Getting your ears peirced: part two - By mummy (older than 8)

Mummy, older than 8

She has always wanted to get her ears pierced. Since she could speak. Always. And she nags a lot. My automatic reaction was, like most parents, ‘not until you are 16’ knowing full well it would be bargained down to 13 then possibly the year she starts secondary school. So why did we give in at the age of 8?

I guess because the subject was brought up so very often I wondered about my reasons for saying no and worried it might be a snob thing. On the continent, in Asia, in the States piercing the ears of small girls is very common and doesn’t raise a single eyebrow. In the UK it seems to be a mark of pride to delay it as long as possible. I canvassed opinion. Infection, said some, too young to know what they want, said others but underlying all that was the unsaid ‘nice girls don’t’.

I knew she knew her own mind. I thought we might have a better chance of combatting infection while I still bathed her and controlled the bedtime routine. So why didn’t I want to? Because if it was about snobbery I didn’t want to be part of that.

She must have sensed I was weakening. The nagging intensified and one day I shocked her by agreeing. It didn’t shock her as much as the pain did though. The actual piercing left her white and shaking. Turns out no matter how many You Tube videos of crying girls I’d shown her she never quite believed that having a hole punched in your ear would hurt.

In the end I decided to save my strength for the battles I really care about, conceding this one to her because in the grand scheme of things there is a lot more to parenting, a lot more to worry about than a hole in an earlobe. And now they’re in? They don’t bother me at all, actually. I almost quite like them shining away on her lobes. Almost…