Maybe because I know there is a very real possibility that this will be the last one I write for a while.
And there is something incredibly strange about trying to find the right words when you know your entire life is about to change.
How do you write about that?
How do you put a period at the end of a sentence when your whole life feels like an ellipsis?
I don't think you do.
So this isn't a goodbye.
It is simply the chapter before I come home.
For the last several years, so much of my life has been lived between phone calls, prison walls, courtrooms, paperwork, emails, sleepless nights, unanswered questions, hope, anger, faith, frustration, and a love that has somehow continued growing in circumstances that probably should have destroyed it.
When I wrote Prison Wife 101, I wrote from the perspective of a woman learning how to survive loving someone behind the wall.
I wrote about the things nobody tells you.
The loneliness.
The waiting.
The ridiculous systems.
The fifteen-minute phone calls that can somehow become the most important fifteen minutes of your entire day.
The mail.
The lockdowns.
The missed calls.
The tears.
The anger.
The advocacy.
The friendships formed with other women living the same strange life.
And the way loving someone incarcerated slowly changes the person standing on the outside, too.
But Prison Wife 102 is different.
102 was written while the ground underneath my own feet was beginning to shift.
It isn't simply about being Ryan's wife while he is incarcerated anymore.
It is about what happens when the woman who has spent years learning how to navigate prison from the outside suddenly realizes she is about to experience that world from an entirely different side of the wall.
That reality still doesn't feel completely real when I write it.
But it is.
My life is about to change drastically.
My routines will change.
My freedom will change.
My communication with the people I love will change.
The way I wake up in the morning will change.
The way I go to sleep at night will change.
The tiny freedoms most of us never even think about—the ability to pick up a phone, walk outside, make dinner, open the refrigerator, take a shower when I want to, drive somewhere because I feel like it, hug someone I love—will suddenly become things I remember instead of things I automatically do.
I know that.
And I would be lying if I said I wasn't scared.
I am.
There are moments when I feel incredibly strong.
There are moments when I feel completely prepared.
And there are moments when my mind races through every possible version of what is coming and I think, How in the hell am I actually going to do this?
Then I remember something.
I don't have to know how I'm going to survive every single day right now.
I only have to survive the day in front of me.
And when that day comes, I will survive the next one.
And then the next.
That is something prison wives learn very early.
You stop trying to survive years.
You survive Tuesdays.
Then Wednesdays.
Then somehow months have passed.
Then years.
And somehow you're still standing.
The decision that brought me to this point was one of the hardest decisions I have ever had to make.
There are situations in life where people on the outside can look at the options and think the answer should have been obvious.
But sometimes there is no obvious answer.
Sometimes there isn't a “good” choice sitting on the table.
Sometimes you're choosing between outcomes you never wanted in the first place.
And eventually you have to make the decision you believe you can live with.
I made mine.
That doesn't mean I'm not afraid of what comes next.
It means I decided fear wasn't going to be allowed to write the rest of my story.
And neither will anyone else's judgment.
Especially when it comes to my marriage.
I know there are people who will never understand my choice in Ryan.
There are people who will look at our story and see his worst moments.
His mistakes.
His addiction.
His incarceration.
The things that went wrong.
Maybe some people will think I should have walked away a long time ago.
Maybe some already do.
That's okay.
They don't have to understand.
Because they haven't lived our marriage.
They haven't heard the conversations nobody else hears.
They haven't watched the growth I have watched.
They haven't seen the man underneath the inmate number.
They haven't watched two incredibly imperfect people continue choosing one another when choosing one another was anything but easy.
And they certainly haven't walked with God through the places we have.
I have.
And I know this with everything in me:
God has His hands on Ryan.
And God has His hands on me.
And I believe with my whole heart that God has His hands on our marriage.
That doesn't mean I believe God promised us an easy life.
Clearly, if that was the plan, somewhere along the way our GPS made a spectacular wrong turn.
But I have never believed that hardship automatically means God has abandoned you.
Sometimes faith looks beautiful.
Sometimes faith looks like worship music playing while the sun comes through the windows.
And sometimes faith looks like crying so hard you can barely speak and still managing to whisper:
“God, I don't understand this. But I'm still trusting You.”
