Monthly Archives: May 2016

May14

Cheers to Stubbornhood.

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I like to believe I come from a long line of strong females. Independent, fierce, and inevitably stubborn—stop thinking that’s a bad thing. My mother radiates all of these qualities, and for Taylor’s sake, she doesn’t have a choice. In a room full of doctors and nurses strongly suggesting to follow a certain path of care, she will stick to her guns and order them to do as her gut tells her. Oddly enough, it is when she doesn’t follow her gut that trouble arises and Taylor declines. Those nurses at the University of Michigan who have previously cared for Taylor, know the routine and respect her wishes, while those who are new will be forewarned before entering into the room. With 40-some medications on his allergy list, many of the nurses will double check with her before administering the drug. On multiple occasions, the pharmacy has disbursed the wrong medication, or one containing dyes (he’s strongly allergic to all dyes), and the nurse will have to return for the proper drug. My mother doesn’t sleep on these overnight trips to the hospital, living off the makeshift bed in the room and once spending over three months in the hospital. When Taylor is admitted, she doesn’t leave. But it’s not like she gets any better sleep at home.

With routine meds taken every three to four hours, along with the constant disruption from getting up to suction out Taylor’s lungs, its no wonder the only full night’s sleep she gets is on vacation. Her last vacation was a few days trip to Boston. Three nights of freedom from being woken up to a dozen times in the night. Three nights out of 365. And you thought the newborn baby routine is difficult. Naps are out of the question. Fed through a g-tube with the use of a food pump, twice a day, the machine likes to disrupt any peace by beeping and demanding to be reset. And let’s not forget them seizures, the sucking of the lungs, the repositioning in bed…

My mother is a real-life zombie.

Or so you would expect her to be. Surprisingly, she’s not most days. Lord knows I would be. Nineteen years of no good sleep, I’d be begging for eternal sleep at that rate. That’s a torture technique: waking up the victim just as they fall asleep or just after negatively impacts the mind. It harms the senses and blurs reality. Imagine: tortured in your own home by a lifestyle you wouldn’t dare change because the only other option is to neglect your child. Makes you feel a little bit better about that once a week, maybe, 4:00 A.M. wakeup call after only three hours of sleep I bet.

I grew up living with my grandmother during childhood. For years, as the head ER nurse, she worked long, strenuous hours to provide for her family. Now, retired, she resides on a farm doing the work she once did as a child. She’s a working machine who, like her daughter, doesn’t know rest. Yet, somehow, I always mistake her age because lord knows she still looks to be only in her sixties to me. She’s not, definitely not. I’m blessed with good genes in the family, thank you.

Evelynn wasn’t an expected pregnancy. She took me by quite the surprise. I’m not the most nurturing person on the planet. While I often babysat during my teenage years, I don’t handle tears well and I run from discussions regarding….feelings. That’s never been my strong suit for conversation topics. But I was excited to be a mom. Scared, most definitely. But I was full of excitement that bubbled energetically beneath my skin. It amazed me people couldn’t tell, how they would ask me if I was okay with it rather than congratulate me. Or worse, ask me if I was keeping it, as if they didn’t expect me to want her. (Scroll down the blog to a few posts before for my thoughts on abortion and why I’m pro-choice.) I’ll admit, I’m one to rarely show excitement over anything; even a trip to Florida won’t have me squealing in glee like a twelve-year-old girl at a One Direction concert.

It’s not a secret that I moved in with my parents during my pregnancy, mostly because I was jobless shortly after the first trimester ended and then increasingly because the pregnancy proved to be a difficult one. However, many people wrongly assume that because I live with my parents, and am juggling work and school, that I don’t provide for primary care. It’s like any other family situation, but as a single parent, I’m extremely lucky to have parents, a stay-at-home mom, who is more than willing and happy to provide for free daycare. And why wouldn’t I want Evelynn to be watched by her own family instead of paying a facility when I’m against daycare?

People often talk behind backs and closed doors. I’d like to use the human nature excuse but we all know its not human decency. When I broke it off with Evelynn’s father, I was the target for judgment. But nobody was willing to ask why or if I was okay with it then. I was relieved and thrilled, and for that I am labeled the selfish bitch. I’ll shoulder it and continue to, because it was best, for me and for my daughter. I set out to set an example of never settling, in career, in love, in life. And I intend to do that. I’m already doing that. And with great female role models growing up, I’m not worried about doing wrong.

