Earring

I have a fifteen year old daughter who is, as people who know me realize, the most important person in my life. As I write, she's in her bedroom, sobbing. Soon, I will go in and try to comfort her, but for now it's best to let her sob. Especially as the occasion of this outburst was my doing.

She wears pierced ear earrings. The piercings were done by a physician and healed quickly. For several years she was happy with them, which was well for I had told her that they were the only ones she'd have while a minor. Still, not long after, she thought multiple earrings were cool and asked about them, and of late she's been saying more about wanting a third piercing, high in the ear and through the cartilage there, so the discussion has been recurring with increasing frequency.

I grant that many of her friends have multiple piercings, and I grant that my views may be archaic. But there you have it.

Tonight she came home with a stud earring high in her left ear. She got the piercing knowing full well my views, and probably knowing that there would be consequences. If so, she was right, and there are. Anyway, the stud is no longer there, and neither, at least for the moment, is the good relationship we've generally enjoyed.

To be honest, I don't know quite what to do. I feel that children, including teens approaching adulthood -- perhaps especially including teens approaching adulthood -- need, and at some level appreciate, limits, and that those limits need to be reasonably consistent and coherent. I know, too, that teens rebel, that rebellion is part of the maturation process, part of the process of experimenting with and establishing one's sense of identity.

However, having drawn the line, whether rightly or not, I don't think it can be erased easily and probably not wisely, either. Yet as transgressions go, this really isn't a major one ... except that it entailed the deliberate flaunting of a well-established and fully recognized rule. So what do I do now? I wish I knew. Parenting has never been easy ... and clearly, adolescence isn't easy, either.

Note: this was originally posted on ketches, yaks & hawks 1 November 2007