Love Unbroken

00:00:04 Speaker 1: Comeback Stories is a production of Inflection Network and iHeartRadio. Okay, welcome back everybody. We're here for another episode of Comeback Stories. And today we are here with Sybil Fox and Rob Richardson known as Fox and Rob, who are a New Orleans couple whose marriage survived despite years of incarceration. So their story was profiled in a documentary called Time, and then their book is called Time, The Untold Story of Love that held Us together when incarceration kept us apart. Welcome to the show, Fox and Rob. Oh, thank you so much for joining us. What a title, Comeback Stories. Hey, we all have one and we all love one. And I think we're about to hear another epic comeback story from the both of you. Dan, I don't know if we had a guest a duo ever before no I was going to bring up this is the first time we've ever had a duo. But I feel like as we dive deep in, we'll see how you know, just through you guys's love and the endurance of that love, how you guys are one. So it's really like we're interviewing one person, but we received that one. Derek. Could you guys start and maybe just give us a little background how or of the two of you, and then how the two of you became one. Oh wow, I guess it will take us all the way back toneen ninety, nineteen eighty seven. Where we met is a high school sweethearts through a mutual friend of ours. Now depends on which one of us you ask this particular question as far as the answer that you get, because there's my version as to how we met, and then of course there's Fox's version as to how it is right the truth none is care so, so I'm gonna give my my version. But the version that that I hold to is Uh that Fox and I met while she had a girlfriend of hers, Uh was shooting hooky from school one day we were taking a mental health day. And that's her story. She's sticking to it. And uh on say on said mental health day. Uh. The mutual friend that we shared needed a ride home and knew that I was home visiting from arow from the from the military all leave went by to offer them a ride. Fox answered the door. Uh. From the moment she answered the door, something came over me that I think some people may uh call the keen to our love at first sight, So it was gonna take maybe the rest of the day in order for me to actually figure that part out and whether or not she had UH had me had me smitten in UH in such a way crazy enough, I ended up inviting my friend over. He came over with us, and then UH, long story short, he tried calling Fox later to no avail. And later on that night, I came back home realizing that I hadn't used the phone since the last time that a friend of mine made the phone called the Fox, and we had an old service that used to be in place back there called Start sixty nine, So I didn't Start sixty nine and then went right back to Fox's number, to which I started talking to him and she immediately stopped me and she says, wait a minute, She said, I thought that you were wonder as a man. Wanda is the mutual friend that I mentioned at the onset? Well, I said, well, no one and I just friends. She said, well, that's not what she told me. And I took the advantage of yet another service we used to have, called three Way. I said, well, won't we called all three way? That way we can hash all of this out. So she ended up calling it on three way, and probably about a few minutes into the into the conversation, I saw it in Wanda was continuously misrepresenting our relationships. So I cut in and I said, well, dam how do we get to this point? You know? Of course she was busted in the moment she conceded, and to say to say the least, there after Fox and I stayed home. I was at little was at that point, you know. But that was what nineteen eighty seven, And here we are, thirty six years later, twenty six years in matrimony, six sons that we have raised together after having served twenty one years as a formerly incarcerated couple in Louisiana before we received clemency from our governor in twenty and eighteen, and actually the only family in the state of Louisiana that received clemency out of over two thousand applicants in twenty and eighteen. So if that's not a comeback story for you, I just don't know what he is. So to answer your question, Darren, it was at that moment, after spending twenty one years separated and apart from one another, that Fox and Rob were born. It was a constant reminder to us to never do anything to our create that level of separation between us again. Hits. We spell our names as one Fox, A N D. Rob God like Paul to us all they all saw to Paul, it was a transformation moment for us, you know, you know, coming from you talk about not wanting to create that separation ever again. And I feel like it's important to highlight how that separation came about because I feel like there are certain people in America that may see as somebody that may have committed a crime, and it's like, you know, they don't know the story behind it, they don't know the human experience behind it. Could you enlighten us on what may have led you to do what you had to do, Like, what was your human experience and your story that led you up to feel like