Tattoo Denouement

Thank you so much to those of you who chimed in and advised on the tattoo revelation process. You deserve to know how it went, so here goes……….

It was totally uneventful.

I had a few drinks, then when my dad was inside I told my mom. She said, “Really? Can I see it? Wow, that’s cool. Did it hurt?” Unbelievable.

Then I asked her if I should tell dad. She looked ponderous. I took that to mean maybe not. So I didn’t tell him, and if she wants to tell him I can’t stop her. Lord almighty, the weight is lifted! Free at last!

The whole thing has been rather hilarious, with the drama of Poe’s “The Telltale Heart” hanging over my head for two years.

Confession is good for the soul. I’m considering it as a theme for the blog this week. Think about freeing yourself from something this summer. I can highly recommend it.

Charging the Waves

We are at the beach in North Carolina this week with extended family, and I just had to share what happened yesterday evening with the baby.

Her dad and I took her down to the water’s edge at low tide just before dinner. She was wearing a t-shirt and overalls to protect her from the sun and insect bites, but the light and the tide and the temperature was all so perfect we decided this was the moment to embrace the ocean for the first time.

Now we’ve all seen different children’s reactions to their first (or 51st) encounter with the sand, salt water, and waves. Some kids just plain don’t like it, and I can’t blame them. They are tiny, and all the forces around them are huge and potentially quite overwhelming; so it was anyone’s guess how our little elf would feel about it all.

Her dad lowered her bare feet to the wet sand. We held our breath. Suddenly we say her “pigglety toes” spread and grab the wetness with a surprisingly strong-looking grasp. She looked down for a few seconds, and dropped to her hands and knees, and then just starting crawling……..out to sea.

No fear, no worries, nothing but direction and excitement and a smile. The low tide kept rolling up, and she kept going. She reached to the side, popped a shell in her mouth, and kept going.
Her father and I are delighted. I’m not sure anything could have done more for our sense of being on the right track with this little one than her warm-hearted embrace of the ocean, and her confidence in where she was as a good place. Naturally, we have to watch this…..she has no idea what danger she could encounter. But I don’t want her to start life with that mindset. There is plenty of time to learn how to analyze risk.

For now, she’s charging the waves, and I think it bodes well.

The Tattoo and The Beach

So here it comes….the family beach vacation and a week spent hiding my tattoo. What is wrong with me? I mean really.

Two years ago I got this absolutely rockin’ tattoo. I even wrote a short essay about it during a Davidson College alumni weekend modeled after the NPR “This I Believe” series. Here is an excerpt from that essay:

“I needed permanent representation of bringing my heart and mind to peace with nearly ten consecutive, tumultuous years involving (illness), professional struggle, marital crisis, and infertility. Enough was enough, and my soul hungered for a ritual to mark my moving forward. When the voice of the universe whispered repeatedly the answer was a Eurasian practice of permanent decorative skin marking from Neolithic times, I was stunned. I expected something more like a new sports car.”

As much as I adore this new part of me, I cringe at the idea of sharing it with people I think will judge me. I’m an adult two times over and I still can’t be my full self with my own parents. I have a cousin half my age who floats in the same general familial goo I grew up in who proudly sports her tatt and even had her wedding dress cut to show it off last month. She and I recently reconnected after well over 10 years of no contact, and I’m wondering if there is a higher opportunity there. Maybe she is my bridge to “coming out” with my art. I’m thinking about sending my full “This I Believe” essay to the folks before beach week.

I may need to just bite the bullet and ‘fess up and move on. I’m not really in the mood for hiding anymore. Any thoughts and advice are more than welcome. I’ll post how it goes soon.
(For the record, if you are looking for the real deal in a great tattoo artist and shop, find Robert Ashburn at http://www.liquiddragontattoo.com/.)

Can "Quitting" Be Courageous?

I saw via Twitter that the keynote speaker at the Generation WV conference last night used the phrase, “You’re not a failure until you quit.” It definitely brought up the concept of courage for me, but in unexpectedly conflicting ways.

