I Thought My Tattoos Mattered

In the kitchen of the Philadelphia home I’d lived in since my divorce, I chopped apples and peaches, mixing in arugula, hummus and corn, waiting for my oldest son to arrive for his favorite mom dinner. He showed up with his usual white-blond man bun and loose beige linen pants and hugged me tightly. Without any introduction, I pushed up the leg of my shorts to show him the stylized M tattooed on the side of my left thigh, still in the embossed stage of healing, tender and red around the edges. 

“You’re shittin’ me!” he said. “Wait, is that for real?” He leaned down to look, then straightened up, shaking his head in disbelief, giving off a faint whiff of weed smoke. “How on earth did that happen?” 

A month later, another son came back from touring in Colombia with his band. I showed it to him too and he said, “Now I’ve seen everything.” On phone calls with my other two grown kids, neither could believe I was the only family member with a tattoo. Yes! I thought, I’m finally in the cool camp.  

I was an unlikely candidate for a tattoo, given my ultra-righteous life up to age 50. I used to judge tattoos as pointless and wasteful. I used to judge many things, like drinking, gayness, divorce, atheism, and myself. I had been committed to Swedenborgianism, “the most superior” church on earth and had become a “superior” women’s leader in my community. I was well respected, everything I needed to be.

My grandmother trained my mom to be docile, hissing if she said something “inappropriate,” goading her to stand up straight, requiring her infrequent high school dates to take place on their plush forest-green living room couch. She was aghast that our mom became slack enough as an adult to go barefoot around the house and wear shorts at the beach. 

When I was a kid, my parents built a custom-designed contemporary house next door to my grandparents’ Tudor stone manor. A sweeping driveway lined with award-winning gardens led down to their private woods with its bubbling spring. Eating a crustless watercress sandwich at their dining room table, my grandmother pressured me to sip milk daintily and keep the linen napkin in my lap. When I was older, I asked why her weekly maid had to eat alone in the kitchen. She tightened her lips and looked away. 

My mom continued the family tradition of controlling looks and behavior, making me sit cross-legged “like a lady” and wear a girdle and stockings to church by seventh grade. 

I learned early that “rebellious” actions and opinions weren’t welcome. By 1968 when I started church high school, I was indoctrinated with sexual shame, self-examination and repentance, and placing the “domestic sphere”—marriage, homemaking, motherhood—above serious plans for a career. 

I was on “the path to heaven,” until I broke open in 2004, at age 50, and became a non-believer. The year before, I had begged God multiple times a day to make me a better Swedenborgian, wife, and mom. Finally, “HE” seemed to answer, “OK. I’ll show you.”

Through months of vivid dreams and intense realizations, my inner world exploded with messages about the oneness of the universe. I perceived that no divisions exist between “God” and every precious human, including me.

Four years later I left my religious community. My 31-year marriage ended, and I started navigating the “real” world on my own. Realizing I wasn’t born “evil,” as my ex-religion had taught, allowed me to reclaim primal innocence, at least intellectually. That was the ballast that gave me enough confidence to do regular things, like driving into South Philadelphia on my own, saying yes to dozens of OkCupid dates, and training to be an abortion support volunteer at Planned Parenthood. I was a wise baby, awake, at the pinnacle of the steep mountain I’d climbed since I left the dense web of doctrinal strictures that had shaped my life. 

But a tattoo? That was as foreign to me as a God-free childhood, or a grandma smoking pot.

The real world seemed foreign too when I entered it. Who was I, really? Did I belong? While straining to find my deeper identity, I continued to suffer from compulsive self-censure, the family disease that made me endlessly question myself. Where did my skills fit in? Why had I shared that intimate thing with a neighbor? Am I an adequate grandma? Should I get up earlier? Meditate? Do something notable like publishing a book? After a fun, connected social evening, I’d wake up and obsess over one small thing I’d said.

By 2014, I could finally access, in my gut, a living sense of innocence, like the breath of newborn infants. When I caught myself judging me, I closed my eyes, breathed deeply, and whispered, I love you, I love you. The tightness inside would open and float away like a thistle releasing its seed to the wind. I wrote pages and pages examining the bad aspects of my upbringing, helping me to see that despite its undeniable privilege, primal child parts of me had been squashed.

That summer I invited close friends to my home for a “Breaking the Tribal Tie” ceremony, to celebrate independence from the shame and blame that had plagued my life. I asked my friend Carrie to come early and welcome the guests. “I’m going to stay upstairs until everyone’s here,” I told her. “That way I can calm my anxiety.”

