The Family That Gets A Tattoo Together, Stays Together.

I met my wife in a Star Wars chat room.
I did not see her as someone I ever thought I would romance.
This is because she was married, and I was engaged, and as such we happily kept to the main topic of the Compuserve forums: arguing relentlessly about anything we damn well felt like.  There was a lot of Star Wars debate (did Luke truly fall to the Dark Side, were ysalamiri a dumb idea, why the hell did they have to fly through the trench for twenty miles to get to the exhaust port, couldn’t they just have started like 2000 meters away?)…
…and there was a lot of political debate, couched in Star Wars hokum so it wouldn’t get moved to another thread.  (“The Saudis, who have absolutely no reason to lower the price of oil to help our national economy out, live in a desert as dry as Tatooine.”)
But mostly, there was a love of Star Wars.  And my future wife and I savaged each other in snarling debates for years, long enough that she got a divorce and my fiancee walked out and one day we realized we were in love.
So we got married.  (And I moved to Alaska, which is a different story.)
So Star Wars bonds us.  We had Luke and Leia on top of our wedding cake.  (We have an OTP that defies canon, what can I say?)  And with the new Star Wars coming out, Gini was thinking of getting a tattoo.
And I told her, We should both get a tattoo.  Together.
Of course we agreed this was a great idea.
But the funny thing is, a few weeks ago we got this new huge Ultra-HD 70″ television, which our eldest daughter helped us set up.  The first film we watched? Star Wars in Blu-Ray, of course.
And what I discovered, much to my thrill, is that though she’s in her late twenties, my eldest daughter is as much a Star Wars nerd as I am.  There are activities I think we all share with our parents that we like because it reminds us of family – but without the family there, it’s just sort of Something You Do On Summer Vacations.  I mean, maybe your Dad read Winnie the Pooh to you as a kid and you loved that warm feeling of being in his lap, but there’s a difference between loving that experience and reading Winnie the Pooh over and over again when you’re a grownup.
Whereas our kid?  She kept pointing out all the tiny details, squeeing at stuff only someone who’d watched this damn film too many times would see.  She was as into it as we were, and it was a glory to behold.
We mentioned the tattoo.
She was in.
And then there was our youngest daughter, who we knew also had the Star Wars love when she waited to show her partner Star Wars at our house.  Her partner enjoyed it enough, but my younger kid’s constantly squeezing her hand and going “HERE IT COMES, NO THIS IS THE BEST PART” probably was a distraction.
Youngest daughter is overseas right now on a college trip, but she’s coming back to town in September.  But we Facebook-messaged her.
She was in.
And so plans are tenuous, but the plan is to go in the week the new Star Wars movie releases and get four Star Wars tattoos together, as a family.  We’re not coordinated enough to get matching tattoos, which I think is appropriate – we’re a raucous bunch, we disagree, and us having all the same style would never fly.
Yet if all goes well, the four of us will ink our special bond permanently. We love Star Wars.  We love each other.  And the movie may suck and suck big-time, but we’ll watch it in the biggest theater in Cleveland with flesh still aching from the needle, knowing that nothing can take our bond away from us.
We survived Phantom Menace.  We’ll get through this.
And whenever I look at my tattoo, I’ll think of my wife, and my kids, and the dream we lived together.
Let’s hope this works.