38.

From the incredibly beautiful Baby Blessing party that our friends threw for us.

Yesterday, Daniel fulfilled my one birthday wish by getting me a prenatal massage. When the masseuse came in, he commented on the tattoo on my arm and asked what kinds of flowers they were. I thought about how much I love that tattoo, how much intention and thought and artistry went into it. Then, I thought about the tattoo on the back of my neck, which I was sure he could also see, and felt shame and embarrassment well up.

The tattoo on the back of my neck – which people don’t see when my hair is long and down – is two Japanese characters that mean “rare” and “wish,” and translate to “hope.” I got it when I was 19ish, after I had decided to major in social work. That’s what I tell people: that social work is all about “holding hope” and so, I wanted a symbol of that on my body. The truthier truth is that I actually got it because I wanted an excuse to hang out with a boy, and having him go with me to get it – and to have him see me doing something so “rebellious” – was an excellent way to get his attention.

I got this tattoo before I understood cultural appropriation. I liked calligraphy – I still do – and it was kind of popular to do things like this at the time (I think Britney Spears had done it?). I also liked sushi and, apparently, calligraphy and sushi were enough appreciation for another culture for me to feel okay about tattooing their characters on my body. I used to tell people that a family friend drew the tattoo for me, both so that people would know that it didn’t say “stupid American” and to make it seem more okay for me to have used another culture in this way. The truth is, I found the image on Google (though, I have had Japanese friends tell me – probably while thinking, “Stupid American” – that it is, in fact, correct).

I think about getting this tattoo removed sometimes, now that I know more about cultural appropriation, but I’ve never seriously looked into it. First, I’m not highly motivated about things that aren’t that important to me, and that sounds like a lot of work and money for something that only bothers me occasionally. And two, much like the Santa Cruz Equity Collab specifically opted to not immediately repair our BLM mural after it was damaged – so that we’d all have some time and space to acknowledge and reckon with the racism that persists in our county and our world – I don’t know that erasing my youthful racism and ignorance, that pretending it never happened, is the best way to make amends for this harm.

I also don’t know that I want to cover up the younger versions of myself, who I used to be, the parts that all mash together to make me who I am today. Bean is making his arrival into the world in 3 – 5 weeks (max), and I don’t want to teach him that we can just cover up and erase the parts of us that we don’t like as much, that we can – or should – just pretend that mistakes didn’t happen. I want him to know that it’s normal and human to want to do so and to have some feels about our behavior. And that it’s also normal and human to change and grow and learn, and that our “mistakes” – I don’t even know that I like that word – can actually be really beautiful and important moments and parts of us.

I am 38 years-old today, and this is the age that I will be when I give birth to Bean, when I begin the unimaginable task of teaching a teeny tiny little squish how to make decisions, how to be themselves, how to build and live a life that they love. While I have some qualms about a person’s identity suddenly becoming centered around pregnancy and motherhood the minute that they announce that they’re pregnant, I also understand that this will be one of the most significant – if not the most significant – shifts in my life.

Maybe it’s because this age feels imbued with more significance because of Bean’s impending arrival, or maybe it’s because I am entering midlife, or maybe it’s just because. Whatever the reason, I have been reflecting a lot lately on the importance of honesty, on owning all the parts of who I am, on letting go of shame about things that I did in the past, on letting the truth of who I am – all the parts and experiences that make up who I am – stand in the world.

I’ve lived in California since 2015, the year that I turned 30. When I moved here, I did not know a single person other than my boyfriend-at-the-time that I moved here with. Which means that not one single person in my community here knew me in my 20s. I occasionally reference the days when I used to spend an hour straightening my hair every single day (and how much I want alllllll of that time back), never left the house without a full face of makeup, and was nearly always wearing high heels and some amount of fast fashion. People laugh, shake their heads, and can’t imagine that version of me.

The parts that I don’t mention as often are the ways that I behaved in my 20s. Most people know that I partied kind of hard, that I “struggled” (whatever that vaguely means), that I left my professional job to “travel” around the country for 2.5 years. They know the glossed over version of past Emma that I let them know, and they know the version of me now: loving, light, compassionate, hardworking. And that has been enough for people to know for the past eight years. But, again, I want 38 to be a year in which I get more honest, when I tell more of the truth. And so.