that was a decision that you had to make just for your own life. Well, I think one I have to say thank you for explaining it is such. It was a human experience and as long as we keep living, we're going to have just those human experiences is what makes us human. And for us, after the six months of being married, Rob and I had launched our first business, had finally put our family together after ten years of dating off and own again, and in the midst of launching our first business, our investor pulled out on us without without any type of answers as to why or what changed or any of that. And we panicked between the investor pulling out on us the new home we had purchased as our first family home, we discovered it had a crack foundation and a bad leak in the roof, with the whole thicken edition of the house was faulty. Uh. In the midst of that, if that wasn't enough, the department that I was teaching in full time ended the division in which I was teaching, so I lost my job. And if that wasn't enough, our youngest son started having seizures that they couldn't diagnose, landing us with a ton of medical bills. And so, if there is a place in the life that is called the end of your rope, we found ourselves there in nineteen ninety seven. And when you're at the end of your rope, I think one of those things that holds us grounded is our moral compass. And depending on how far you go down that rabbit hole or how dark you allow things to get for you, Darren and Donnie, it depends on the decisions that you make at your lowest points. I've heard it said that circumstances don't reveal the man a woman, don't make the man a woman, They reveal them to themselves. And so in that moment, with our faith being tested, our moral compass got off and we figured if we couldn't get it the right way, we would succeed at any by any means necessary. And it was that mentality of what we call the American dream syndrome, when you're willing to do whatever you got to do to succeed or to obtain the American dream. It took over us and landed us to making a decision that we would end up regretting for the rest of our lives. So, in nineteen ninety seven would facebook financial challenges to spill it all out for you. We tried to regain financial solvency by taking money from a credit union. I've heard you use the quote desperate people do desperate things, and I could relate so much to that, and Darren and ize our backgrounds come from addiction and we're currently in recovery. And when I heard that quote from you Fox, it just made me think about all of the desperate things that I did in the depths of my addiction, and in so many cases just really didn't get caught, or if I did get caught, the consequences it just it's looked it looked different. But I can relate so much because at my rock bottom, I mean, the decisions that I was making were out of complete desperation and they were not wise decisions at all. But I think that's where the power lies, isn't it. I Mean, when we hit rock bottom, like Rob and I have a quote where we say one thing about rock bottom is once you reach it is nowhere to go from the butt up. I mean, you know, like Donnie said, as being a former addict and talking about that human experience, I always try to let people know and inform them that I didn't just want to become a drug addict just because I wanted to run my life into the ground, or I wanted to make poor decisions, or I wanted to have this be my legacy. I was just somebody that wanted to change my circumstance, wanted to change how I was feeling, and ultimately those small decisions lead to a place where yeah, your moral compass is off. But at the end of the day, it's about trying to get people to see people like us as people and not as our mess because our mess may be where we're currently at, but that's not who we ultimately are. And let's try. That's a message that we have to keep pushing because it's so easy to just stereotype somebody or you see something go across the TV and be like, oh man, what was he doing, Like he's tripping, Like why would he make that decision? But it's way more uncomfortable to get into sit down with that person, sit across from them, talk to them, get to know them, and see like, hey, we all people that are really just trying to you know, that's right, avoid our fear, get over our fears, you know, step into a life that we want to live and provide and protect and all these things. We all have the same goals and we all have the same heart posture at the end of the day if we can allow ourselves to get there. I like that heart posture so true. So can you walk us through what the sentence scene was, what the criminal system looked like back then? And then what came up for the both of you as you were faced with that sentence. I think it's important to know for people that are listening in that the time that I was sentenced was nineteen ninety seven, and this was just at the point that the Clinton Crime Bill that kicked in. At that moment, the Clinton Crime Bill created a thing called Truth and Sentencing that required states who received federal funding from the federal government to sentence people are convicted of crimes to serve out. Eighty five