When I was about eleven years old, I decided that I was desperate to get my ears pierced.

My mom said, “Let’s ask your dad.”

My dad said, “When you are sixteen.”

Now, more than ever, as I journey along in my parenting adventure, I see that as he was a father of three sons and one daughter, I am completely confident that at the moment of my question my father determined the age of sixteen in a more arbitrary manner than I have planned next week’s menu.

I think Dad just picked an age.  Any age.  As long as it was not whatever age I currently was.  Sixteen?  Sure, that feels far enough away.  (Go ahead, Dad.  Correct me if I’m wrong.  It’s okay to confess now.  Enough years have passed to make the confession comical.)

At any rate, sixteen was the age my mom and I heard and so I waited.

And then I asked routinely anyway.  (I think even then I knew the number was a kind of farce.)

Over Frosted Flakes on a Tuesday morning, “Dad, can I get my ears pierced now?”

“No.”

On our drive to church on a Sunday morning, “Dad, can I get my ears pierced this week?”

“No.”

After Dukes of Hazard on a Friday night, “Dad, can I get my ears pierced this weekend?”

“No.”

And then.  On perhaps the only family vacation we’ve ever taken, a family vacation to the great state of West Virginia where we stayed at a cabin at a state park, I asked my dad, “Can I pierce my ears now?”

And he answered, “Sure.”

I choked.  I looked at my mother.

She looked me directly in the eyes.  “Get in the car,” she said.

Ears were pierced.  Before I was sixteen.  (But not by much.  I’m thinking in the fourteen range, but that specific number eludes me now.)

Riley, my eldest daughter, never showed a strong interest in getting earrings.  She just wasn’t concerned about having them until late into high school.  It was a non-issue.

“Sure,” we told her.  “Pierce your ears whenever you want.”

So, when the boys left a few weekends ago for a Trail Life camp out the girls and I sat down and asked one another, “What shall we do with ourselves?”

One of them suggested, “Let’s all get our ears pierced.”

I answered “maybe” without giving any real or deep thought as to what I was possibly granting permission for.

And, next thing you know, I’m in a mall (!) with all four of my daughters and several of them are pulling back their hair and picking out posting choices.

Later, that same evening, at a gathering, a friend listed to the story of our mall experience and laughed.

“You just set the entire universe off-kilter.  You took a rite of passage and just jumped over it.”

I laughed with him then.

And later, of course, I secretly panicked.  Did I just ruin some mother-daughter rite of passage?  Did I just tempt fate and mess with the laws of the entire universe?

I let my nine year old get her ears pierced alongside her teenaged sister.  What?  Is that wrong somehow?  Should she have been forced to wait her turn in years, like a curfew or acquiring new technology or a later bedtime?  (And – what?  I have another teenaged daughter?)

Okay.  I don’t really think I upset the universe of our family.  I really think it’s fine. It wasn’t a big deal in our family.  Earrings weren’t a “wait until you get older” sort of decision for us.  I mean, the universe is a wreck, but it’s not my fault on this one.

(And, it’s obviously fine if it’s a thing in your family.)  (Side note: I don’t think ANY family ever has to do anything the same as my family.  I hope there’s never any post I write where you think I am saying “my” way is right and yours is not.)

Anyway.  My girls now have pierced ears.  And their lobes are all surprisingly different.  Different from each other.  It was fun to note the small differences and the shapes and sizes of their cute little ear lobes – a part I’ve never studied enough on them apparently.  (Well, when they were babies I studied their precious ears.  But lately, not so much.)  Also, their lobes were all different on their own heads.  As in, London’s right lobe was not like her left lobe.  None of ours are, I guess.  We’re all so different, even in our own skin.  (I sort of love that.)

The pierced ears are for sure a sign of growing up.  A definite rite of passage in that sense.  They’re lovely – my girls and their perfectly imperfect little lobes.  

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