Tattoos and Tacos

(by Karen Sosnoski)

Author's reading

It was holiday season, and my friends with kids in college had concerns that would have been mine had life gone as expected: Where should “the boyfriend” sleep? What to serve the newly vegan or gluten-free? What to buy a twenty-something who already has your credit card?

“It is a lot,” I sympathized, holding my alternative timeline close. My husband and I would fly from Virginia to Florida where our daughter had moved since completing rehab there. We weren’t exchanging presents. To celebrate Raven’s one year in recovery, I’d buy us both tattoos.

 “Aww,” said friends when they heard Raven wasn’t coming home. “Sounds tough.” 

Actually, "tough" was last year’s family vacay: Raven, rabid at my sister’s house; me wailing, calling counselors.

A close friend, knowing Raven couldn’t come home so early in recovery, not given her old “contacts” here, validated, “Home is where the family is.” It meant a lot. To be an intact family—I’d prayed for nothing more.

But then, without warning, something stubborn in my heart reared up. This isn’t everything.

__________

In the admissions room of Electric Tattoo on New Year’s Eve Day, waiting for Raven, I projected Zen: a crystal-wearing, late-middle-aged woman filling out forms. No one could see how hard I’d worked to get there, and was still working.

What if they don’t let Raven get her tattoo without her ID? What if she doesn’t show up? What if she gets the tattoo gift and hates it? Selecting our place, artists, and images had drawn us closer to a successful mother-daughter outing than we’d had in years. Wasn’t I stupid to think we’d follow through?

I texted my Alanon 12-steps sisters, six other moms of addicts. Their support shot right back. 

“Keep the focus on yourself. Expectations are your enemy. She’ll show up or she won’t.”

“Stay in your own lane; make sure they get your tatt right.”

By the time Raven showed up, only ten minutes late, I’d recovered enough to realize that getting my tattoo constituted cake; my daughter getting hers with me, mere icing. Sweet, though, to note her approaching, clear-eyed, carrying coffees.

“Thanks, Rave. You remember cream?” 

“Duh,” she said. I smiled.

__________

We sat side-by-side, my girl and I, in a space that was not a hospital, courthouse, or therapist’s office, while artists blocked our tattoos. Raven wondered out loud if there’d be a problem tattooing over the raised scars, silvery now, ringing her thigh.

“Maybe they can sand them down?” she speculated.  

“Maybe.” But it was a “her” problem, I reminded myself. Her cutting scars tracked a timeline otherwise invisible. And just maybe, they were no problem.

__________

“Mother-daughter tattoos are the best!” I bragged on Facebook after the fact. 

“Like a spa day,” I elaborated to friends back in Virginia. Since I’d taken to wearing unseasonably short sleeves and gesturing dramatically with my left arm, few could miss the sanguine crocodile stretching from elbow-crook to wrist. 

Readily, I distilled the dream that inspired my tattoo image: “A crocodile lurking at my bedside winked at me. Not a threat, a guide!” I told how, upon waking, I’d gotten up for water. In the bathroom mirror, observing the deepening wrinkles around my eyes, I saw it again: the crocodile!

“Aww, you’re not wrinkled,” my friends lied.

“That’s not the point,” I said. “The dream was calling me to Bolder Oldness. I’ve accepted.”

I was even prouder of Raven’s tattoo. Years prior, when we’d sent her to a wilderness school, my first letter to her there contained the Anne Lamott quote now tatted on her thigh. “Hope begins in darkness….” 

__________

I told a good friend the tattoo story on our first unpacking call of the new year. “But what about you?” I asked. 

“Same as last year.” She and her daughters had made vision boards by their lit tree over chai and oatmeal cookies. 

“I love it,” I told her. “Mindfulness manifested.” I imagined their cookies, homemade, chewy, slightly sweet.

“Aww, thanks. But aren’t your tattoos vision boards? Maybe you and Raven are developing your own annual bonding ritual?” 

To have a friend this empathetic…. And I hadn’t even told her the best part. 

__________

After the tattooing, Raven and I walked in the heat with plastic bags taped over our ink to the smoothie place that looked so good on Yelp, only to find its sign read “Closed.” This imagined-treat-cut-off-by-locked-door used to happen to us constantly. We both used to blame me.

This day, however, we simply trekked an extra mile to a taco place Raven Googled. Sweat made our tattoos sting, but we didn’t complain; we merely observed. 

“Fuck you,” my beautiful daughter occasionally tossed at male passers-by who leered or honked at her. 

When the men’s gazes swiveled to judge me (Bad Mom of Uncontrolled Daughter), I feigned a punch, jerking my shoulder per my recent boxing classes. Primed beneath my mom-ish fat, emerging muscles flexed—like Raven’s pirate toughness standing by beneath her Barbie hair.

Several times Raven reflected, “At least we’re getting steps in.” 

How to convey just how much this walk never could have happened in the past? And that for us it registered as cozy?

Or what it meant to me to eat bad Mexican food together, Raven downing a soggy chicken burrito, me a fishy taco. There were no bruises on her arms, no raised voices, no disappearing acts mid-meal. She let me take a photo for which she grinned, kid-like, her open mouth full. I didn’t need to text my friends to get re-grounded.

__________

When you’re addicted to your daughter’s addiction and you’re recovering yourself, you start consciously choosing what you share and with whom. I seldom tell anyone how in that crocodile dream, I fled the bedroom, screaming, calling 911. When no police answered, I left a girlish message. “Save me!” No responding sirens sounded; no cops came. I returned the crocodile’s wink, throwing my head back to laugh a womanly laugh at my situation, and later at my wrinkles, because I had no better option. Older, bolder, freer, by default.

(And still so blessed.)

I didn’t tell my friends I sent Lamott’s words to Raven in her wilderness school because I didn’t know either my daughter or my own words well enough to send those.

(Now I do).

We’d visited Raven in Florida twice before the tattoo visit, each time thanking God to see our funny, fierce girl re-emerging, clean. But carefulness defined me in these visits. So careful not to judge, not to cheerlead, not to manage—the things I’d done too much of in the past. I thought of the recovering self I’d left at home—expressive, eager, open—and felt bereft. Was it selfish, how much I wished Raven could know her?

__________

After eating, Raven sent her friend a photo of my crocodile. He texted back, “Cool. Tell your mom she needs a really good artist, though, if she’s gonna get that pine cone one she’s talking about—otherwise it could look like a poop emoji.”

“He’s not wrong,” I admitted. As visions of turd tattoos danced in our heads, Raven and I doubled over, chortling. 

Nothing to write holiday cards about, our miraculous everything.

Just a mother/daughter, sporting fresh ink, shooting dumb shit, finally meeting over fast food at the end of a long, hard year. 

---

Karen Sosnoski lives in Northern Virginia where she is finishing her memoir, Above Us Only Sky: Beyond My Addiction to My Daughter's Addiction. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Sunlight Press, and Healthline and on This American Life. She can be found at Blue Sky and LinkedIn. 

Anne Lamott’s “Recipe for Hope” (our best meal ever):

Hope begins in the dark, 

the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, 

the dawn will come. 

You wait, watch and work: you don't give up.