percent of the Senates that had been handed handed doubt as a result of those moneys that states had taken for you know, people are committing crimes. With that being said, I've received, as a first offender a sixty year sentence, my nephew received a forty five year sentence, and my wife to seven year sentences and a five year sentence, you know, all as first offenders in a crime that no one received. No one died from the crime, no one was hurt physically hurt from the crime in any and by no stretch of the imagination do I b rate the trauma that takes place when someone takes something of value from you, whether by note, by firearm or whatever it may be. Uh, the fact still remains is that it's a traumatic moment for you. But what was equally as traumatic for us on the other side of that was the the heavy sanctions that had been handed out to us, especially when he kind of looked out over the landscape as far as what the national average was for people committing similar acts, as well as a parish average for the parish where the where the crimes themselves were committed. Uh So, these sentences were really outside of the social norms for what had been happening, both in the nation as well as in the in the parish that had happened there. Uh So to say that we were bewildered, uh that we were flabbergacied. We were floored. Man we uh we we I thought for sure that maybe he was reading from someone else's sentencing transcript uh in our particular matter. But it wasn't until we got the paperwork ourselves and we realized that, okay, there was no mistake made here. This was just flat out injustice, you know, at a whole other level. So all probably their end began began our fight of coour. So Fox, I like to know when at what point did it go from Okay, like this is unacceptable, this needs to change, to you wanting to step in and be like, okay, like I'm gonna do something about this, or I'm gonna do my part in seeing change come about. Probably the first night I went to prison. It was one thing to be housed in the in the jail in the parish, but when I actually was remanded to the Department of Justice for me, it was in that moment of seeing how they were, how we're housing human beings, and how it was that man just the deplorable conditions that they had US citizens living in state side, not in a third world country, and the treatment of those human beings. And I honestly thought that as an American citizen, when we were casting our citizens into incarceration, that we were doing so to rehabilitate them and make them come out better citizens like they do in other industrialized nations. But I did not realize how in entrench slavery still is currently in the United States, and that our prison system is a slave system by a new name. And so my prayer when I got to prison was Lord, just let me use my voice for the voiceless that are here. I had a master's degree by the time I went to prison, and what I learned while I was there was I met the first adult in my life that could not read or write. And not was it just one, it was many of them striving to get just a literacy education in jail, in prison, less and lonely, a ged while they were incarcerated. And so I understood that I had a responsibility, that maybe it wasn't just my action or me losing my moral compass that got me here, but that I could use this for the greater good of mankind and take my transgressions and transform them to really become a voice for the voiceless Darren, because we've all got a calling. And sometimes we can let our downfalls in life be our kid falls and we stay there, or we can let them be our springboards for the work that was supposed to do in this life. And that's what Rob and I and our entire family, our six sons, they bought in as well, to understand that this system had done an injustice to our family. Certainly we deserved to be chastised for our transgressions, but we did not deserve the treatment that our state sanctioned against us. And sometimes when these systems don't do right by the people it represents, it is the people's responsibility. It is our duty to address the system. It is our duty to fight for our freedom, brother dere, it is our duty to win. And so we set out to win. We set out to show them that you do this to me. Then, as I say in Time movie, if you haven't seen it, check it out on Amazon Prime. Nominated for an Oscar in twenty twenty one, the most honored documentary of twenty twenty and that is I say, success is the best revenge. How do we get back in a system that was intentional about destroying us and our family? We succeed anyway. Rob, I've heard you say. So you're faced with this sentence and you say, if I'm going to get through this, I'm going to have to use some of those core principles that you know to be true. What were those core principles for you that you had to put into practice when you were incarcerated. Probably some of the ones that stand out most was from a from my uncle. Uh yeah, given me some some rules to live by when I first went off to prison. And those rules are basically consistent of For one, I knew that I had to I had to stand like a man. Uh. I knew that I had to speak truth to uh to falsehood. And I knew