Even though the ritual itself was a joke on the life I’d left behind, it was also meaningful, and attention for me felt like walking a tightrope. I might tiptoe just right, or I might fall, or both. I gave Carrie cards to hand each guest, with a statement that read: I love you and I’m grateful you came. Because I’m so prone to over-thanking, this will be the single time I say it today. Thank you for being here and for being you.

We sat in a circle in my dining room—my new partner Ben, friends from my old community, a few poly connections and Burning Man acquaintances, and my closest sister. “I reject the self-rejection I was raised with!” I declared and sang a spoof I wrote of a hymn from my former church. A ring went around the circle before I placed it on my finger saying, “With this ring I mark the return of myself to myself.” Others shared their experiences of finding inner freedom. At the end, I snipped up a couple childhood photos that reminded me of being shamed and we went to the roof deck and burned them in an old roasting pan. During the afterparty in my back courtyard, I indulged in a margarita.

The next morning on my exercise walk around the neighborhood, I felt even freer, released from fears of being terminally wrong, almost free enough to fly. I was one with the sidewalk, the car driving by, the squirrels, the brave oak leaves swishing in the wind above me. I stopped on Westview Street around the corner from my house as a voice—mine—came into my head and said, You’re as innocent as your granddaughters. Get a tattoo.

“No, I need to go on my own,” I said when my new-ish pagan computer-whiz friend Brent offered to come along with me. He had recommended Eddie’s Tattoos on fourth street below South where he and his primary partner had spent multiple days getting their backs etched with intricate labyrinths. I wanted Brent’s calm, worldly-wise support, but was determined to honor the very reason I was getting a tattoo: as a stamp of the strength I gained from my newfound innocence.

But as I approached Eddie’s, anxiety shot like sun rays from my bundle of stomach nerves. I felt like I was 14, trying tampons for the first time, or like my 16-year-old self when she drove to the Huntington Valley shopping center alone after getting a license. I feared I might do something embarrassing, but I also imagined passersby noticing me and being impressed with my independence.

The tattoo artist behind the counter said a nonchalant hello. I could hardly take my eyes off the two clients who lounged in reclining chairs being buzzed and drilled, without glancing at me. I wondered why they wanted tattoos, what their process was, and whether they were as attuned to their meanings as I was. Then I thought, why do I have to notice everything? Care and compare? It’s freaking exhausting.

I wanted a stylized M, my first granddaughter’s first initial; I was as blameless as she was, though it had taken decades to unearth that fact. When my siblings and I were born, our mom had gone under general anesthesia. In 1978, when I was pregnant with our family’s first grandchild, I thought I would do better. Instead, the pain was knives from all sides aimed straight at my cervix. After Demerol and an epidural, I birthed our daughter, believing I had failed her, my husband, myself, and God by not being stronger. It took months to accept my “betrayal.” 

By contrast, the birth of my first grandchild had felt like a sacred event. My daughter was totally present with her body’s needs. She disappeared into her own world, able to give her all to the being inside her trying to come alive. After breathing and growling through the crescendoing pain of labor, she pushed out a perfect girl as I knelt crying beside her. The baby slipped into the huge tin watering trough that had been set up in the living room, while I bathed in the waves of innocence flowing from them both—a birth, for me, of a primal goodness I’d never known.

Despite my lifelong art career, I didn't have a design in mind for the M. My desire for a tattoo had nothing to do with art or style. And I did not want something removable like a necklace. I wanted a permanent reminder of my amazing growth, small and simple, explicable to anyone who saw it and asked.

From a mountain of notebooks on the counter, the tattooist slid over a thick, heavy tome with the alphabet in every shape and size. I breezed through the pages, alighting on an M that resembled an Asian character, a fake, without a thought about its ethnic resonance. To me it looked like a tiny temple whose roof had caved in and then caught its own fall, reconnecting in the middle instead of collapsing. My finger landed on the page, and I said, “That one.”

He told me the piercing of tattoos on your torso hurts more than on your limbs, so I chose my upper thigh. I wanted it to show at times, like when I wore a bathing suit, or if I revealed it casually, but not somewhere intimate, like my butt. I needed to be able to share my landmark. I settled into the chair and breathed deeply and rhythmically, feeling proud of myself.

The needling of my flesh was a refreshing pain, the kind I thought childbirth was before it assaulted me. This pain allowed me to brace myself like the resilient grownup I was becoming. The artist kept checking if I was OK, and I surprised myself by saying yes, though I was glad I’d chosen such a small one. And I didn't want the bother and expense of coming back. Tattoos for me were one and done, or so I thought.

My second tattoo came after immense pain in relation to a couple of my adult sons. My need to explain myself to them sprouted like nettles in 2009, when it was clear my marriage was done, and grew here and there during our one-on-one get-togethers.