My daughter eats healthier than most adults I know—for that I’ve been told I’m not letting her be a child. If I don’t comment on the preservatives and dyes and artificials you feed your child, please refrain from the healthy nature I’m instilling in my child. Besides, she likes and eats the food I give her. I changed her pediatrician because we got in arguments over Evelynn’s water consumption—they wanted me to cut back in order for her to eat more while I wasn’t willing to do so when she looked fine, they were more concerned with the numbers on a scale and how she matched up with other babies her age. News flash: she was born small and society’s average baby build is consistently getting bigger. I only breastfed for a few months—my milk supply diminished on its own. I shouldn’t have to defend myself on this topic yet people always asked, “Are you breastfeeding?” and followed it with, “Well, you should try to hold out at least a year.” I’ve no comment. No response on this would be deemed “acceptably nice.” The best is when I’m told I need to date for a father figure in Evelynn’s life. She sees her dad once a week most weeks, and she has her papa for a male role model. Thank you. Besides, haven’t you heard? I’m supermom.

Here’s to the two women who have repeatedly proved stubborn is one of the best traits a mom can be. Go ahead and call me stubborn, I’ll gladly take it as a compliment.

May11

Tattoo Neglected

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Come here. No, closer. Let me prick you—not poke. I am not that needle which injects your flu shot or draws a vial of blood from the crook of your elbow. But I may steal some. Have it smeared on your skin. It’s up to you and your intoxication, you’re responsible for the amount you bleed—let’s hope you didn’t lie on that permission form sheet with your signature. To which do I owe this pleasure? A false identification and the need to rebel? A craving to be under the pinpricking, rhythmic needle? Peer pressure and insecurity? Liquid courage? Oh, never mind. It hardly matters.

Your body is my canvas, unappreciated by others—don’t worry, those idle judgments from yesterday have not caught up with the times, still living in the olden days, pre 1970s. I’d like to thank MTV and pro athletes for implying my permanent marks are cool. And for organizations, like the Alliance for Professional Tattooists, for cleaning up the industry, finally—finally!—realizing “safer practices protect the clients—and the tattooists.”1 Thanks for saving my job but the help was uncalled for; I have been surviving in traditions and on outcasts for many years before the general public was willing to accept what I do, who I am.

Before entering jail cells, before parlors popping up on main street meant whorehouses next door2—irrational fear if you ask me—I was the sacred instrument to grant Dhegiha women “their proper place in the cosmology of their community.” I was fired from that honorable role by the mid 1950s.3 I simply couldn’t have the best of both worlds when mainstream, my sudden popularity, shot it—the private, quiet, treasured practice I performed for the Dhegiha—to hell and people suddenly began to seek out this form of expression.4 But I am fashion crazed, wanting nothing more than to please (except for the judgers—screw the judgers). And am entirely dependent on the needs of my artists and victims—that first bite from the needle always relinquishes a response, no matter how ready or willing one is, and I crave that intake of air, irregular heartbeat, or first bead of sweat. I am a machine, made of many-pointed needles holding the ink within my layers and puncturing the skin—what a lovely, lively canvas—so the ink can be drawn down,5 permanently marking, embedding itself in that smooth and enticing skin.

It’s this permanence they—the incessant and relentless judgers—can’t stand, the desecration of God’s perfect image forming my best canvases.6 In my mobility—the walking portraits of my artwork—I am greater than the brushes of Van Gogh or Picasso,7 for these “symbols of ownership by, devotion to, identification with, and protection by a deity or master can demonstrate the image of god.”8 My audience is greater. My persistence and prevalence over the years are slowly but surely wearing these horror-stricken Christians down. It helps that my creator, Samuel O ‘Reilly, modernized me back in 1891 when he invented the first electric tattoo machine; and certainly, Thomas Edison deserves my gratitude, for it was his embroidery machine that the invention was based on.9

