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A little over two years ago, my husband and I were not in a good place, and hadn’t been for awhile. We’d had a rough couple of years (baby during a pandemic, anyone?!?), and were generally coexisting in the same space, often not peaceably. I was miserably unhappy, and I had started to wonder whether maybe I couldn’t be happy with him at all...couldn’t be my true self with him. We both, candidly, didn’t like each other very much. Thankfully, he agreed to start couples therapy, we found the most incredible therapist for us, and now I can confidently say that we have the tools to figure things out when shit goes awry (one of the tools being said therapist, who we’ll see for as long as she’ll have us).

When my youngest daughter was about six months old, I started wanting a tattoo. At the time I think it was probably stemming from a minor identity crisis, but the hunger for it lasted five years. Five years I spent looking for ideas, comparing fonts, creating a folder in my phone for all the photos of tattoos I liked. The nudge I needed to make the appointment came when I asked my husband's thoughts on a design and he said “you’re never really getting a tattoo.”

The news coming out of Minneapolis has weighed heavily on me, particularly the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both of them thirty-seven years old. I wanted to go to a protest after Renee Good’s death, because that was absolutely the straw that broke the camel’s back for me, but I was scared. I’m ashamed of it, but I was.