautiful until they became teenagers and boys became a factor and social media got out and cell phones. They didn't have time. So of course I was hurt. Visits were less. My mom was making excuses of why they couldn't come.”

King channeled her maternal worry into staying busy, exhausting herself from the time she got up to when she went to sleep in her prison cell. She referred to herself as the “24-hour laundry person” for her use of it as a distraction. Other time was spent participating in a four-year bible institute, writing a book, and preparing for release. 

As she reflects, sitting back into a plump brown couch in her apartment, King pauses and lets out a small laugh, revealing the dimples in her cheeks. “This is going to sound like the craziest thing you’ve ever heard, but I promise you it's true.” 

King goes on to detail her connection to a vinyl composition book she found while in prison that she wound up calling her “Go Home” book. Flipping through the floppy black artifact of her nine year incarceration, she reveals the books' thin pages, filled with email addresses, names, companies, street addresses, and checklists she made for herself in preparation of seeking employment and stability upon release. 

While this focusing kept her busy, it did not mitigate the emotional toll of being away from her family. 

“I missed Woo's graduation. She was my baby, so that bothered me. I missed the birth of all of my grandchildren, all seven of them. I missed my son getting married. My grandmother who raised me passed, so I missed my mother's mother passing. I just missed so much, so much, so much,” King said.  

Pausing, she looks up at the ceiling, using her hands to catch the tears that have fallen to the edges of her face. 

As she continues, she explains her vivid recollection of the day she found out about her grandmother’s passing, the woman who raised her because her own mom was an addict for 24 years. Calling home in the middle of a school day, King was confused when her youngest daughter answered the phone. 

“She put my mom on the phone and I just remember screaming and sliding down the wall,” King said.

Rudera, an older inmate who at the time had been incarcerated for almost 30 years, ran into her cell that night after recognizing the distinct agonizing screams that accompany losing a mother figure. A complete stranger at the time, she continued to show up for King, accompanying her in spaces where the women would congregate. As they grew closer, King wound up calling her “mom”. 

In December 2017, King was released from Maryland Correctional Institution for Women. Her “Go Home” composition journal became an asset on the outside to build professional rapport; however, the transition was difficult for her mental health and her relationships, a sentiment common among women experiencing re-entry. In time, King recognized that she wouldn’t be able to show up for everyone else until she first showed up for herself, a lesson she also took from her mother’s life as an addict and one that informed her book “Get Yourself Together First” that she wrote in prison. 

King, who in addition to her government job is an author and speaker, turned to miming as an avenue for emotional release both during and after her incarceration. “I would stay in my room all day, figuring out moves,” King said of her discovery of the art form in prison. “I found it was a tool to find songs and display, whether it was my pain or how I felt, and get that out.”

After miming for a few years, the chaplain asked King if she wanted to start her own ministry in the prison, and she began teaching other incarcerated women to mime. Now, King uses miming at her church in Washington D.C. as a tool for ministry in her congregation.

Similarly to King and to her own mother, Chaney turned to the physical as a means to heal and process emotions, especially when panic attacks and suicidal thoughts flooded her life after her twins were born. “It was dropping in my spirit for me to meditate, but I had never even heard nobody say they had meditated before,” Chaney said. 

When her mother Lashonia helped start a nonprofit, Women Involved in Reentry Efforts (The WIRE), and was applying for a grant to get an arts program, Chaney suggested they include meditation, an action that prompted her to complete her own yoga training. 

“For me, yoga is a moving meditation,” Chaney said. “It gets the emotion through your body, it heals. And when you've been through a lot of trauma, you got to heal that to get it off your aura.”

Chaney started practicing yoga with her kids and family, but in the past year has also opened up classes to the public. This fall, she offered a six week yoga session for women she referred to as “Wealthy Women Wednesdays”, and for children she called “BOLD Yoga”, representing the affirmations “Beautiful-Original-Loving-Daring” she wants youth to embody. At the end of November, she started a four week postpartum session for moms and their newborns. 

“We connected to our kids in more ways than others. You know, it's not just all about physically, always showing up. Sometimes it's about what you do. The work you're doing with yourself can still impact your children as well,” Chaney said. 

In separate spaces of Washington, D.C., Charnal Chaney and G. King take a deep breath before transitioning into a movement. King, who uses silenced expression to move through lyrics of a song and speak to her audience, and Chaney, who uses her own voice to guide women and children through mindful movements on a mat. Two women, who experienced the mother-daughter relationship interrupted at the hands of the state, now working to pour back into their communities.