Today's Mother

I feel compelled to offer an unrelated preamble today. The thing is that I've never been much for running posts on the actual day their subject matter might call for, and this is no exception. It occurred to me that if I'm going to write about mothers, maybe the thing to do is to wait until May, when the holiday occurs. I could even write it now and schedule it for then. I just figured that if I wait, I'll forget the idea I have, and if I write it now, I'll have to see it sitting there on the webpage for months. That sounds even worse to me. I'll just run it now, I reasoned, and no one's really got any standing to question that. It's really nice to be answerable to no one where this blog is concerned, although if I were it might be more successful. Such was F. Scott Fitzgerald's reliance on his editor, if I recall right.

Now then, I believe I was actually going to discuss mothers. This calls for some reminiscence. I was born in the early 80s, having my early childhood during that decade, with my later childhood and adolescence falling in the 90s. Throughout all of my childhood, a certain picture formed of what a mother was and looked like. She might or might not work, and while she might not look like June Cleaver, she didn't look like Joan Jett either. I'm speaking in generalities, you understand- not specifically referring to anyone in particular. When I think of all the women I knew to be someone's mother at the time, they were more or less conservative in appearance. Casual and formal wear did not veer too far from the offerings of Sears or L.L. Bean. Jewelry was restricted to rings, bracelets and earrings. There was no- and I mean no- body art of any kind.

Things have changed. Tattoos, nose rings, tongue studs and the like were once what separated the fringe from the establishment. Their use represented deliberate separation and antagonizing of a section of society that their users abhorred for reasons social and political. Somehow the line has moved. As George Carlin once noted, a man once wore an earring or had tattoos to 'piss off the squares', but he noted that now the squares had them too. Social fissures aside, it is jarring now to see who now has the tattoos. I don't remember ever seeing parents or anyone older having any of these things (veterans and ex-cons excepted in the last case), and now I see it all the time. It's not always a little tattoo on the ankle, either. The other day, I was on the bus watching a harried mother trying wrangle her little son and daughter, both something like three or four years old. She was just covered in tattoos, and had I seen her alone I would have marked her as an irredeemable punk rock band adherent.

It's probably nothing that ought to surprise me. It really is an entirely natural, logical and linear progression one might have seen coming fifty years ago, with a little vision. When people are in their teens and twenties, they rebel. They may discard the clothing fashions, but they keep the music and I guess they have little choice but to keep the tattoos that some accumulate as well, like it or not. My guess is that they like it. What might be the hardest thing to accept is not that this has happened. It's that it's already been substantially accepted, and the time will come soon when I'm the last one that remembers it was weird. What will be weirder still? Spurning the piercings and body art will be the new rebellion. As discombobulating as that will be, I think I'll be glad to be there and see that.