that if I was ever going to get through this, I knew that in order for me to get through it, I had to come into it with an attitude that I would never give up, that I would not allow uh defeat UH to be to be the end uh the end result of my fight. UH. So it means that I had to fight tooth and nail. And so with that being said, I started, you know, redirecting my energy. Uh. I started redirecting my thoughts. Uh. I started learning how to read the law because you know, one of the things that you realize is that when you're in a fight, no was gonna fight as hard for you as you're willing to fight for yourself. Uh. And with that being said, I knew that it wasn't necessarily gonna be a lawyer that was gonna get me out, because at the end of the day, lawyers go home and they go to soccer meetings and pta meetings with their kids, and they hang out with their wives and their friends. You know, between work hours and those things. And I'm not on their mind me or none of their other clients. But for me, uh and our family, you know, we breathe, we sleep out, we we ate, we walked, we talked law all day long. And it wasn't until I started practicing law or learning law on my own that I even started to see breakthroughs in my case. And that was after countless lawyers and and uh and oh man, thousands to my tens of thousands of dollars that had been spent, All lawyers that you know, that had no clue as to how it is that they were going to get me out. Uh, let alone the fol of representation, you know, like cars and like medicine and those kinds of things. You come to find out that there are people that are specialized. People that know how to work on engines, don't necessarily know how to work on breaks. Those work on breaks don't necessarily know how to work Transition doctors all don't work on brains. They are not all heart surgeons, you know, and some of them are just general practitioners. Well, in a lot of this, I realized that a lot of lawyers, you know, when you talk about your pre trial lawyers. Most of them are general practitioners of the field. They do a lot of deal cutting and that kind of stuff that happens on the front end of sentencings. But what I was in need of was a special was a specialist, and specialists in this particular field are hard to find. When you start studying case law on those things, you start realizing that the specialists is the person that's locked up. You know, you think about precedents and laws that change, that change the momentum or the direction of where we go in terms of how the pendulum of justice swings. It doesn't happen as a result out of an argument that took place that some fancy lawyer made inside of the court system. It happens from some jail house attorney that set up in the wee hours of the night on the poor lighting, that read between the lines where the right was not necessarily written in order to you know, carve out an argument for fundamental justice and uh, and they prevailed on those matters, and as a result, we get a change, or we get to a bend at our laws that you know, kind of move us in a different direction. And that didn't start happening for me and my family until I started to take responsibility for the situation that I had put myself in through my own choices. For real, No, for real, man, I think it's beautiful that what I got from you is around perspective, like as opposed to Okay, yes, I've been dealt a pretty shitty hand, but I'm going to be an active participant in the solution here. I'm going to educate myself. I'm gonna teach myself. I'm gonna be a part of this to the point where as you do that, the type of energy, the type of you know, miracles that you're attracting to yourself in that process is a powerful thing. And I want to know something because you you guys fighting, you guys trying to educate yourself. A lot of people would want to have that breakthrough or that change happened overnight, whereas you were in prison for twenty one years. So it's like, what what do you think looking back like with something that you can take from that time of like I wish this fight could end earlier, but still having gone through it, is there anything that's like a valuable type of lesson that comes from that from having to wait, and you know, like in just living in this instagratification world, is there anything we can take from that? And you guys's perspectives, I think for me and I'm gonna ride finish it because this brother here is one of the most patient people I've ever met in my life. When you talk about the patience of Joe, this brother studying our evens in prison and the race of job God gave him. But for me, it was about eating the elephant, onebity at a time, knowing that as long as I get up every day and I'm biting into this elephant dog one, It's gonna be devoured. It has. The second thing for me was about counting all my wins. Very often, when the victory didn't come out the way we wanted to, We'll just skip over all the other smaller wins, all the wins that we need to get us. You know, It's like I don't watch a lot of football, but my family does. Well. You know how they move the gold line and then you get to the next goal. It's like the first down and the