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The New Tattoo

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When I was a child my mother had a tattoo of a bird on her chest. One of my earliest memories is of tracing that tiny bird with my finger. It was a tiny grey line of a bird and tattooed underneath it were the words, Free Bird. When I was eleven she had it covered up with a different bird. I tried to talk her out of getting the new tattoo. In my eleven-year-old mind that tiny grey bird was a part of her in a way that new bird, drinking nectar from a flower, wasn’t. I still remember that tiny grey bird, but now I sometimes wonders of its true meaning. My mother was a teenage when I was born. In a lot of ways, we grew-up together. She didn’t always make the most responsible choices and those bad choices shaped who I would become as an adult. My mother grew up in conservative rural Montana, where sex education was non-existent, and in a Catholic home where any conversations about sex were taboo. When she found out she was pregnant with me, the doctor had to explain to her how babies were made. Yes, my mother found out how babies were made after she was already pregnant. The first time my mother lived independently, from my grandparents, I was three. We lived with my mom’s sister in a white house at the end of a long dirt road. The house was surrounded by fields of grass and wild flowers. Although my memories of that time are few there was a feeling of overall happiness and wellbeing. My aunt would ride her bike to work every day and my mother and I would run down the road to

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