When Son Number One was 16, he spent the summer not wearing shorts. On holiday that year, he spent a lot of time in the pool, and seemed to wait until eyes were elsewhere before he got out or went in.
You can see it coming: he’d got a tattoo on one of his calves; which wasn’t revealed for another couple of years. Afterwards, he kept referring back to that holiday, and his astonishment that he’d got away with it. There wouldn’t have been high-fives all round if it had been noticed at the time, yet it probably wouldn’t have provoked the outrage he had feared. He was a teenager, fully intent on pushing against all boundaries. There were far worse things to be worrying about.
With a spooky dash of synchronicity, Herself was recently in a tattoo-related controversy.
There was a sudden, thrilling silence, during which all the old familial roles clicked in. The disapproving parent. The rebellious teen
She’d been talking about getting one for years: she just couldn’t decide what she might like. And when she did decide, there just wasn’t the time, or she was a bit broke this month or the woman she wanted to do it didn’t have a slot.
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But there was another reason too.
The tattoo design was exceptionally clever. It was that Banksy image of a little girl letting go of a balloon, except the girl’s hair was changed to Daughter Number Four’s fabulous curls. The girl was positioned on her forearm, with the string from the balloon winding up her arm. And when she finally got it done, Herself was delighted with it: she excitedly showed it to everyone. Everyone except her mother.
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Yes, she’s a grown woman. Yet the roles assigned to us through our family structures – parent, child, sibling – are never completely escapable. Siblings will have hierarchies established when they were children. I often catch myself telling my grown-up children things they already know. I often catch them telling me things they think I want to hear so I’ll be proud of them. When I see my sister, we always say ‘Allo in a cockney accent. Because that’s how we spoke when we were children.
Herself’s mother is virulently anti-tattoo. She heartily disapproves of mine and made a decent attempt at hiding her horror at the sight of the graffitied arms of Daughters One Two and Three. She did point out to Daughter Number Two that, now that she has a law degree, having the word f**k inscribed on her arm might stymie her chances of becoming a High Court judge. Which is a fair point.
Obviously, this is a generational thing. While nowadays, having a tattoo barely constitutes rebellion, to Herself’s mother, people with tattoos are the sort who will burgle your house.
So, Herself put off telling her, until – and you can see this coming too – she unthinkingly pulled up her sleeves while serving lunch.
“Did you get a tattoo?”
There was a sudden, thrilling silence, during which all the old familial roles clicked in. The disapproving parent. The rebellious teen. But it was punctured by Daughter Number Four – who seemed to find all this hugely entertaining. She asked her granny: “Are you angry?”
Granny, also stuck in her role, couldn’t help but deploy the parental A-bomb. “Not angry. Disappointed.”
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I like to think the laughter this prompted carried within it a glimmer of insight: that everyone was playing a part, one formed by generations of expectation. The moment passed and the conversation moved on.
Fired by the passion of new motherhood, Daughter Number One is going through a phase of reading parenting books: the sort that lay out the mistakes her parents made and how to avoid repeating them. I want to tell her that mistakes are inevitable; that Philip Larkin was right, that it’s better to find people where they are, not where you’d like them to be. I don’t want to tell her because I’m trying to resist my default father role. Yet sooner or later, I probably will.