Team Hedgehog

The first thing I notice is that the printout of my tattoo is large. It actually seems huge to me, like a shin guard covering the entirety of my lower leg. “I don’t know, do you think it’s too big?” I ask. My son says, “It’s sooo cute, mom!”. “It looks so good!” my daughter enthuses. 

They’ve betrayed me. 

What good is their combination of Millenial/Gen Z agency and their bountiful experience with tattoos if it’s not yielding an immediate request of the artist to make it smaller? 

“Mom. It’s just 2 inches tall.” I guess they have a point.  

My children are holding their stencils up on their respective forearms and they love them. I agree. They’re sweet and charming. And just so us. 

Growing up in the seventies and eighties, I often heard the opinion that tattoos were dirty and ugly and, with time, would certainly become the biggest regret of their owners’ lives. I had begun to shed these prejudices by the time my children started pitching me family hedgehog tattoos. Still, I declined. Several times. After a while, they stopped bugging me. 

Last year, though, at the age of 55, I joined the legions of gray divorcees. Like many long term married people, the thought of another 20, 30, or more years of marriage felt like a death sentence to me. I had to get out to survive and thrive. By far, the hardest part was telling my children. I was wracked with guilt about destabilizing the family unit. “We just want you both to be happy,” they said, but how would we connect, build new traditions, and grow together after this monumental change? Could tattoos link us spiritually?

My mom and dad probably didn’t envision themselves living in an apartment in Stockholm when they first met at a small college in Kentucky, but that’s where they had me. Around the time that I was born, a family of hedgehogs appeared in the hedge row outside their window. My mother fell in love. 

I didn’t have any of the army of stuffed hedgehogs that appeared after my children, my mom’s only grandchildren, were born. The mountain of plush “hedgies” and other hedgehog items grew as her grandchildren grew. My children delighted in the playful and magical mammals and proudly wore their green “Hedgehogs: Why don’t they just share the hedge?” t-shirt featuring one lone hedgehog curmudgeonly saying “no” via a shimmering speech bubble. 

Always having at least two (and during one insane period, three) dogs at a time, having an actual live hedgehog as a pet seemed ill advised. But when my younger child, Quinn, was in high school, an opportunity arose. I was teaching and an email went out to the faculty. A family with connections to the school was moving and couldn’t take their pet hedgehog with them. Was there a teacher who would like him as a class pet? I couldn’t hit the reply button fast enough. I would have a hedgehog but keep him mostly at school. 

My students named the hedgehog Sushi. I went to a pet store to get an exercise ball so that he could run around the classroom. I ignored the fact that the gloves for holding Sushi included in his glass tank were the leathery thickness of falconry gloves. 

Never having met Sushi’s former family - they seemed to have dropped him at the school door while they sprinted to the next state - I don’t know what his “old” disposition was, but with us he was one ornery, pissed off, prickly hedgehog. The falconry gloves were of little use as he hissed and clawed his way back into his tank, thank you very much. 

Over winter break, I took Sushi home with me. Quinn and my son, Brennan, were excited to meet him after hearing all the stories from the classroom. They laughed when they saw the gauntlets needed for holding him. With age and maturity, they recognized Sushi as something more than the cute stuffed mascot they held onto as young children and they delighted in all of him - the good, the bad, and the prickly - a true emblem of family life. 

The Egyptians greatly admired hedgehogs, considering them to be symbols of resistance and rebirth due to their survival in harsh desert environments and reacclimation after hibernation. They honored them by creating their form in jewelry, toys, tombs, boats, and amulets. The symbolism overlay perfectly with my post-divorce resistance and rebirth, and the family sentimentalism of the hedgehog cemented my decision to get a family tattoo.  

When the tattoo artist first comes out into the lobby area he asks, “Are you Team Hedgehog?” We smile at this surprise moniker. I like this guy. 

Brennan, Quinn, and Brennan’s spouse, who has come along for the ride, have elected that I go first. They present this idea to me like they’re sure I’m excited to get my first tattoo. Since they’ve already experienced this thrill, they’re letting me go first. Later I found out that they wanted me to go first so I wouldn’t chicken out. 

