Almost got a tattoo

I have a tattoo.  It's the comedy/drama masks and represents how important the theater was for the first 25 years of my life.

And immediately after the miscarriage, all I wanted was some permanent etching on my body of my girls that would never go away.

I thought about using the image I had used in the blog post to announce my two girls, but then realized that any version of connecting female symbols would communicate "lesbian" and not "twin girls".  Lesbians are awesome, but not what I was hoping to honor with a permanent skin scar.

Besides, K hates tattoos.  So I was trying to figure out where I could put something small that would be hidden most of the time, but wouldn't be in K's face every time we proved that there is sex after miscarriage.

I told myself that I would give it a year before making any permanent life decisions.  Frantic grief isn't really the moment to be changing your body or your life in a way that can't be unchanged again.

And then it occurred to me - shards of my pottery are going to outlast me by centuries.  Possibly thousands of years.  How do we know how the greeks lived?  Archeologists dig up their pottery!  And every day, I'm creating an archeological archive of my own existence when I'm out there playing in clay.

So I've redesigned my signature stamp.  It's always been just my initials from my original name with all of the vertical lines connected - MMR.

Here is the new design -

2 circles, in the same position they were in inside my body, and the cross of the female symbol on the vertical.

And here's the new stamp in action on the bottom of a teacup I just made.

Thousands of years from now, a shard of pottery with that symbol will be found.  And while they won't be able to interpret the story of what it means, I don't care.  Someone will see that they existed, even if that person doesn't know what they're looking at.