Pierced & Inked

In which it is never too late to have a rebellious childhood.

The offending ear

I have long maintained that my father accidentally stumbled upon one of the greatest parenting strategies of all time. He denies that any of it was intentional, but I am not sure I believe him. And either way, his method worked beautifully to keep me (and, I think, my siblings) as close to the straight and narrow as possible, without any sort of coercion or any of the kind of authoritarianism that can erode the trust and communication between adolescents and their parents.

So what was this brilliant hack? It went like this: My dad forbid me to pierce my ears a second time. 

You may be wondering how this could possibly have done anything productive, but bear with me. The larger context is that both of my parents communicated to me from a young age that they trusted me to make good decisions, and that the worst thing I could possibly do was disappoint them. Thus, they did not police my interactions with boys; they instead made sure I was armed with information about sex and safety.* Ditto alcohol – they did not make it some taboo temptation, they explained the risks and how to drink responsibly and let me know that they believed that I could and would make good choices. And as for drugs, they made clear that they expected better from me, and demystified getting high, so that it never seemed worth the trouble.

Had this been all they did, I imagine it might have backfired, as adolescents are not known for their ability to make rational, thoughtful decisions, especially when a horde of impulsive friends is impelling them towards danger. The reason their approach was brilliant was because my dad’s fierce prohibition on multiple piercings gave me a focus for my age-appropriate need to be impulsive and rebellious. And because all of his stern, prohibitive energy was orbiting around this one act, that is exactly where I aimed all of my opposition.

The ultimate test of this strategy came in the winter of my senior year in high school. At my Jewish private school, senior year ended in early January, and the rest of the school year was spent in Israel. Imagine it: 25 high schoolers in a country thousands of miles from home, where the drinking age of 18 was not enforced, and our two counselors could not possibly keep watch over us adequately. And so we lost our little minds, there in that intense little country. The obvious and nearly universal method of our madness was alcohol, and night after night my friends stumbled out of the bars that became our stomping grounds in Jerusalem, blind drunk and very close to peril. But neither the wild drinking nor any other kind of risky behavior appealed to me. 

Instead and of course, I had my sights locked on one thing and one thing only: getting one of my ears pierced a second time. I quickly hunted down a shop, and – with a sense of great jubilation and mischief – I got pierced. 

My dad was very very unhappy when I told him, of course. But what could he do? I was unreachable, and he was powerless. It was a glorious feeling, acting out like that, but alas it only lasted only until my ear got infected, at which point he engaged in some parental gloating, and eventually the (w)hole thing blew over, and with no more risk to my safety and wellbeing than a mild infection easily cured with Neosporin. 

Later, my dad did the exact same thing with my youngest brother, only the object of his ire was not any piercing, but Sam’s epic hairstyles. Meanwhile, Sam successfully navigated high school and was accepted to an excellent college. But of course, when Sam appeared at breakfast with wild hair on the morning of his high school graduation, my dad flew off the handle. Being old and wise by that point, I took great pleasure in taking him aside and pointing out that his son was an absolute success story, so maybe he could calm down about the haircut and focus on the obvious joys of the day. To his credit, he heard me, and the celebration was wonderful. And it was that day and that experience that opened my eyes to just how cleverly (or unwittingly) he had helped shepherd all four of us safely past the rocks and shoals of adolescence.

So that is the story of my dad’s success in parenting. However, there may have been one teensy after-effect that none of us anticipated, and that is that my interest in body art seems to have lasted all the way up to this very moment (oops). 

Thus, when I was 24 and in the midst of an on-again-off-again relationship that had me completely knocked off my axis, I got my belly button pierced. My dad was loudly unhappy about this, but could do nothing. (I later took the piercing out when I was pregnant with Vee, scared that the pressure on the barbell would cause it to shoot out of my belly button and take someone’s eye out.) 

After that, once I was a respectable married woman and somewhat focused on my career and motherhood and etc., I stopped thinking about these small acts of rebellion for a time. But I had had a small tattoo in mind for a while – a harebell flower – and had sometimes flirted with the idea of getting inked. It never felt real though, until my favorite singer/songwriter, Leonard Cohen, the poet of my life, died two days after the 2016 election, and at that moment I had this strong feeling that I had to turn my pain into something corporeal in some way.

