The Tattoo

Fatherhood is like that tattoo you got when you were too young to know any better. There are days when you see the wrinkled skin and tiny gray hairs that are curling around that mark on your chest and you wish you could get it burned off with a torch, but mostly you’ve learned to live with it. Sometimes when you’ve had a few too many you actually enjoy looking at it, like a picture of an old girlfriend. And then there are times that you’re stone sober and you know that you’ll never be able to get rid of it but you love what it says about you anyway. For my money, that’s as good a definition of being a father as I could ever come up with.

Here's an example.

My middle daughter is working on getting into college and we’re working on helping her. I say “working on” with genuine sarcasm. My daughter doesn’t really want to go to college right now. We really don’t want to have to pay for it. And most of the colleges she’s applying for don’t really want her – they’ve got too many other kids banging on their door who don’t really want to go - and whose parents don’t really want to pay for it - to care all that much about whether or not they accept my kid. So it’s kind of joke. And it would actually be very funny if it wasn’t the rest of her life we were talking about.

Of course, I’m mostly just exaggerating. My daughter does really want to go to college – she’s just scared of growing up and that’s manifesting itself in teenage apathy and less than stellar SAT scores. My wife and I do want to be able to pay for her college – it’s just that we can’t quite figure out how to squeeze 50 thousand dollars a year out of grocery and mortgage money. And I’m sure many colleges would love to have my daughter, no matter her SAT scores – as long as we can pay the 50 thousand dollars a year in cash. And that brings me back to the tattoo.

Like the tattoo, this exquisite farce of trying to get my daughter into a college is just another reminder of fatherhood. I can’t ignore it and I can’t wish it away. The best I can do is to see her college education as something that is a part of me, something that is because of a choice I made a long time ago. My daughters and their futures are my tattoo and my duty is to accept and defend that which sits on my chest above my heart. It hurt when I put it there and I shouldn’t expect it to stop hurting now just because the ink that mixed in with the blood is fading.

Next weekend, we’ll face our fears of the future and take my daughter to visit a couple of colleges. My daughter will be anxious and non-committal the whole time. My wife will be stoic and encouraging while we walk the campuses. And I will look at the heavily endowed buildings and the state of the art music facilities and wonder how, in the name of all things holy, I’ll ever pay for it.

But when we’re done and we’re on our way back from the weekend and all is well, I might just make the following suggestion to my wife and daughter. Since we’ve come this far, I’ll say, why don’t we stop by one of the cities we pass on the way home and celebrate? We could go to a nice dinner. Or we could spend some time site seeing.

Or better still, since we’ve come all this way, perhaps we could take a little side trip to one of the seedier parts of town where I could find a place to mark the occasion with a tattoo.