My mom’s tattoo

Whenever someone asks me what my mom is like, I tell them she’s the mom every kid would want to have. Always on your side, whether you needed a little spending money or late night homework help or just someone to ask if anything was wrong so you could pour your heart out.

She’s been a tireless advocate for her kids — for anything that would make us happy without making us spoiled — and she’s also modeled the way that compassion should extend to people outside our home through a life of service.

I have a cool mom, but I don’t know if she knows it.

The last time we all gathered to celebrate a milestone birthday of hers, overwhelmed by the love and one glass of prosecco, she made the very human admission that she wasn’t sure she’d always been a great mom. We reassured her that we couldn’t have been luckier, and soon after, she made the very cool admission that she’d been thinking of getting a tattoo, and the only option she’d really considered was one commemorating her three children.

What did she have in mind exactly? Well, back during the dawn of home internet, we inserted one of those ubiquitous CD-ROMs and created a family email account by turning Jack, Noah, and Caroline into janoca@aol.com. We only had one mailbox at our house so why would we need more than one email address?

Her ankle is now emblazoned with our initials and the tattoo is the outward expression of something we’ve known all along: we’ll always be with her and she wants us to know it.