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.