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From the New York Times and WBUR Boston, this is Modern Love.

Stories of Love, Laws, and Redemption.

I'm your host, Megna Chakrabardi.

We can't control the curveball's life throws at us, but we can control how we handle them.

Asha Bendelli decided she needed to face the biggest one of her life alone.

Cynthia Adaira Robinson, star of the USA Series Shooter, reads Asha's essay,

I Need to Woman Up.

Five months after we were married, my husband, Rashid and I had a honeymoon of sorts.

A 44-hour jaunt in a trailer at the New York State Prison where he lived.

At 21, he had been convicted of a gang-related murder which occurred three years before,

and on this day, he was in the 13th year of a 20-year sentence.

We had met five years earlier when I was 23, a college student teaching poetry to prisoners.

I believed then, as I do now, that poems can expand a soul.

They had done so for me, and I was watching the same thing happen to prisoners, especially Rashid,

already a man seeking transformation.

Over the course of a year, in many discussions about changing ourselves and our world, we fell in love.

With Rashid, there was this breath of dialogue I had an experience before.

Our conversations, unspeakably honest, were for me, life-saving.

When I met Rashid, a failed marriage already behind me, no college degree yet, no direction for my future,

I saw my life as a series of mistakes.

He set that lie aside, made me see myself through his eyes until I could love my reflection.

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