The Lines Project
December 15 – December 20th

December 19, 2015
Sometimes as a parent you wish to have the power of just being able to tell your child not to do something and have them stop doing it. Sometimes you just want to take their pain and cover it with so much love that they don’t hurt anymore. Sometimes you have to share your pain with them so that they know that you don’t judge them and in fact you truly do understand and that you won’t punish them in an attempt to convince them to stop punishing themselves. I first shared our The Lines Project two years ago and I won’t retype it all here but I will share the links from last year’s post which includes the original post as well. Today we are finally making our commitment to refrain from self-harm a permanent statement by getting matching tattoos. We’ve wanted to get these tattoos for two years because it means so much to us and because it really is a commitment to never ever cut ourselves again no matter how hard life gets. If you are familiar with The Lines Project then you may know that having the lines on your right wrist means that you’re not a cutter and that you support the movement to help those that are. If you mark the left wrist it means that you are a cutter but you support the movement to help yourself and others. Today when my son and I go get ours inked on we’re getting them on opposite arms. We were texting each other about it after we made the appointment for today and we explained why we want it on the wrist we want it on. Even though my son hasn’t been a cutter for over two years he’s getting his left wrist done because in his words: ” I think I’d definitely want it on my left wrist even if just to cover (or slightly cover) the scars that are there and mark it with positivity instead because I’ve wanted to do that for a long time” and I’m getting my right wrist done because as I text him back: “Because the right side means you don’t cut and I will be commited forever to not cut because I will have the tattoo permanently saying that I don’t.  I promised you that if you would stop then I never would again and when I have felt like doing it I just couldn’t break my promise to you. So it will be like a promise to myself and it will match yours and to me that’s huge” and then his response made me cry on my lunch break at work: “And that is exactly why I know I want to get this tattooed. I think it’s a great thing and it being on my left will not only cover what has happened maybe but it will make that wrist something entirely different to me. Because when I look at it I’ll only think of you and never the negativity anymore. It being on the left for me is basically guaranteeing I never do it again. So I think us having opposite sides will work perfectly. Because this goes a lot deeper for us than it does a lot of people because we gave it even more true purpose.”
I have always felt some guilt about my baby boy cutting himself.  I had never allowed my sons to see any of the marks I had cut into my skin because I had been hiding it from everyone since I was a kid and was really good at keeping it covered. I knew that the hurt that had been mine as a child wasn’t what caused him to repeat my behavior because I had made sure that I protected him from those types of things but obviously other hurt had been done to him. I had failed him in some way. I failed to protect his heart but also somehow I had failed to notice when he had first begun to cut himself as evidenced by the old scars when I first saw the fresh cuts. Then again I failed him when I tried to get him to stop hurting himself just because I explained that he could get an infection. I didn’t want to think that he was doing it because he was hurt on the inside.  I didn’t want to acknowledge that he hadn’t just been copying something he had seen other teenagers doing. I didn’t want to tell him that I was a cutter too. For one thing it wasn’t something I liked to acknowledge about myself. I wanted to give my children the impression that I was strong and in control so that they could rely on me. I didn’t want them to see that I was broken. I didn’t want to make it a bigger deal than it was. If I had shared my truth with him from the beginning then maybe he would’ve stopped the first time. Maybe not but there’s always that thought in my head. It breaks my heart to think that my child has ever suffered because of me. After forbidding him didn’t work and crying and begging him didn’t work I finally talked to him about my cutting and knew that I was basically admitting to him that he got it from me. Somehow, someway I had passed on my brokeness to my son. I have never told him or admitted it outloud or even written it in my journal but I think about one instance that I had forgotten about it until I had discovered he was broken in a similar way that I was broken. I may tell him about it today if I can verbalize it. If it doesn’t hurt too much. If I don’t he can read it here…
    One night while I was quite pregnant with him I was very upset and hurting emotionally and my pregnant hormones didn’t help matters at all. I was so upset that even though I hadn’t cut or bruised myself much since I had reached adulthood I gave into it that night. I cut myself several times and banged my fist into the fresh cuts repeatedly just trying to feel something other than the hurt I was feeling inside. He was in my womb and I was abusing my thigh but he was experiencing the emotions and chemical changes in utero in whatever way babies experience life from inside their mother. It certainly wasn’t nourishing for him to be inside of me at that moment and I don’t know if it has anything to do with what happened later but it couldn’t have helped. It’s a strange coincidence that I was in the parking lot of a tattoo parlor in 1998 pregant with him when that incident occured and today we’re going to get tatoos to commit to never harming ourselves in that way again.

Our matching tattoos.

His Sharpie lines from the first The Lines Project compared to the permanent ones.

The artist that did our work for us today is such an amazing person. He listened to us and made both of us feel so comfortable sharing our story even when I had to pause to cry. He was the perfect person to become part of our story.

Read my first and second The Lines Project posts by clicking below
My last 2 The Lines Project posts