Turns out, the tattoo I got at age 21 was the only parenting advice I needed
When I was 21, I walked into a tattoo studio in downtown Toronto on a grey spring day to keep an appointment with a man in a sparkly electric-blue apron. It took roughly half an hour for him to ink the best parenting advice I?ve ever received across the inside of my left wrist.
Back then, starting a family couldn?t have been further from my mind. I was a single university student with a part-time job selling art supplies. I had hatched the idea for the tattoo one year earlier. When my plan was dismissed as silly by my then-boyfriend, I stubbornly vowed that if I still thought it was a good idea a year later, I would get it done.
One year later, the boyfriend was gone, but the idea wasn?t.
I got the tattoo.
It?s just one word?a simple concept that is often difficult for me to practice: ?patience,? it says, in a cursive script underscored by a bass-clef flourish. As an impatient young person, I wanted to have an indelible reminder etched somewhere I could see it. I had lofty ambitions for my new adornment. I planned to tell ridiculous stories about its origins at parties. I thought I?d devote entire afternoons to deep, philosophical ruminations with my friends about virtues in general, and patience in particular?sparked, of course, by my tattoo.
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