Holding down a man in jail is a choice plenty of women make out of love. But at some point, every one of them has to ask whether it’s loyalty or something else.
I was watching an episode of Mob Wives yesterday. Before you ask, no, I don’t know why I was watching it, but something stuck with me. A lot of these women are married to men doing time, and even though their lives are harder because of it, they stay.
I’ve been there. I fell in love with a man who seemed to spend more time in a jail cell than at home. If he made it 30 days without getting locked up, we treated it like an accomplishment.
Month after month, my money went to bail bondsmen, commissary and collect calls. It got to the point where I couldn’t pay my own bills because I was taking care of another grown man.
Then I got fed up. Love wasn’t worth it anymore. Why was I doing so much for a man who kept putting himself behind bars? I didn’t commit the crimes, and I never asked him to commit any for me. His life was in the streets, so why had I made it my life to be there for him? The weekly prison visits weren’t worth it.
Why do we do it? I can only speak for myself, and for me, it was guilt. Honestly, I was over the whole situation long before I actually left. I stayed because I felt that leaving would mean letting him down when the rest of the world had already turned its back on him. I felt like I was all he had.
There’s a fine line between loyalty and what I was doing, and I had gone way past loyal. Loyal is writing letters and telling him you’ll be there when he gets out. I had let him become a financial burden, and when it started taking away from my child, I had to stop.
That’s why Mob Wives had me shaking my head. Some of these women are raising two, three or four kids while standing behind men who practically live in jail. One of them doesn’t even know when her husband is getting out, because he refuses to tell her. On top of that, he called her and cussed her out, calling her names no man should ever call the woman holding down the fort for him. From the looks of it, she’s staying anyway.
Some people say there’s no obligation to stand by a man in jail, so just leave. Others say it isn’t right to walk away while he’s locked up, and you should at least wait until he’s home to end it.
Here’s where I landed. Loyalty is a gift, not a debt. Writing letters, taking calls and being there when he comes home are things you choose to give. When holding him down starts costing you your peace, your bills or your children’s needs, you don’t owe him anything else.
