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Helen Klein Ross
Their Bodies, Ourselves

See my tattoo? A friend extends her forearm to me. She has just come back from a vacation in the islands with a black blot on her arm in the shape of a lizard. It’s only henna, she says, but I’m getting one done just like it for real.

She means to amuse me, or perhaps means for me to share her delight in her free-spiritedness at the age of sixty, but I feel socked in the stomach. My daughter just got a tattoo, I say by way of explaining my lack of enthusiasm.

Which place did she go to? my friend wants to know, and I feel the force of a one-two punch.

My daughter got a tattoo the month she turned fifteen, on a day she told me she was meeting friends for pizza. She did meet friends for pizza, but after that she and a friend took a cab to the Village. This friend looks even younger than my daughter does, and now every maternal instinct rises in me, and I wish I could have dissuaded those two impetuous, unblemished girls from walking up and down Eighth Street, peering into the windows of tattoo parlors, scouting for one that looks seedy enough to overlook the fact that they are, indisputably, minors…

Excerpted from I Wanna Be Sedated: 30 Writers on Parenting Teenagers Copyright 2005 by Helen Klein Ross