How to Love Your Father When He’s in Prison for Child Porn

When my dad was arrested for possessing child pornography, my sisters and I wondered if we’d ever understand, let alone forgive. I couldn’t help but try.

Illustrations by Isaac Kestenbaum

Two days after Christmas, my father pleads guilty to forty charges of possession and distribution of child pornography. The judge who sentences him to five years in prison makes a point of noting that my father is appearing in court alone. This judge, who has never talked to me or my sisters, tells the court that we are ashamed and embarrassed of our father.

Like many things around my father’s arrest and incarceration, we find this out through reading a story in the local newspaper. Sometimes we find these stories ourselves, other times a former neighbor or a high school friend sees them and passes them along.

I do not know how the judge made his guess about those feelings. I do not know what rhetorical purpose that claim served in court, or in a local paper’s story after court. I just know that I wasn’t asked — not by a judge or a lawyer, not by any small-town reporter, not by my father — about how I feel.

I never got to tell the judge that I feel numb a…