second bat and the third down, and you keep going down, you're gonna get a touchdown, right, So that's what the small winds are. To me, it's like the first down, and you know, so I chill the first down. You know. Some people are like, oh, it was just the first down. I'm like, no, baby, it was a first down. You know. So all the wins, every man, and not just the super Bowl, but it takes all those other wins to get to the super Bowl. And then for me, probably the last thing is that live at the moment. You know. It was at one point on our journey, I was so busy living for the day that Rob was gonna come home that I realized, Johnny, I wasn't living at all. I didn't even have my children living. Everything we did was we talked about the future. When your daddy comes home. We're gonna do this. When your daddy comes home, we're gonna like, it's gonna be great. But I said, had to come to TIMS, probably after we had done ten years. I had to come to TIMS with the fact that I'm not guaranteed to see when he comes home. Truth Enough, I'm working toward it. Truthfully, I believe that it's coming, But honestly, I don't know when God is gonna decide that it's my last day here or his last day here, and so I can't just live for when he comes home. We have to live in the now. And so if we are an incarcerated family, yeah, we know how great we're gonna be when we are free family. Well, right now out will one hellified, strong, incarcerated family. That's what we are, and we're gonna celebrate that, and we're gonna live in this moment and enjoy our visits. Darren. I got to say, Man, I'm loving how you've really made yourself at home in the big city. I'm curious, how are you getting around? You a subway guy, cab uber. I'm glad you asked, Donni. Man, I'm at the honor to partner with All American Forward over in New Jersey. They've been taking really good care of me since I got out here, and that's why I love the most about it. Man. They treat me like I'm family, not just a customer trying to get a deal or just a statistic. You know, they give me great service. You can tell they got to commitment to quality. The innovation is unmatched. And just so if anybody's you know, like me, trying to get around in New Jersey, don't know where to go. I'm telling you go check out All American Forward here in Jersey. They're gonna take real good care of you. When we come back, you'll hear more of this inspiring comeback story. There's so many, so many powerful principles that they're and I talk about. I mean, you both are rattling them off of Rob. You had talked about redirecting your energy and redirecting your thoughts, and that's as a mindfulness teacher, meditation teacher. I mean, this is the essence of what we do right to Everything is energy. Where our tension goes, energy flows, And as you were saying, Fox, it's like that conditional happiness, like I'll be happy, I'll be free when Rob gets out, and it's like no happiness happens in the now, And it brings us back to what you were just talking about about being in the presence. Another word that comes up for me that I'd love to have you both touch on is acceptance, Like at what point? And I think a lot of people struggle with acceptance as they think acceptance is giving up or giving in. And I always remind people that acceptance doesn't mean you have to like it. But we do have to accept the reality of what's happened. Otherwise we're just holding on to things that we can't control, and I think that jams us up even more. That's right. I would have to add to uh that, donnie U when you I'm talking about almost immediately that first thing came to me probably one of my favorite Bible scriptures that basically says that I have learned that whatsoever state I begin that wish to be content, to be content about something doesn't necessarily mean that you have to be satisfied with the outcome or how things are are happening. But what it does is that I think that there is something that is empowering about about acceptance. It's in that moment I think that you start to build out the the the pathways for knowledge and insight to come in in order to give you what's necessary in order to fix the problem that's in front of you. But all too often, like you know, and when face with conflict, when they're faced with with with troubles, you know, they they want to they want to check out, you know, they want to And it's normal, I guess, because I mean, you think about it, Jesus almost wanted to check out, you know, he asked up to bitter comfort. You know that he was faced with, if it could be removed from his lips, let somebody else have it. I don't want to have to go through it. But there was a moment of acceptance even for Christ when he said, but if it's your will, then let dying will be done. So in that moment, I realized that I came from from an ancestry of people that have been fighting for over four hundred years to undo this condition that they knew as slavery that we now know as mass incarceration. And it was in that moment that I had to tap back in. I had to realize that the DNA that ran through those people that it fought under conditions far worse than the ones that I was facing in mass incarceration. And again