Some of the most courageous things I’ve done involved deciding to stop doing something. And I don’t mean bad habits, like smoking or biting my nails. I mean sometimes there are things you have worked on over and over again, and when you look down the continuum of the continued effort, you really have to self-evaluate.

Is it possible that “quitting” can be courageous?

I use quotation marks because this term really bothers me. It reminds me of those beefy football coaches on the sidelines, screaming at exhausted players, “Winners never quit! And quitters never win!” It can be a form of manipulation, a way of suggesting that that only losers (whatever that means) ever stop trying.

Perhaps that is where the key lies. In the effort, in the trying. I agree that sometimes the effort is the main thing, and it is beautiful and wonderful and important. But let’s be honest, sometimes all the effort in the world towards the wrong objective is a lost cause. It’s then that “quitting” may be courageous, despite all the pressure and all the names you get called. And in this vein, I can clearly see why some people want to make other feels bad about quitting; it may mean you have to acknowledge the objective was never that good. Then it’s about more than the one who stops trying, and the coaches have to be accountable.

Just a Friday afternoon thought for you to chew on, and maybe comment on if I’m lucky! Happy weekend.

People Concerned About.....People

What do you do when your heart and your mind tell you something needs to be addressed, but the powers that be seem insurmountable? How do you decide which fight is yours, and which fight you just pray someone else will take up before it’s too late?

This is a really hard one. Those of us living in the Kanawha Valley of West Virginia have known for many years that we live in the only place left on planet earth that stores the deadly chemical know as MIC in quantities vast enough to wipe out human life to the tune of thousands of people from a single tank breach. This is what happened in Bhopal, India, in 1984. This tragedy is often cited as the world’s worst industrial disaster.

In August 2008, the Bayer plant in Charleston had an explosion that narrowly missed releasing MIC into the atmosphere. (For more on the event, see http://blogs.wvgazette.com/watchdog/2009/04/27/bayer-stories-collected/) The pending threat went from theoretical to very real overnight. For the record, the explosion literally shook my home miles away. While the powerful chemical industry continues to evade responsibility for the threat they pose to our community, one young woman is standing up to them and leading local residents in a public conversation with the industry and state and federal authorities about the truth of what is happening – and not happening – at the plant.

I’ve been disturbed by the way the plant’s PR reps attempt to paint her as a radical, when her approach is clearly common sense. I feel the same admiration for her I feel for the young man who addressed the Kanawha County School Board’s diversity policy. She is stepping out on her own, speaking the truth, trying to help people, and risking isolation and aggression for her efforts. I am awed by her willingness to fight a corporate giant, when so many people in our community who are on some level much more equipped to take this on stay silent; and on behalf of my family and my home, I am grateful for her leadership.

For more on her work, see http://www.peopleconcernedaboutmic.com/ .

Eleventh Hour

Mark Twain once said that courage is not the absence of fear. It is the mastery of and resistance to fear.

I started thinking about courage a week ago when I read about a young man in our local county school system. Approaching the end of his senior year in high school, he went to the school board to ask them specifically to name sexual orientation in the anti-bullying policies. This would mean that the well-known playground taunts of “fag, gay, homo, dike, fairy” etc. would be identified as on par with racial slurs and attacks.

When I saw his picture in the paper, standing alone at a podium in the board room, I was overcome with respect and frankly, amazement. He is almost out of the K-12 system. If he and everyone else in his class can hang in there, they will be out of public school all together and on to what, hopefully, will be the commencement of a full and exciting adult life. All of the pathologies of adolescence will be behind them, and they will be free to go on to grow into who they were born to be, not who the crowd tries to force them to be.

And yet here he was, putting himself out there at the eleventh hour for all of those children behind him. Whatever the school system decides to do, he will not benefit directly. If anything, the last days of high school may be a special hell for him, now that he has taken the ultimate public route to talking about his experiences, naming who has tormented him, and how it hurt. Last time I checked, people who to treat others this way don’t exactly turn down the volume when you acknowledge your vulnerabilities.

How many of us would have the courage to do what he did at his age? At any age? Maybe now I could consider it, but at 18 I am pretty sure I would have laid low and tried to just get out. This fellow is a special person, and a young man of true courage.