1.17.2017

Eight and Nine

I’ve had my birthday in the last 30 days and it’s a new year.  There’s always tons of reflection that I do during this time. 

Just this past week, I got my eighth and ninth tattoos.  

Say what now?

Holy shit, I have nine fucking tattoos.

This year, Ray & I will be celebrating 17 years together.  14 of them married.  

I told him that my tattoos are symbolic of our relationship.  He had this puzzled look on his face. What do you mean?  He asked.

I told him it’s because when he met me, I only had 1 tattoo.  On my back.  A small sun that hardly anyone could see.  Now?  I have 3 tattoos on one arm; two on the other.  They definitely can be seen - especially on a summer day when all I can stand are tank tops.  I have 3 on my back and one on my foot.  This was not the woman he married.  I told him that I doubted that he looked at me walking down the aisle on our wedding day and thought man, she’s going to get a lot more tattoos!

He laughed.

The tattoos are a physical manifestation of the growth and change in our relationship.  We are not the same people who met in 2000.  I’ve been blessed to feel like not only have the changes we’ve both made have been accepted, but the process has also been honored and celebrated.  That wasn’t the plan, per se.  There was no plan, except to spend the rest of our lives together.  

Communication is a huge part of our relationship, so when I realized my own feelings about it,  I told him I was going to start getting tattoos - with the likely conclusion being that I would eventually have full sleeves.  He didn’t flinch.  Told me to go for it.  I asked him if he was really OK, because I knew that marking my body in such a way - while it was something I absolutely needed to do - was going to be something he’d be looking at until one of us died.  Besides, what if it turned him off?  It wasn’t like I was getting ‘ALL ABOARD’ tattooed above my ass, right?  I wanted my ink, but I didn’t want to stop getting laid. Again, without hesitation, he told me that I had his support - so much so that he got a tattoo right along side me that first time. Six years later, he’s still rooting me on;  he designed tattoo #8. 

The acceptance that exists in our relationship sometimes astounds me - and I’m living it.  We met in our mid-twenties and are worlds away from those two wonderful souls who decided to lean in to their inexplicably strong feelings.  I’m so grateful to them for making a pact that it was just them against the world.  I’m so glad we’ve seen each other through the last half of our twenties, all through the thirties and are now nestled together in our forties.   We’ve raised a family.  We’ve lost family members and dealt with serious illness, together.  

He’s never, not once, tried to change me.  I don’t have to conform to some kind of standard.  All I have to do is be me.  That’s all he has to do too.  It’s what makes the relationship our safe place in the world. 

More tattoos will be coming.  Without a doubt, I’ll get the itch for more and I’ll hit double digits.  As I told him all those years ago, this will go on until I’m on to that next place.  There is something inside me that compels me to do this.  It’s part of my evolution, I know it and I accept it - even if others in my life don’t quite understand my ‘why’.  I do and he does.  

That’s enough.