that's not the b rate or denounce anything about mass incarceration, because it is about as close as slavery as you're ever gonna get. But with that being said, like I said, I knew that it was in that moment the guy that called me to do something something special up to me through a transform my condition, my situation and make people all see it as something all different than than what had the hand that had been dealt to me. I want to continue on the theme of the human experience. I'd love for you guys to give us a glimpse into the joy, the elation just exuding on your day of release. But the same at the same time, what were the emotions of transitioning back into daily life together? Was there anxiety? Was there any level of fear for individually and collectively? Like can you take us through the entire experience of your release? Oh my god, it was like a fetal sweet kind of moment. I mean, when you go from being in a situation where there is that you know that you don't have the same level of stimulation. And keeping in mind too that when I went to prison, I went to prison two years on the the side of of our windows ninety five. You know, by the time I had come home, my space had become a thing that was no longer a thing by the time I had come on U. When I left, you could just wave at the gas tended and they would turn the pumps all you pupa take a gas. You go in and lay a twenty on the counter or whatever, and you lead back out. When I came home, gas pumps were talking to you. They were trying to sell your stuff and all kinds of other things, and I'm like, wow, this is this is crazy, you know, this is like other worldly, you know. And uh, it was in those moments that you kind of realize the the real uh dissergers uh that our Department of Justice does to those that are incarcerated because technologynology for me, while in prison, was considered countraband, So the very thing that I needed to know and needed to learn in order to be functioning, and uh, you know, proactive in society was considered contraband. To me, it was almost like enslavery when people were not allowed to read and then all of a sudden, the next day people were allowed to be free enrolled. But you can't read, and you couldn't read it, and you know, you're a grown man or a a grown woman at this point or whatever, and it's like, well, how do I function? How do I communicate in the new world? You know? So those things were, you know, were really challenging for us as a couple, being in a space where I've been in the overcrowded dormitory. I mean, they were more than a goal is the largest prison in the world. There's more than six thousand men that are incarcerated. Where I was incarcerated, there were you know, more than one hundred men in my dormitory, more than five hundred of them on the pod where I lived, and more than two thousand of them actually lived in that in the yard space that we lived inside. So you're talking about sharing five showers with one hundred men. You're talking about sharing one TV with one hundred men, two telephones, one Kiosk, one coffee pot, one drake fountain, five sinks, six urinals. Do you imagine the conflict that is always present when you have that many men competing for something essential essential, you know what I'm saying. So coming home, you know, I was hopeful for privacy. I was hopeful for some downtime and time alone and where I wasn't necessarily happening to share my space, whereas my wife had been fighting and battling for years so that she could actually have me back in her space and we could be in intimate spaces and we could be you know, hugged up and up under each other, And that was challenging for me. You know what was seen as a moment that you thought that I would have been excited and elated to be able to have my wife in the shower with me. It became like a thing of like, you know, like I was going through a moment because it was like, man, I just want to get out of this condition, you know. So it was just like those little things we battled about how many times do married couples even supposed to have sex in a week's time? You know, Thank God for Google, because when the question is first poles, I mean, you know how it is when it comes to ment, you know, when it comes to your sex drive or whatever. You know, that's that's something associated with your all your masculinity. It's associated with your ego and those kinds of things. And especially when women questioned it on the other side of it or whatever. You know, it's a real that's a good way to make you go go solve, right, you know, So just having those moments, but even in Google, thank God, you know, we realize how many times are married couples actually have sex in the course of a week by state back ery, you know, she was saying by continent, you know, and I realized in the moment, I'm like, Okay, well, numbers up, We're doing pretty good here, you know. But again, like I said, those are just many of the challenges that we faced as a as a returning couple, you know, coming back from the condition of our corn serration. I would love to know a little bit about what what makes love last. You guys were able to keep a marriage together after years