Tattoo

My son is home from college for Thanksgiving week. He arrived this morning around 8, looking happy and hale, with a tattoo in the center of his back, between his shoulder blades.

After an hour or so of chit-chatting, he whipped off his shirt, then sat with a quizzical smile on his face, waiting for us to notice. I saw something, a shadow on his back, and asked him to turn around. He did readily, his expression proud and nervous. I guessed he was proud of his art but was nervous about what we would say, because he still cares.

His tat was his birthday present to himself, which he actually had done on his dad's birthday. It is a black and white piece, a stone cross surrounded by angel wings. It is not too big, not too small, nicely centered left to right, not too high, perfectly placed. And the art is lovely, not at all cartoonish, done by a steady, professional hand.

"It's beautiful," I said, and he melted.

"Ahh, that's the word I was hoping for!" he said, and then he hugged me.

"What does it mean to you?" I asked him.

"It's a symbol of faith," he said, "of the way you raised me. A reminder that God has my back."

I thought of my dad, and my husband's mom, my uncles, all the loved ones on the other side, watching over him. I believe he thinks of them, too.

I spoiled it a little by asking him not to get any tats on his neck or forearms, nowhere visible in job interview clothes. I even noted I could be just fine with this one tat on his perfect body that I birthed. My husband, at that point, told me (nicely) to back off, cool it. My son just smiled. His mom is his mom, and that was okay with him at that moment.

I was touched, really, that it mattered to him that we liked it, even though I know, if we had given him grief, he would have shrugged and pretended he didn't care.

I'm glad he cares.

Noisy Brain Syndrome

Do other mothers have this crazy, overactive imagination that can devise every possible scenario in every conceivable situation that could render their children unsafe? Really, when my kids are out of the house, I look normal, I speak normally, I function, but underneath I am trying to beat back all the intrusive thoughts of what could go wrong, what harm could befall my beloved children, what lapse in judgment could overtake them. Sometimes if feels as if I don't start breathing again until they are safe and sound inside our front door.

Then I hear stories like this one: Two friends of my daughter, both 15-year-old boys, have formed a band with another boy and a girl, both also 15. The four of them took the MetroNorth train two hours upstate on Friday night, to be picked up by Jim, the father on one of the boys who is friends with my daughter. The plan was for the four kids in the band to stay with Jim overnight and then perform at a bar (that place where they serve alcohol to folks over 21 in New York State) the next afternoon.

I know Jim well. Our kids have been in school together since they were four. We have become friends over the years, both of us always willing to wade into all manner of conspiracy theories. He is probably fierce looking to some people, with his multiple eff-you type tattoos and tee shirts with eff-you type slogans over biker muscled arms.

Once, driving through a town upstate, my husband and I stopped at an eating place and I wondered about going in, because at the front door stood a burly man with tattoos snaking out from under the sleeves of his tee-shirt, clearly designed to intimidate the faint of heart. My husband and I were the only two Black people we had seen for miles, and this man looked like every movie stereotype of a racist with a gun-rack in his pickup truck. And then I thought, No, wait, he looks like Jim, who can be iconoclastic and provocative, but is as non-racist as they come. Looks can be deceiving.

Still, I couldn't help wondering, What were the parents of the lone girl in the band thinking? Almost enviously, I marveled that they could get through the night, not knowing where, or in whose home their teenaged daughter was sleeping. They had never met Jim, and if they had, his appearance would probably not have been reassuring, though a conversation might have set their minds at ease. Yet they let their 15-year-old girl travel to a strange town with three hormonal teenaged boys and more guitars and amps and drums and gear than four scrawny kids could carry, to stay overnight in a strange man's house and play a gig in a bar the next afternoon.

And she was fine. She returned home in one piece, exhilarated to have played a real live gig. Which just goes to show, all those crazy scenarios in my head, they're mostly just straw ghosts, keeping me from fully enjoying my children's enjoyment of their lives.

I once ran across a condition called "Noisy Brain Syndrome" in a psych book. I couldn't believe there was such a descriptive name for the brain I live with every day. But this trait, while it might have been protective in an age when humans could get eaten in the wild, is no longer useful. So how do I quiet this incessantly chattering brain?