A Hole in One

A Hole in One

I realize it’s not 1976 and an earring or two on a boy is no longer shocking. Many teenagers, if you can see under their hooded sweatshirt and downcast eyes, have something pierced or tattooed.  However, it’s not just teenagers getting pierced today. Since parents cannot say no to their children, there are more than a few sixth grade boys with a glint of gold and a sparkle of bling in their ear. Though I’m over the shock, and while I’m cool with people doing whatever they want to themselves, I don’t want my 11-year-old son popping a hole in his ear or any other body part for that matter.

I won’t deny the feeling of amazement when his friends started coming around with studs in their ears and conversations of piercing eyebrows, lips, tongues and other body parts wafted up to the windows as they shot hoops down below. This is my baby. I cried when they cut his umbilical cord and I feel tears welling up as I think of a piercing gun shooting a hole into his ear lobe.

Not long ago, on a Friday night, we’d gone to the mall. He and a friend wandered off ahead while I finished shopping. I was studying the teenagers, and as I was thinking how scary they looked, I heard “Hi mom” coming from under a black hood. It was my own pre-teenager, now tall and grown and dressed like one of them.

But it’s not being the mother of a mall rat or absorbing the eye-catching stares that go with piercing and body art that stop me from wanting him to refrain from getting an earring, but picturing how that look will age 20 years down the road. And when I think of that, it’s not good.

I’m old enough now that I look at forty or fifty year-old men and think they’re good-looking, but there’s no way I ever look at one with an earring and think that looks right, unless he was a pirate. So, as a parent, I try to dissuade my son using the delay method. Maybe when he’s 16 I’ll go along with it, but right now, I’m telling him to wait. Will he listen? I don’t know. But it wouldn’t surprise me if he came wafting in the door with a fresh stud pierced in his ear.

What do you think? Is piercing thuggish, stupid or just another form of individual expression?