by Karla Jynn
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.
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