I remember how this cherished child of mine once nursed. Breasts, for me, represent femininity, a soft sexuality, womanhood, motherhood. I saw my daughter’s piercing as an act of violence against her breast. Sure, sure, we can talk about condoms and STDs and emotional impact, but really, at some point we have to let go. We cannot follow our children down that baggage-strewn, pothole-ridden, highway. Face it: Sexual activity has psychic and physical ramifications. Not a healthy reaction, to be sure, but an honest one. I have friends who plug their ears and chant hummana, hummana, hummana whenever teens and sex are linked in a sentence. But her nipple? Wikipedia says many things about nipple piercing, but the two I glommed onto were “deaths have occurred” and “sexual arousal is enhanced.” There you have it: sex and death. I wasn’t irrational enough to believe she might die from this, but my extreme reaction probably had to do with the fact that her piercing put me face to face with her sexuality, which can be hard for parents. My ears are pierced, multiple times - well, twice in each ear. Was I insane? Why had this piercing upset me so much? She hadn’t pierced her face again (her nose is pierced, and I think it looks great). “You’re insane,” she said with excruciating calm as she closed her bedroom door and went back to bed. I told her that her breast, with the silver spear through it, looked like a canapé at a cannibal cocktail party. I cried out, “Flagrant fucking foul!” As long as we were paying her tuition, as far as we were concerned (and I may have been using the royal we at this point, as my husband was already over it), no money was truly “hers.” Moreover, until she was old enough to rent a car, 25, the age of full prefrontal cortex development, her body was only on loan to her. My daughter calmly told me that she’d used her own money, and it was her body. “What am I supposed to do with that information?” He was neither upset nor happy with our daughter’s choice, he was responding to my reaction. Uncertainty, shock and discouragement scrolled across his face. I ran down the stairs, yelling out to my husband, “She’s pierced her nipple!” In a voice spiraling ever upward I wondered did she know she might never be able to nurse her babies? Did she know what kind of message she might be sending to her intimate partner? “You pierced your nipple!?!” Thus began my apoplectic rant. As she propped herself up on her elbow, her nightgown, a spring green acetate shift she’d bought at a flea market, the kind of sleepwear pediatricians advise new parents to never, ever let a baby sleep in due to fire safety, slid from her shoulder revealing … a pierced nipple. She’s always been a cheerful riser (aside from a brief period of my unhappiness when her hair was pink and she was pocket-calling me from the beer line at a keg party). I stood by her bed in the weak winter sunlight, coffee mug in hand. The morning was chilly, and I’d decided to bring her coffee. A couple of months before I received a breast cancer diagnosis, before I was forced to accept in the deepest possible way that I am not in charge, my daughter came home on college break and showed me in her way that I am not the boss.
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