twenty one years of incarceration. But what would you say makes love last? Like? Why does one couple stay together while another falls apart? I mean, you guys were able to do it through twenty one years of separation and incarceration, and most people are struggling to keep a marriage together and they don't have any issues near like that one. So what makes it stick? I think for me, one of the first things I would have to say is that I clearly understood that we were stronger together than we could ever be apart. I found value in numbers. When you think about the insect kingdom, you don't just see one ant, you know, you don't see an ant by itself, You see ants around of One of the things that I share what I'm speaking is that when you see a roach in your house, you know, you don't just say have one roach, you got roaches. So for us, it was about if the animal kingdom, you know, lions they travel in pride, and fish they swim in schools, if they understand nature, understands the importance of us being together, that that was something that I needed to implement in my own life, that my husband and I and our children we were stronger together than we could ever be apart. The second thing for me is about being intentional. I was intentional that if Rob and I were not gonna make it, it wasn't gonna be because of the state of Louisiana said we couldn't be together. Just the fact that they were insistent about denying us our family made me more intentional to say, oh, no, if we don't make it, it'll be on our own terms. But it won't be because you said we can't make it. You said we can't be together. Yes, adreed. And it just made me think. Fox and I was just watching a comedy skit on the Netflix or so the other night and one of the comedians and they had a profound moment when he made the statement, and it piggybacks off what Fox mentioned about stronger together. And he said that our goal has to be to keep our couples together, because when we keep our couples together, we keep our families together. And when we keep our families together, we keep we keep our communities together. And I went one further and saying that when we keep our communities together, we keep our nation together. And when we keep our nations together, we keep our world together. So we understood at the at the smallest level, at the micro level of it all, that if we could stay together, then we can make the rest of this, uh, this workout for us. And I guess they say the proof is into putting, but it is definitely in our experience at this moment, you know, because never giving up on one another, understanding that our you was something special uh to us, even if it was not to someone else, and we uh it was something that was worth fighting for. And we had made a vow to one another till death do us part. Not incarceration, not hard times, uh, none of the things. Uh. But we as long as we had our breath and breadth and our lungs and you know, the vigor to get up and move and so forth, we were gonna make sure that we stayed together at all costs. I think that that would probably just be one of the things that we would want to encourage your listening audience, Doney and Darren to do, is to hold on to each other. Oftentimes, when difficult times arise in our lives, the first thing we do is get rid of somebody that close to us. We off, we attack, We target those people that are closest to us, and normally it's our family members. And instead of clinging to one another doing the tough times, instead we we create more conflict with one another during the tough time. So I would just challenge you to hold on because it's better on the other side. And again, we are always stronger together than we can ever be apart. That's that's that's good right there. I've been married for seven months as we record this podcast. Congratulations. That's that's a word of encouragement I could take with me. So I appreciate you, guys. I'll let you know as you guys, I saw you guys developed a nonprofit. I look to know how as you guys's purpose joining together since twenty eighteen, how has that continued to expand over these last five years? Fight fight, Fight Fight. We believe that to be free is to free others, and what God has done for us, we have been commissioned and ordained to do for other people. Our ministry, our nonprofit, has rich family ministries and we have an initiative called Participatory Defense Movement NOLA PDM. NOLA dot org is our website, but we teach legal awareness to families that are justice involved. We are one hub that is practicing this model out of forty hubs across our country, and we judge our success by how much time we save someone from serving time in prison versus how much time they actually serve. And so to date, our organization we started six months after I came home from prison and to date, four years later, we have saved thirty four hundred years of time behind ours to include bringing home the longest serving woman in our country through clemency, as well as being able to change a pass resolution in law in twenty twenty one that has given over three thousand families and opportunity to come home on parole of people who thought that they were going