Two in the same day, what are the odds? It's getting worse and worse, people. I'm stunned, not only at parental overreach, but by kids' unwillingness to transform into the adults they are at eighteen years of age.
Early in the day, a young lady came in for a small tattoo on her hip. As I'm getting ready, she hands me her cell phone.
"My mom wants to talk to...the tattoo artist?" She half said, half-asked, and I had no idea why she was so confused as to who I was and what my job was. We had exchanged emails several times the evening before, suddenly she thought I might be the janitor or something.
I took the phone from her and asked, "Can I help you?"
"Uh, hello...hello?" Came the feeble voice from the other end.
"Yes, can I help you?"
"Oh! Uh, well, this is _______'s mother," she began.
"Yes?" I asked.
"Well, uh, my daughter is eighteen now, and, well, you know, she wants to be a rebel, you know, kids, they just, well...you know, they gotta go out and just be themselves, and..." I sighed and caught myself starting to eye-roll, as I realized that the girl was standing there watching me and this was her mother on the phone. As stupid as this whole scenario was becoming, I still wanted to be polite.
Mom continued, "So, anyway, so where she's getting this tattoo, on her hip, will she be able to drive herself home, or will she be...does she need someone to accompany her?"
"No, ma'am, what I'll be doing to her is very minor. It's not major surgery."
"Oh. Okay. Well, I know, she's eighteen, and so she's an adult, but, I'm her mother, I don't need to be there with her, do I?"
I resisted the urge to tell her that she answered her own question. I think I might have given myself a hemorrhoid from the strain. "No, ma'am, you don't need to be here," I said through gritted teeth.
"Oh, good. Because, you know, I mean, she is eighteen and all, but I just don't know how..." her voice trailed away as I took the phone from my ear and handed it back to the girl. Mom kept going for a minute or two and didn't seem to notice that the "Uh huhs" she was getting as a reply were now coming from her kid instead of me. They launched into a two-minute game of "I love you...I love you more...I love YOU more...I love you the most...no, *I* love you the most....bye...bye....bye...." and she finally hung up.
"She is CRAZY." The girl sighed.
"Do yourself a favor, kid," I said, with a stern look. "When you go off to college, go to Guam or something."
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Later that same day, a young lady came in looking for a quote. I wasn't helping her, but I had the (dis)pleasure of standing nearby as one of my co-workers got sucked into one of the finest evening melodramas I've seen in a while. Having picked out a quote and a font, the young lady asked for a minute to text her mom and send a picture of the stencil. Mom came right back and demanded a different quote.
"She says get a different quote," the young lady announced to her friends. The phone pinged, she looked and read, "something spiritual".
The three girls puzzled over what mom meant by that when the phone pinged again, and our Heroine read, "It better not be big". She looked to my co-worker and asked, "Can it be smaller?"
She got the explanation over why tattoos cannot be super-tiny, and she texted back to mom whatever her version of that spiel might be. The phone pinged, she read, and then she asked, "What size is that, exactly?"
My co-worker sighed. "I have no idea."
She looked down at her phone. "She said, 'it cannot be more than one-quarter inch'."
The girls had another huddle and finally she said, "Whatever, I'm just gonna do it. Let's do it." Atta girl, I thought to myself, as her thumbs furiously tapped her phone screen, making her intentions clear to mom.
Ping.
She stared at the screen. "You'll be sorry," she read. The three looked at each other for a moment. She sighed and said, a little ruefully, "I'll be back in four months." They went out into the night and I wondered what was going to happen in four months. She was moving out? Joining the military? Murdering mom with a loaf of stale French bread? Kids, listen. I've said it before and I'll say it again: If you're an adult, act like one. Make your own decisions. Stop asking your mommies. They're not going to agree, they're not going to approve, and when you beg you're just embarrassing yourself in front of us and your friends. And the internet when I write about it. If your parents are that controlling, that emotionally manipulative, just move out. I keep hearing, "They're not gonna pay for my college/rent/crack habit if I get tattooed." Well, here's an fascinating fact about life: The person paying for all your shit gets to tell you what to do. If you're accepting all the free shit, you're locked into that agreement. Stop mooching off their stuff and expecting you're gonna get to do whatever you want.You can't have it both ways. My Pop always used to say, "When you pay your own way, you can do whatever the hell you want," and he was right. The last time I called him to ask if I could do something, I was asking if I could use a 30-W motor oil in my car because I couldn't find my chassis manual, I was covered in grease and I didn't want to go tromping back through the house to look it up online. I certainly didn't ask for permission to buy that car because it was my motherfuckin' money and he hasn't paid my bills in two decades. So there it is, kids. Move out if you don't like their rules. Or else just do it anyway and be a real fuckin' rebel. Rebels don't check with their mommies first.