Don’t deceive yourself into thinking I’m only a century old. When I was first born, I was mostly made of needles from bones. To the Polynesians who inhabited Hawaii, I was better known as kakau, guarding their health and spiritual well-being. My depictions of lizards, greatly respected and feared, and the Hawaiian crescent fan, to distinguish society’s highest-ranking members, were revered. Their bodies were further adorned with intricate tribal patterns and designs on the hands, fingers, wrists, and tongues for women; arms, legs, torsos, and face for men. I was only “a needle made from bone, tied to a stick and struck by a mallet” to apply pigment to the skin. After each use, I was destroyed. The secrecy of the practice was so highly guarded.10 (You didn’t hear it from me.) For the Inuit in the American Arctic, I was nothing more than eyed-bone needles and pigment-rubbed sinew stitched through their skin.11 But it was the Tahitians who gave my work a name, derived from their tatau, “to mark.” First used by Louis Antoine de Bougainville, the French Navigator, in 1771 to describe my decorations on the body canvas. He translated my name to “tattoo.”12

Responsible for these markings, I am the identifier of lost sailors. In their fear of shipwrecks, I was called upon to ensure their Christian—yes, the irony!—burial. I was the badge for the prostitutes’ profession. For prisoners, I am the favored way to rebel against society and express their protests. Then there are the SS men—the bloody bastards!—who had me mark their blood group on the inside of their upper arms. My least favorite role, though, was playing slave to the Nazis, forced to permanently ink numbers on their victims’ arms.13 Keith Underwood may have clipped the cord, revolutionizing me into a battery-operated machine gun.14 What a terrible term. I despise the accuracy that negativity—“gun”—can convey. For the surviving Holocaust victims, I am the gun that triggers their memories with the worst artwork imaginable.

I told you I have existed much longer than the simple, cordless machine, as I am most commonly recognized. Since the Neolithic Period, some 5,300 years ago, I have been producing artwork on this earth.15 Please, don’t judge my age. My work has survived centuries. Didn’t you ever hear of the frozen corpse found trapped in a melting glacier in the Otztaler Alps back in 1991?16 No?! What do you mean No?! That’s a damned shame. I survive in the memories of Holocaust victims—in work I’d love to erase—but am neglected for traversing time and honoring traditions.

My popularity is no longer derived from tradition and honor, but rather controversy and personal experience. It’s the negative biases people have that I cannot forgive. I am harmless. Despite the nightmares the sight of my permanent mark may give Holocaust survivors. Or the cringe I receive from people who sought out my artwork in haste to showcase a love that didn’t last or an intoxicated decision they can’t remember. I do not discriminate. Soccer moms, veterans, athletes, rock stars, sailors, prostitutes, convicted felons. I have done them all. They do not deserve my rash judgment when I don’t know their stories. And I am worth much more than the harshness afforded me over decades by those who don’t know mine. But now you do.

 

Notes

  1. Berkowitz, Bonnie, “Tattooing outgrows its renegade image to thrive in the mainstream,” The Washington Post, February 8, 2011, accessed November 1, 2015, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/07/AR2011020704915.html
  2. Berkowitz.
  3. Betsy Phillips, “Unearthing the Secrets of North America’s Tattooing Traditions,” Think Progress, March 2014, accessed November 1, 2015, http://thinkprogress.org/culture/2014/03/17/3410711/native-american-tattoos/
  4. Phillips.
  5. Rachel Feltman, “Watching a tattoo needle in slow motion reveals the physics of getting inked,” The Washington Post, September 24, 2014, accessed November 1, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2014/09/24/watching-a-tattoo-needle-in-slow-motion-reveals-the-physics-of-getting-inked/
  6. Lorne Zelyck, “Under the Needle,” Christian Research Institute 28, no. 6 (2005). Accessed November 1, 2015, http://www.equip.org/article/under-the-needle/
  7. Janet S. Fedorenko, Susan C. Sherlock, and Patricia L. Stuhr, “A Body of Work: a case study of tattoo culture,” Visual Arts Research 25, no. 1 (1999): 105-114. Accessed November 1, 2015, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20715974
  8. Zelyck.
  9. Zelyck
  10. “Skin Stories: the art and culture of Polynesian tattoo,” PBS, 2003, accessed November 1, 2015, http://www.pbs.org/skinstories/history/hawaii.html
  11. Phillips.
  12. Fedorenko et al, p. 105.
  13. Fedorenko et al, p. 106.
  14. Keith A. Underwood, 2003. Tattoo Technology. U.S. Patent US6550356B1, filed September 15, 2000, and issued April 22, 2003, accessed November 1, 2015, https://www-google-com.ezproxy.emich.edu/patents/US6550356
  15. Fedorenko et al, p. 105.
  16. Fedorenko et al, p. 105.