Another falsehood my kids had the nerve to tell me was that it wouldn’t hurt. My hedgehog has forty-eight quills. I did not pick this number. There’s no significance to 48 for me other than that’s how many quills apparently fit into a 2-inch front-facing hedgehog drawing. The tattooist is chatty.  He’s from a cute town in Western Maryland that I’ve been to. We talk about the canal in that town, the unique shops, and the nice restaurants there. Each inked line feels like an Exacto Knife is slicing the skin on my ankle wide open. After each quill he pauses to talk more about his hometown. “Oh, my god!” I scream in my head. “Stop talking! Just finish it!” But I do lamaze style breathing and when he’s done, I think I love it. But I’m about 10% unsure. 

Our tattoos are small and simple, so in less than two hours, all three are done and we are officially Team Hedgehog. All are the same line drawing style, but each one is unique. A whimsical hedgehog with an acorn cap hat, a sweet hedgehog in profile holding a flower, and a loving hedgehog -mine - cupping a heart in its hands. On the way to the car the ink catches my eye and surprises me. I have a precipitous lack of confidence that I’ve made a good decision. 

Three weeks later we are in my dining room, eating a meal comprised of foods that are difficult to get in the country where Quinn is moving. The end of the evening strides up and rather rudely sucker punches me. “Go to live queer events as long as they have them. Don’t give your data to Meta or online dating apps. Stay safe, mom. I love you,” she says. 

Brennan and his spouse leave the country two months after that. 

Quinn and Brennan left the United States for a better life. They are both trans. They’ve endured an onslaught of hatred born from the political weaponization of the “social contagion theory” which commands the eradication of trans people in order to stop new people from “catching transgenderism”.  One impact of this politicization is that many people here do not accept trans people’s appearance at face value. Rather, they overanalyze how trans people look, searching for a hidden meaning or calculated deceit. And, of course, when some people feel deceived or threatened, they turn to violence, especially in our violent country. My children are not purposefully trying to trick their way into a bathroom for salacious reasons and they’re not trying to win at a sport they wouldn’t otherwise be able to. They just wanted to exist in peace, like everyone else. 

When my parents’ plane took off for Canada, and later Sweden, my grandaddy, Henlee, wrote in his autobiography that he was “struck with the thought that I might never see them again on American soil.” My father was considered a fugitive for refusing to unjustly take human life in the Vietnam war and he was subject to arrest in the United States.

Quinn’s U.S. passport sex marker is still “male” so after she transitions more physically this could cause problems reentering our country. Brennan was one of the last people able to change his sex marker before the executive order prohibiting it, but there’s talk of prospectively changing markers back to genders assigned at birth. So now, like my granddaddy, I wonder if I’ll ever see my children in their birth country again. How many weddings, births, graduations, and other life events will they miss here? I try to shut out the fear of falling ill and not being able to have my children at my bedside.

An electronic bloop-bloop notification goes off while I’m teaching a class. There’s a message in the “Team Hedgehog” group chat. My fifth graders are astonished. “You have Discord, Ms. Barnette?! Why do you have Discord?”. They’re hopeful I’ll blow their minds with a disclosure of a hidden gaming life, but I am not a gamer. “Discord is how I communicate with my children,” I tell them. “They both live in other countries.” 

During winter break, I celebrated Christmas overseas with my children. We started new traditions. I asked for Christmas tree ornaments from their new countries as gifts for my tree at home. We incorporated the local food into our traditional holiday meals. We held a video call with my dad, his sister, and her wife. Since getting my tattoo, I’ve been thinking more about the perception of them as “dirty” and ill-considered and I’m sure that dirty is a coded word for visible. I am proud to be more visible right now as people and cultures are increasingly marginalized and erased in our country. Also, doesn’t the dreaded “permanent” just mean enduring? It took me a long time to appreciate tattoos, but I now cherish the visible and enduring bond linking Brennan, Quinn, and me in a shared expression of our newly configured family and selves. 

And my tattoo no longer seems huge to me. In fact, it feels ideal.