Close Knit: A Heartfelt Look at a Daughter’s Healing and Lifeline to Her Imprisoned Mother

Susan and Michelle in 2024 getting ready for the L.A. Dodgers vs. San Francisco Giants game

From childhood, crochet has connected Michelle Bustamante to the important people in her life — especially her mother.

Michelle was seven when her mom, Susan Bustamante, taught her the art of crochet, creating a series of slip knots, adding another and another and another, until there is a line. Then putting the hook through the knot, the yarn over the hook, again and again. She spent hours alongside her mom painstakingly learning the techniques. Before long, the duo were transforming the stitches into squares and then blankets. Michelle was enamored by the fun of weaving pretty colors, making beautiful things and having her mom at her side.

Michelle didn’t know it then, but the handiwork was teaching her about the sacred act of connection, creation and comforting others, and herself.

A Balm for Body, Mind and Spirit

Michelle also didn’t know that the skill would be her lifeline to survival. In 1987, she was 10-years-old (her sister Jeannette 7) when her mom, Susan, a Latina mother from East L.A., was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. Susan was convicted of helping her brother kill her husband. The court claimed it was for a $50,000 insurance payoff. But Susan tells a different story. She recounts years of beatings, threats, abuse, chokings, humiliation and anguish, in between intense good times and the birth of
two children.

1981, Susan and Michelle with Susan’s little sister, Laurie, and Susan’s mother holding Jeannette

At the time, both Michelle and Susan remember everything in their lives seemed to be falling apart. But perhaps the most agonizing aspect was that the mom and daughter would be separated.

“We (my sister and I) bounced around from houses and sometimes foster homes every couple of years,” says Michelle. “My mom would call us every week and relatives and her friend Renee took us to see her. Sometimes I feel like I grew up in the prison. I learned I really need to take care of myself and chose a path where I wouldn’t become a victim of this. I knew I couldn’t let myself get caught up in the trauma.”

In hindsight, Susan says it was especially challenging to “be a mom behind bars.”

“I feel bad because I know my daughters felt I was abandoning them and that even though we spoke weekly, the focus was on me. I was trying to live in a world of violence where you didn’t know from minute to minute if someone in the prison was going to write you up, or hit you. It was a very scary time and at the time the best I could do was to know my friend Renee was also helping mother my children. I loved them very much but even to this day I feel very sad about how they must have hurt and hurt.”

Today Susan is a re-entry coach for Five Keys Home Free, a transitional housing program that helps women like herself, domestic violence survivors and other women who have experienced trauma reenter communities after being released from prison. As a re-entry coach, Bustamante helps incarcerated survivors prepare for their parole board hearings, hosts domestic violence events at the prisons and supports them on their needs following release.

For Michelle, the absence intensely affected her life both at home and school. Much like the act of busy hands and creating a fabric by organizing in a matrix of loops, Michelle has worked step by step to survive, thrive and push forward to create a full and abundant life.

“I knew I had to do something, to keep pushing forward,” says Michelle, now a mom of three young adult children and two grandchildren. “I became responsible for myself and my younger sister and learned to just hold tight, keep quiet and do what we had to do no matter who was taking care of us. I knew I had a choice to take control of my own life, that my life couldn’t be lived in the shadow of my mom’s circumstances.”

Through high school at Hollywood High, Michelle kept crocheting.

“I didn’t have a big group of friends and spent a lot of time by myself,” she says. “It quieted my mind.” At 18, Michelle gave birth to her first of three children. She started working in the warehouse of a flooring distributor and has worked her way up during the next almost 20 years to her current position for a flooring company.

In 2018, 32 years after Susan was convicted and spent more than three decades in the California Institute for Women, Chino, prison in San Bernardino County, CA, Susan was granted clemency by former California Gov. Jerry Brown.

On the day her mother was released, Michelle, her sister and other family members and her supporters, some from hundreds of miles away, came to celebrate and embrace her, waiting outside the front gate of the prison. Traditionally, in California, paroled lifers are allowed twenty-four hours to report to their parole agent after being picked up by family or friends: time for reunion and reconnection, to purchase new clothes, get a decent meal, or just experience freedom.

Michelle and her family were not allowed that grace period. The transition program to which her mother Susan was assigned had a policy of taking its new charges directly to the parole office and then allowing for a much shorter period of family reunion time later that day. Susan had to report to a near-lockdown facility that restricts cellphone and computer use, limits contact with family and the rest of the outside world.

“That whole day was a fiasco, so awful,” says Michelle.

After six months of living in an overly restrictive halfway house, Susan moved in with Michelle and her partner, Michael.

Fast forward to today, Michelle has created hundreds of cozy, soft blankets and throws. Currently she’s working on five blankets to auction in an upcoming fundraiser for Home Free (April 10, 2025).

As More Mothers Fill Prisons, Inspiring Hope for the Children

Michelle hopes her family’s story will help other children whose parents are imprisoned to know they are not alone.

“I think one thing that is really missing is that the prisons or society or whomever doesn’t do anything to focus on the families of these women,” says Michelle. “What about the kids? What about parenting classes for the moms so that when they get out there will be more focus on the families, instead of just on them and their needs? I know my mom is doing a lot to help the other women, but more needs to be done for the whole family.”

Her family’s story plays out in the lives 190,600 women and girls who are locked up in the United States on any given day. That’s the top-line number from the new report Women’s Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2024, released today by the Prison Policy Initiative.

However, the numbers tell only part of the story: 58% of women in state prisons are parents to minor children, and of those, most are single mothers who were living with their children prior to imprisonment — making it likely that incarceration uprooted their children and led to termination of parental rights, permanently breaking up their families. According to the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit research organization, women are the country’s fastest-growing prison population, and 80 percent of them are mothers. The overwhelming majority were the primary caregivers of their children.

These days Michelle says she and her mom, and her partner Michael have created a new cadence for living. “We all take care of each other. I cook, my mom cleans. We know we are all taken care of.”