In those grim weeks of November and December 2016, I listened to two songs on loop. One was Cohen’s Democracy, and the other was his song Anthem, which suddenly gave me an idea for the tattoo I now wanted in a very real way. Here are the lyrics to Anthem, followed by a picture of the tattoo I ultimately got in January 2017, just a couple of weeks before the Women’s March, which also happened to fall on my birthday: 

Anthem

The birds they sang
At the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what has passed away
Or what is yet to be

Ah, the wars they will be fought again
The holy dove, she will be caught again
Bought and sold, and bought again
The dove is never free

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in

We asked for signs
The signs were sent
The birth betrayed
The marriage spent
Yeah, and the widowhood
Of every government
Signs for all to see

I can't run no more
With that lawless crowd
While the killers in high places
Say their prayers out loud
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
A thundercloud
They're going to hear from me

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in

You can add up the parts
But you won't have the sum
You can strike up the march
There is no drum
Every heart, every heart
To love will come
But like a refugee

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in

That's how the light gets in
That's how the light gets in

- Leonard Cohen

Although I was deeply nervous about showing my dad the tattoo (especially given a traditional Jewish prohibition on tattoos), being 41, and knowing that by that point we had all survived far worse, I screwed my courage to the sticking place and shyly showed him. And wonder of wonders – he liked it! Or, at least he didn’t hate it. And that was pretty great.

I thought that my itch would remain scratched for a good long time after. But then, in the fall of 2019, as the swirl of my dying marriage wrapped me in agony, the old familiar urge to - act out? call out? scream out?  - surged in me again. And so, on a random Tuesday afternoon, as I ran errands at an outlet mall, I found myself stopping at a piercing stand and pointing to the upper cartilage of my left ear. The piercing took forever to heal, but at least it never got infected. And my dad did not say anything at all.

Soon after that, COVID shut down any thought of any adventures in body art. But this fall, as I emerged from a year and a half of rolling, non-stop traumas (see almost every other post I’ve written), the itch came back. First, at the end of August, I got my nose pierced, although my friend and I went to a shop that messed up both our piercings, and I had to take it out and get it re-pierced. And finally – although who knows what’s really final? – in October I got one more tattoo – a line from my favorite poem, next to a rendering of one of my photographs of my beloved hellebores:

Dogfish

Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thing
kept flickering in with the tide
and looking around.
Black as a fisherman’s boot,
with a white belly.

If you asked for a picture I would have to draw a smile
under the perfectly round eyes and above the chin,
which was rough
as a thousand sharpened nails.

And you know
what a smile means,
don’t you?

*

I wanted the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
      where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
      I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,

whoever I was, I was

alive
for a little while.

*

It was evening, and no longer summer.
Three small fish, I don’t know what they were,
huddled in the highest ripples
as it came swimming in again, effortless, the whole body
one gesture, one black sleeve
that could fit easily around
the bodies of three small fish.

*

Also I wanted
to be able to love. And we all know
how that one goes,
don’t we?

Slowly

*

the dogfish tore open the soft basins of water.

*

You don’t want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don’t want to tell it, I want to listen

to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.

And anyway it’s the same old story – – –
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.

Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.

And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.

*

And look! look! look! I think those little fish
better wake up and dash themselves away
from the hopeless future that is
bulging toward them.

*

And probably,
if they don’t waste time
looking for an easier world,

they can do it.

– Mary Oliver

Now my dad is no longer really in a state of being to allow for fussing over my behavior, and anyway, he has made his peace with my acts of rebellion, and I know that he is just unconditionally proud of the person I have become. So showing him this last tattoo, and my nose piercing, were simply acts of sharing. (He is proud of my siblings too, of course, but of the four of us, I remain - as I always have been - the difficult one with the messy life, where my siblings all are settled and solid and easy.)

Looking back, I see too how this interest in body art has manifested at moments in time when my rebellious spirit has been triggered by personal turmoil or chaos in the world around me. Whether this is unconsciously linked to my childhood or not, I may never know. But if it is a vestige of my upbringing, well, all I can say is...thank you, Dad. It could have been so much worse.

Now, in the fall of 2021, I do not know what the future holds, or when this itch might flare again, but I know that the peace and inner equanimity I am longing for might be the best predictor of whether I feel the old urge rising. And in the meantime, as I have multiple piercings and two tattoos and a laissez-faire attitude towards my daughters’ hairstyles and hair colors (and clothes and etc.), I am going to have to hurry up and think of some silly thing that I can fiercely ban for them, and I will have to prepare to kick up an Oscar-worthy fuss if (and hopefully when) they proudly rebel against my parental authority by doing the exact (silly) thing I so passionately prohibited. Please send me your ideas if you have them…

*Now that I am the mother of daughters, and because my work focuses in large part on sexual harassment and sexual assault by and of children, I know that teaching just the facts (ma’am) about reproduction and protection are wildly insufficient to really help kids really understand consent and desire and arousal and sexuality and and and…But in the late eighties and early nineties, what my parents did teach me was pretty forward-thinking.

The unoffending nose