A year after my move into the city, my third child, Dane, stood at the stove poking a mound of ground beef hissing in the skillet. He liked chopping it into bits, to better mix with the zucchini we planned to add and the rice boiling in a big pot next to it. I sliced tomatoes and butterhead lettuce, my brain churning on which thing to bring up next.

“He was having something like a breakdown,” I said of his dad. “After he took early retirement, he was so aimless. He’d put a beach chair from the shed into that big rectangle of sun coming into the kitchen and just sit there. Remember how the sun used to pour through the French door?”

Our family of six had lived happily in that wonderful home, swaddled in our church community, for 25 years. The gap between that reality and what unfolded after I outgrew religion was a chasm I wanted us all to get across.

“He’d close his eyes and try to bask like he was on vacation, but there was such a vibe of bleakness underneath. I'd suggest he take a bike ride, and he would, but when he was out along the trail he’d feel untethered and need to come back home. I started to feel I was in charge of him, like a parent. It wore me out.”

“Didn't he try some therapy?” Dane asked. His deep-set brown eyes looked straight into mine.

“Yeah,” I said. “He tried a bunch of different things, but they never felt right. In the last couple of years he’s told me I'm the only person he really trusts and feels close to. It was like I was the funnel he had to go through to get beyond himself and feel at home in the world.”

Dane said, “Hmmm that sounds hard. But it wasn’t that way at work.”

“I know,” I replied. “But that's different from what was going on inside. He has so much trauma from when he was young.” I went on to explain more about his dad’s and my processes than I ever should have, stressing the creative ways I’d supported him and his healing in the final two years.

As I talked, my belly nerves revved like they often did, tensing my chest and forehead. I needed to be seen and understood by him, and most of all not blamed for the breakup.

My sons at the time seemed to be OK with me sometimes using them as listeners and friends, almost therapists. But it can take kids, even smart adult ones, a while to wake up and re-orient toward what they do and don't want with their parents. Being the sage I thought I was, I created the kind of emotional distance I was trying to defend against.

“Mom!” Dane said angrily in a 2015 Whatsapp message, “Dad invited us to a session with his therapist. He told us how it felt that you ended up in love with someone else before you divorced. Wow, can I ever see it from his perspective.”

In follow-up exchanges I thanked him for his honesty. Then I went on to explain again what my children had already long known: that I loved his dad deeply, that his dad was fully aware from the start of my feelings for the other man, that I wanted the marriage to continue, and that I never got together with the other until after my husband had walked away blaming me. I was appalled at the reductive view my ex had given them, both of the facts and the timeline of our breakup. I stayed anchored in my own sense of how expansively I had handled the end of the marriage.

But Dane pushed back; he wasn’t having it.

“You’re meeting me with a lot of defensiveness,” he said. “You’re talking circles around me. It leaves me doubting the validity of my experience. It’s pretty intimidating.”

As I listened, my breath thinned and almost stopped, my gut churning.

“With time,” his messages continued, “I can accept the validity of my feelings, but I’m trying to be more forthright with you. This is why I have to pull back sometimes. It’s normal to be critical of parents. I know that can make you feel wounded, but that’s how it is.”

Wounded, still. 

I listened and listened again, seeing it as he did. Appalled at what I had wrought, I called my closest support friend and wailed into the phone. Then I lay on the porch and sobbed alone, my body spasming. When I could breathe again, I wormed my thoughts back through our history, revisiting details from scenes of needy, self-absorbed me oversharing with my sons. My cluelessness made me gag.

Later in the day, I collected myself and messaged, “I really heard you. Thank you again. I’m so sorry to have been like that. I understand why you wouldn’t have wanted to hear those intimate details, and I understand your courageous pushback. I will watch myself, learn from this, and do better.”

And I did keep watching and learning. Galling humility was the only path back to authentic boundaries with my grown sons, to chatting and laughing again with them, and being a ready support person when they ask.

Deeper consciousness through painful communications was beyond any kind of interaction I could have had with my own parents, or they could have had with theirs. And my granddaughters, being raised by grownups who listen to them and have cherished their feelings from day one, will never have to face the same challenges.

I went back to Eddie’s Tattoo parlor and got a stylized L on my shoulder, in honor of my second granddaughter, to commemorate our family’s massive change through the generations.

In getting the tattoos, I believed that my new levels of understanding had overcome my past. I had no idea I was only beginning.

In 2017, nine years after emerging from the cocoon of my original community, I was more awake and less emotionally fragile, but even my expanded life was still a bubble. I had my M and L tattoos, but so what? I didn’t connect much with life beyond my comfort zone.