That's the season I am walking into.
I don't know everything that waits for me on the other side of those doors.
I don't know every challenge Ryan and I will face while we are both living lives neither of us ever imagined.
There are going to be hard days.
Really hard days.
There will be days when one of us is struggling and the other one can't physically be there to fix it.
There will be loneliness.
There will be frustration.
There will probably be tears, misunderstandings, terrible timing, bureaucratic nonsense, missing each other so much it physically hurts, and approximately seventeen thousand occasions when I want to yell at some policy written by somebody who has apparently never met an actual human being.
But there will also be something else.
Us.
Still us.
Ryan is my husband.
He is my person.
My best friend.
My pain in the ass.
My safe place.
My forever.
My always.
And incarceration doesn't get to rewrite that.
Distance doesn't get to rewrite it.
Public opinion doesn't get to rewrite it.
Our past doesn't get to rewrite it.
And the hardest chapter of our lives does not automatically get to become the ending.
I will forever love that man.
Not because I believe he is perfect.
Not because I am blind to his mistakes.
Not because love magically erases consequences.
But because I know his heart.
Because I know who he is beyond the worst pieces of his story.
Because I know who we are together.
And because, after everything, we still choose each other.
That matters to me.
So yes, our marriage is about to enter territory very few marriages ever experience.
We will both be walking through incarceration.
We will both have to grow in ways we probably wouldn't have chosen for ourselves.
We will both have to learn patience.
Grace.
Accountability.
Independence.
Communication.
Faith.
And maybe most importantly, how to love someone without always being able to reach out and touch them.
But I refuse to believe this chapter exists only to break us.
I believe we can allow it to build us.
I believe both of us are going to come through this stronger than we went in.
Not untouched.
Not unchanged.
But stronger.
Wiser.
More grateful.
More intentional.
More connected.
I think there will come a day when Ryan and I sit beside each other somewhere completely ordinary—maybe on a couch, maybe eating dinner, maybe arguing over something completely stupid—and suddenly one of us will look at the other and realize:
We made it.
We actually made it.
Through all of it.
And I cannot even imagine what that moment will feel like.
That brings me to Prison Wife 103.
I've already known that there would be another book.
But I also know something else now.
103 will be written when I come HOME.
Not because there won't be stories worth telling while I'm gone.
Oh, believe me. Knowing me, I could probably collect enough material for fourteen books and a strongly worded appendix.
But 103 deserves perspective.
It deserves the voice of the woman who went through it.
The woman who walked into prison carrying fear, faith, heartbreak, love, and a thousand unanswered questions...
and then walked back out.
I don't know exactly who that woman will be yet.
That's the point.
I haven't met her.
But I know she's waiting for me.
She will know things I don't know today.
She will understand freedom differently.
Marriage differently.
Faith differently.
Friendship differently.
Time differently.
She will know exactly which people stayed.
She will know what mattered.
She will know what didn't.
She will know what prison took from her.
And she will know what prison could never touch.
She will write Prison Wife 103.
And I already know the first thing I want her to say:
I told you I was coming home.
So if this happens to be my last blog before I go, please don't read it as my farewell.
Read it as a bookmark.
The story is not ending here.
Ryan's story isn't over.
My story isn't over.
Our marriage isn't over.
My books aren't over.
My advocacy isn't over.
My faith certainly isn't over.
I'm simply walking into a chapter that I have to live before I can write about it.
And maybe that's what makes this one different from everything I've written before.
For once, I can't skip ahead and see how it ends.
I just have to trust the Author.
And I do.
I believe God is going with me.
I believe He is staying with Ryan.
I believe He is standing in the space between us.
And I believe there is another side to this.
So please pray for us.
Pray for Ryan.
Pray for me.
Pray for our marriage.
Pray that when the days feel impossible, we remember that impossible days still end.
Pray that we both use this time to become the people God is calling us to become.
And pray that someday, when I sit down and open a blank document titled Prison Wife 103, I remember exactly how this moment felt.
Because I want the woman writing that book to reach backward through time and tell the woman writing this blog:
You were right to keep believing.
You both made it.
God never let go.
And you finally came home.
Until then...
This isn't goodbye.
It's just the chapter before I come home.
— DeAnna
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