\u201cDo you honestly think anyone will let you work with children looking like that?\u201d an interviewer asked my husband, demanding he remove his tattoos to become a history teaching assistant.<\/p>\n
At 43, he had spent two years pursuing his teaching dream, taking courses, volunteering, and passing background checks. At home, he was a patient, devoted father to our three adopted children. Yet interviewers kept judging his appearance.<\/p>\n
With tears in his eyes, he rolled up his sleeve. There was our late daughter\u2019s footprint, her name, and dates just 13 months apart. Other tattoos honored the children we adopted after losing her.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can cover them,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I can\u2019t remove them. I buried my daughter once. I\u2019m not erasing her.\u201d<\/p>\n
The room fell silent. One interviewer began crying.<\/p>\n
Nine days later, the school offered him the job\u2014with no tattoo removal required. That evening, our oldest looked at his father\u2019s arms and said, \u201cThey finally figured you out.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cDo you honestly think anyone will let you work with children looking like that?\u201d an interviewer asked my husband, demanding he remove his tattoos to become a history teaching assistant. At 43, he had spent two years pursuing his teaching dream, taking courses, volunteering, and passing background checks. At home, he was a patient, devoted …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24441,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifevibesever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifevibesever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifevibesever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifevibesever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifevibesever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24440"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lifevibesever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24442,"href":"https:\/\/lifevibesever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24440\/revisions\/24442"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifevibesever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/24441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifevibesever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifevibesever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifevibesever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}