to die there because they had such a lengthy sentence. So yeah, that's the work that we do every day and for those that may want to follow our work or find out more about what we're doing, our website is foxinarrib dot com and reach Familyministries dot org where they can find out more about that work there, and all of our handles as well are Fox and RID. I love that you guys are essentially creating pathways back to freedom. And I feel like in my role as a teacher, teaching, teaching yoga, leading as a personal development or life coach, it's the same thing. It's creating pathways back to freedom. Whether it's in a yoga class. If you're moving your body and breathing intentionally, you're moving energy. You're essentially freeing yourself from yourself or all of the things that the body remembers, because they say your issues are in your tissues, and so to be able to move, to move that stuck energy in the trauma, the things and the emotions, the unwanted stuff that we pushed down, it's in there. So when you talk about creating pathways, that would you know, means every run's so deep for me and maybe in a well definitely in a different way than it maybe does for you too, because mine was rooted in the addiction and being bound in that. So I have a bracelet on my wrist that says the word freedom, and it's it's just I want to be free, and in order to be free, it's about service and freeing others. So yeah, to be free is to free others, and it's the easiest way to get out of our own way is just to go go help somebody else. Yeah, well, said don Yes, well, and then I got one more for you, Donny too. You say like the intentions, I think you say it is where you set the court in you intentions, something about you intentions, What I say is where the mind goes. The behind follows Oh yeah ah man. Well, I want to thank you guys so much, just for your story, for your resiliency individually and collectively with fel like a lot of people will be blessed from hearing your story, seeing your story in the documentary, by going and checking you guys, and your workout on the website. So we just want to thank you and honor you for taking taking the time in your life to spend a few mens with us, because I feel like somebody's life is going to be changed from hearing this. So we just want to say thank you, We thank you. It takes a lot to take our mess and turn it into a message for other people and to be that vulnerable. So Donnie and Darren, we thank you for your vulnerability and how you're blessing our world by sharing your story and your truth. Thank you both. Yeah, thank you so much. I'm wondering if you can leave Darren and I and our listeners with a nugget of maybe there's a there's a couple out there that's they're just ready to throw in the towel, they're ready to give up. What would be some advice that you would give a couple that's just really struggling. They know they're struggling, but they don't know what to do about it. I would give them the advice that Rob gave us when we were in our lowest moment during our marriage, about thirteen years into incarceration. God just so happened to have him in a marriage and family counsel and course. And what did you learn in that course? Baby? That saved our marriage. Probably one was, first of all, you have to get over yourself. But secondly it is that you have to treat your relationships like a bank account. And the objective of a bank account pretty much holds true to that of a relationship. The main goal is to place far more deposits into the relationships than the withdrawals that you're gonna take from time to time. But if you place enough deposits into the relationship, he can withstand some of the withdrawals that are just gonna come with life, you know, as a whole. So by far, that was really one of the greatest takeaways that I had from the class. And crazy enough, the Arthur's name was Gary Smalley and the name of the book was Making Love Last Forever, Dottie. You know, just ironic that you even mentioned that just seconds ago, But yeah, that would probably be some of the greatest advice that I could give to young couples, aged couples, you know. And the likes is just put more in and you take out. Simple, simple. Yeah. Thank you so much to the both of you for coming on and sharing your story. And we love a good comeback. We love the people that are turning their mess into their message and their pain into their purpose, and you two are doing it and it's a legit power couple. And it was an honor to for you two to be our first duo here on Comeback Stories. So thanks again, but we look forward to coming back And for your listeners you're viewing audience, our book Time is available. The book really goes further than the documentary into our truth along the way and so the nuggets are there that you know that we need to encourage us. So I would offer our book time, the untold story of the love that kept us together when incarceration kept us apart. There you go, go get it. Listeners, go check that out, Go check that out. Me out. Yeah, I'll be glad, don't know so much peace. Comeback Stories is a production of Inflection Network and iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.