Endurance

When I was a kid, I wanted my ears pierced SO BAD. I wanted to wear makeup and heels and get my hair permed too.

My parents sent me to Catholic school until eighth grade, so the makeup and heels were not an option. But around age 12, my mom relented and let me get holes in my lobes.

It hurt. For a week. Then done.

When I hit high school, I got the perm. And I thought better of it after about three years of maintenance. Hey, it was the 80s. I had IOU sweatshirts, banana clips and a Walkman too.

When I hit college, I wanted a tattoo. I made my roommate get one instead, under the guise of photographing it for a journalism class assignment. I have no idea if she ever showed it to her mom. After all, she dropped out our third year, drank the entire semester and paraded strangers through our tiny apartment at all hours, without telling her mom about that.

But my first year of college, I was in a coed dorm, and I happened by an open dorm room on the first floor one day on the way to the elevators... there was a little screaming and a lot of laughter. I paused at the door. There was my future college boyfriend piercing the nipple of a male friend.

So.......

Not long after, I abandoned the tattoo idea and got a piercing at the top of my ear. This is not an unusual thing by any means, and in fact I interviewed a great deal of pierced people before I embarked on the $10 endeavor. Very few reported regrets.

I regretted it for the first... three years or so. The infections, getting it ripped out by unsuspecting hairdressers, having the left half of my head full of split ends after my hair repeatedly got stuck in whatever jewelry my inflamed piercing tolerated at the time.

After that, I sailed free. A little flare-up here and there, but after many years with this stupid hole in the top of my ear, I didn't let that bother me.

Around my first trimester with Jacob, all my earrings made me itch. I took them out. I hadn't put them back in. Until last night. After a year and a half with nothing weighing down my cartilage, I found that the one hole I struggled so hard with since 1992 had betrayed me.

Anyone who has ever had the ambition to do the whole potato and ice thing knows just about what I went through trying to get that hoop through again. And HOW BAD IT HURTS TODAY.

I about want to lop off the whole left half of my body. But dammit, I'm a mom now, of two, I still listen to Primus and though I wear fake Birkenstocks instead of the real thing, I am only two sizes bigger than those days, I can afford to keep Ramen noodles out of my cupboards and my journalism teachers were all wrong, wrong, wrong. I won't ever raise mice again for the fraternity snakes, nor sneak a microwave into somewhere it's forbidden. I won't ever get that sunflower tattoo, or keep earthworms in my flowerpots. Or agree to split a phone bill with anyone.

Or drink Mad Dog 20/20. The orange one, at least.

BUT WHEN I AM WRINKLED, WHEN I AM BURIED, THIS EARRING WILL STILL BE IN MY EAR.