I went to a “Women in Re-entry” art exhibit in North Philadelphia where incarcerated women, those just home, and some with imprisoned family members had created paintings, poems, and mixed-media installations expressing the pain and resilience of living through poverty, injustice, and generational trauma. Compared with my protected, well-fed, well-educated network, this was a devastation I’d never tuned in to.

Afterward, I drove along treeless streets with broken-down houses and piles of trash, back to my woodsy neighborhood and spacious, well-kept home. My lifelong ignorance left me brain-fried, and hungry to learn and do. 

I joined an interracial systemic-justice training and fundraising course. On gender day, two non-binary speakers drew a graph of four basic quadrants, to help us glimpse the galaxy of possibilities for non-binary humans.

The first quadrant was the sex assigned at birth. Next was the sex one is, sometimes the same, sometimes not. Then one’s chosen gender expression—queer, femme, masc, androgynous, etc. The final quadrant was sexual preferences. These intersect in numerous ways; any human can show up in any combination.

Thrilled to have insights that expanded my straight, cis-gendered default views, I laughed when I imagined how aghast my mother and her mother would have been.

In a photo from one of my granddaughters’ long-ago visits, five-year-old M poses in her latest favorite costume, a pink chiffon ball gown with flounces draped over layers of a paler pink skirt. A wide rose-colored satin sash wraps her waist, with a huge bow tied in the back. Lines of tiny pearls on ribbons festoon from puffy sleeves, with more ribbons and pearls edging her neck and waist. Her head is turned to show off French braids. With arms spread wide like an opera singer, her plump open hands beseech the audience to revel in her splendor.

That grandkid, now 15, is trans. He uses his appropriate pronouns and has chosen K---- for his name. His exploration took several years and deeply self-aware conversations with parents and friends. I’ve always been close with my daughter and was grateful she kept me updated on the stages.

I love learning about K, and am floored at the honest, organic process that has let him become who he is, including through a time of they/them pronouns and a different, androgynous name.

K’s presentation to me seems more feminine than masculine, including sometimes showing cleavage in his Instagram reels. He also posts photos of his face painted with elaborate theatrical make-up, but assigned cultural markers of gender morph over time and are not innate or "appropriate" proof of how men or women should look.

I would love to ask K what makes him sure he is him, but of course I wouldn’t. Are there parts of him that feel female, and others that feel male? Does all of him just feel like him, and not some binary that needs to be parsed and defined? Does he think he will ever want hormones or surgery? How does he feel now about all his ballerina/princess/fairy costume photos from his childhood?

Instead, I revel in the complexities of a world greater than me or my imaginings, and way beyond the sermons of my first 50 years spouting “divine” doctrines like “God made men to be men down to every cell of their bodies, and women to be women in every cell of their bodies.” Categorical thinking applied to minds and hearts as well; men were rational, women emotional. But now, thank god, K is free to be and try and find out what fits him. I wish it hadn’t taken me till 50 to begin that adventure.

In a recent Instagram reel, K said, “We humans can be some batshit crazy creatures. We’ve caused so much pain to the world and to each other but how can you look at like the rise and fall of empires and not think that that's freaking amazing for a species to do? I get not liking people on an individual basis or not liking some of the things we've done but this species is one of the coolest things to be a part of.”

I laugh when I think of me at age 15: somber eyes straining for attention; head tilted, hoping to look cool; struggling through Algebra 2; no awareness beyond the tiny puddle I was trying to swim in.

The initial tattooed on my thigh still stands for primal innocence even though the name that inspired it is obsolete. And the tattoo on my shoulder will always mark the evolution of our family, all the more since my second grandkid too is non-binary and uses a different name than the L one they were given at birth.

What I understand now is that I’m simply a speck in the cosmos—not superior or a seer. And that there’s always more to learn about myself and the world. This is even clearer when I muse on the technology lying ahead. I thought that in reading about AI, I had a chance of mentally preparing myself for the exponentially greater AI life that awaits us. That too is an illusion. People way savvier than me have no idea what’s coming. 

I’m 71. At each point in my life when I thought I’d won some race, it turned out I was at a different starting line I hadn’t seen. I could go to Eddie’s again for a third tattoo, but what on earth would it stand for? I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Maybe I could get a brown blob inked somewhere on my body, to signal that my wisdom in the world is a piece of bark peeling off the London Plane tree in front of our house. Some pieces look like countries or continents on an imaginary map; some like abstract art; others are shriveled strips of protection the tree no longer needs. When the time comes, all bark falls to the ground and gets raked up and placed with leaves into the compost heap.