I had affairs with married men. Yes, plural; let’s just get that one out of the way off the bat. I lied, a lot. So much that there were times when I lost track of what was actually true. Sometimes, I’m still not entirely sure what actually happened because I’ve told a different version so many times. I stole money from people; not, like, a *ton* of money, but also more than $5. Somewhere between $5 and a ton. I stole the most money from my future self. I used all of this stolen money to help fuel a lifestyle of “traveling” and “working on farms” – the palatable version that I give people now, which leaves out the drug-fueled partying, sleeping in my car and tent and hotels when I could afford them, and general need to always be moving, lest the growing awareness that I was not okay with my choices catch up to me. I made my world incredibly small – just me and my then-boyfriend – so that nobody could see how I was living, nobody could hold me accountable, nobody could worry. I broke the law, a lot. I don’t feel bad about breaking the law because the laws that I broke are racist and unnecessary; the part that I have some feels about is that Black men are suffering through decades-long sentences in prison for the same ish that I got away with because I was a cute, white female. I was in a bad, bad, bad relationship during the years that I was “traveling,” which continued into a couple of years of living in California. I was breaking out into hives regularly from the stress of pretending that I was “fine” all day long at my job at CPS – which, at that time, I considered to be the least stressful part of my life. When the hives prompted me to start therapy, the therapist suggested that I might need to stop smoking so much weed for therapy to be successful; back then, I had no other coping skills for the pressure cooker that was my life, and so, I just stopped seeing her. Fortunately, before I quit therapy, she had recommended Al-Anon to me, so when I stopped seeing her – and knew that I was still very much not okay – I started going there, a decision which ultimately led to me changing my life and becoming the person that we now all know and love.

Which is not to say that I’m perfect now. I still use single-use plastics. I still eat cheap meat. I still buy things on Amazon. I still overcommit, people please, act as a martyr and hesitate to say “no.” I then still self-sacrifice in order to deliver, and sometimes hit walls of self-sacrifice and then still flake instead. I still indulge in judgment and gossip and resentment. I am still stubbornly – and detrimentally – self-reliant, while preaching the importance of community and asking for help. I still don’t quite trust that people will love me if I’m not hustling really hard all the time to demonstrate my value to them. I still suck at gift giving; I will remember your birthday, for sure, but showing up with a thoughtful gift? Oof. I still try to control other people’s behavior when I am overwhelmed or anxious. I still start almost all sentences about my plans with, “I have to…” instead of “I get to…” – as in “I have to have dinner with so-and-so” – language that implies that nearly every single thing that I do is an obligation rather than a joy. I am still, sometimes, more concerned with how things look than how they actually are, still a little bit addicted to trying to control how people see me. I still doubt my own worth, sometimes wondering if I really deserve to be in a relationship with someone as kind and good as Daniel, if I deserve this community that loves me so unbelievably well.

Now, I could tell y’all about all of the important and profound lessons that I learned from behaving in these ways, about knowing that the goal is “progress, not perfection,” about how my deep well of compassion for other people’s human-ness comes – at least, in part – from my fucking up so many times in my own life. But I don’t think that this is about that.

So, what is this about? What am I seeking from sharing all of this stuff? (This stuff which, when Daniel read it, caused him to wince and ask, “You want to publish this? I mean, I totally support you. You just might get some backlash.” “But it’s my birthday. People can’t be too mean on my birthday, right?”) The answer is: I’m not entirely sure. Maybe it’s self-acceptance. Maybe it’s to test whether people will still love me if they really know me. Maybe it’s because I want us all to have permission to stop hiding the things that we’ve done that we aren’t proud of, and so I’m “letting it begin with me” and giving myself that same permission. Mostly, it’s that I just want the truth to get to be in the light, to be out in the world. I want the truth to exist somewhere outside of my body. That’s it. That’s all that I am seeking: to release, to lighten, to get a little bit freer.

I have three tattoos, in total: one is a little heart on my lower stomach that I got right around my 18th birthday. That one was purely a symbol of rebellion, a mark of independence that I could now make this decision for myself, a decision that I had been waiting to make for a few years. I forget this one exists (and haven’t even seen it in a few months, thanks to my pregnant belly; I actually asked Daniel the other day if it was still there). The second one is the one on the back of my neck that I talked about above, the impulsive, culturally appropriated, mark on my body that I got to attract a guy’s attention. Both of these – especially the second one – could be seen as cautionary tales about tattoos, the stereotypical reason to not permanently mark your body with something that you might not want on there forever. For me, though, even if I don’t particularly like them now, I like that they serve as reminders of my younger selves, of who I was and what I was doing at that time in my life, symbols of my evolution as a person.

I love my third tattoo. It is my first “grown-up” tattoo, a super intentional, thoughtful work of art that symbolizes so much of my healing. It includes the words “let go,” a sign of the faith that I found when I started doing healing / recovery work.

I realized a couple of years ago that I have ‘hope’ written on my neck; a heart, which generally symbolizes ‘love’; and a tattoo to symbolize ‘faith.’ “And now these three remain: Faith, hope, and love.” Without any intention – and without even knowing that Bible verse when I was 18 – I ended up with those three deeply spiritual principles tattooed on my body, which wouldn’t have coincidentally happened if I hadn’t been young and reckless and unconcerned with the future. Which, is actually kind of perfect to me.

“And the greatest of these is love.”