The avatar image on my profile - here and elsewhere - is a phoenix. I have a reason for that. Well, two reasons.

After my mother died, I began to feel freer, more able to express myself. My husband said I changed after she died, and he was right, but not for the reasons he'd assumed. Because my mum was the person who knew, most of my life, what I was frightened to tell others (and I was frightened to tell others because of her), he assumed I had lost an ally when she died. But I hadn't. I didn't see her as an ally. I saw her as the reason I hadn't done things I'd wanted to do. I saw her as my blocker.

It was like I was reborn after she'd gone.

It's awful to admit that out loud but I know it's true. I didn't want her to go but when it actually happened and there was nothing I could do about it, I took advantage of it. Not altogether consciously, but I did. I started to express the real me more and more each passing day.

Unfortunately, that coincided with my relationship with my husband getting worse. Or, more probably, our relationship got worse because I was feeling freer to express myself - and my husband didn't like the changes. And we didn't communicate well, which made things even worse. We had stopped communicating properly years ago and had become entrenched in a relationship where we took each other for granted, stuck to the same routine, started to ignore each other.

My husband dislikes tattoos. Intensely. For years, I thought I didn't like them too. But over the last couple of years, I've changed my mind about that. Eventually it got to the stage where I was seriously considering getting a tattoo. The only thing that stopped me was the knowledge that my husband didn't like them. But when our relationship got so bad that I started thinking about moving out, I realised I didn't need his permission anyway. It's my body, not his.

I don't know why it took me so long to work that out.

I got my first tattoo in July. It's a phoenix. It's around 8-9" long by around 4-5" wide, spread across my right shoulder blade, in red, orange and yellow. The tip of one wing peeks over the top of my shoulder, pointing at my clavicle. The artist did a great job and I love it. 

I told my husband I was going to get the tattoo. He huffed and didn't respond. When I got back from the studio, I asked, "Do you want to see it?" He said, "No." So I didn't show it to him.

After our lengthy discussions on Thursday, when we cleared the air and came to an understanding of each others' views and thoughts, when he told me he would support whatever I did, we went to bed. For the first time in over a year. He saw my tattoo for the first time. Grudgingly, he said it was good.

I'm considering getting a dragon on my left shoulder. That's mainly because I was born in the Chinese Year of the Dragon. as was my mother.

The other reason I use a picture of a phoenix as my avatar image all over the web is because there's no way in hell I'd ever post a photo of me. Not that there are many photos of me to choose from, anyway.