When I was growing up in small town New England I was one of only two girls in my school who did not have pierced ears. It was tradition in these parts to bring your girls out when they were seven or so to give them their first ear piercing. This was a right of passage most little girls lived for – a mommy daughter moment that made them look tough and older. I never saw the point. I was like that – constantly questioning, constantly wrinkling my nose at the status quo. My mother told people it was because I was afraid of the pain. This was absolute horse shit. Pain was never something that bothered me. I loved to get vaccinated with the other children. I’d laugh when the little boys would cry and gloat over them when I didn’t. No, this wasn’t a pain thing, but it may have had a little to do with a story I kept hearing get told over and over again…. that of my mother’s ear piercing.
She lived in a more conservative time. Children did not have their ears pierced but that didn’t stop them from wanting it. So when my mother was a teenager she let her sister pierce her ears with a sewing needle. Her sister was not trained in this but that didn’t stop either one of them as they pulled some ice cubes out of the freezer and began to numb her ear lobes the best they could. The first ear went well. She grabbed a hold her sister’s lobe, pointed the sewing needle (sterilized with alcohol) at the approximate spot it should go and started to push it through with great strength. You see that’s the thing about ear lobes, they’re spongy, rubbery, and thick. They are not easy to manually push a needle through! But sure enough with a nice gush of blood and an audible pop the first ear was pierced!
It was the second ear that was the problem… Now my aunt was under great pressure to get it done and get it done quick because their mother had shown up and was pounding on the locked door demanding to know what mischievous thing her daughters were up to. With very little numbing she lined the needle up and pushed it diagonally through the ear while hollering, “NOTHING! WE’RE NOT DOING NOTHING! GIVE ME A SECOND!!!” The chaos was palpable, the consequences permanent. My mother’s diagonally pierced ear never healed up so she was never able to redo the piercing better. Worse still it was open to infection now and she was without the supervision of someone who knew what they were doing. An abscess formed, puss built up in the ear lobe, and her solution to fixing it involved soaking a cotton thread in salt water and flossing it through the new hole. This did work in the end but just the idea of it makes me gag thinking about it. No thank you. I had no desire to go through this just so I could have some stupid sparkly thing jutting out of my head. I found it bizarre society seemed to demand this of women. Ah well, I always was a failure as a girl and then a woman. I’m content with that.
