Column: Savagemama

Losing My Nose Ring, Not My Edge

By Jennifer Savage, 3-13-08

Two mornings ago I woke up to Eliza saying, “Hey!” She was sitting beside me, staring down at me. I’m not sure how many times she said this before I woke up but after seeing me awake, she smiled. 

“Hey!” I said as I sat up. I ran my hand through her curls, then because I’ve been waking up really congested these days, scratched my nose with the back of my other hand. I felt something hard and pointed and when I pulled my hand away I saw my nose ring had fallen out. A tiny L-shaped piece of metal, the thing was prone to stick out but it rarely came out by accident or otherwise because it was such a pain to get back in. I sat looking at it in my hand and instead of putting back in the hole in my nose I put on the shelf next to my bed. I scooped Eliza up and headed down to make breakfast.

I got my nose pierced when I was 25 on the day I graduated from graduate school. The piercing was a gift from my mother who had made the trip from Virginia to Oregon to see me walk across the stage with a necklace of red carnations around my neck – a gift from the mother of one of my classmates – and a green and yellow hood that marked a masters degree trailing behind me.

Little did my mother know she was walking into a firestorm of relationship drama between me and an ex-boyfriend. She probably hadn’t planned on sleeping with a chair in front of the door but that’s what we did, that’s how escalated the ex-boyfriend drama became. I think we even talked about calling the police because the ex-boyfriend kept calling then hanging up, and driving by my house. That time – the tangle of graduation, friends moving away, having my mother come visit, deciding where I would go and the threads of a dying relationship on the periphery of it all—blurs in my memory.

But one moment of clarity is getting my nose pierced. Jenny and Elisabeth came with my mom and me. I think Jenny got her ear pierced and Elisabeth, the inspiration for my nose ring, was there for support.

For me, the piercing was a fashion statement, a trend, but also a baby step toward the person I wanted to be: independent, brave, unafraid to try something new even if it didn’t work out, willing to stand up for herself.

I remember the sharp sting as the needle when it, the deftness with which the tattooed man wearing latex gloves inserted the corkscrew ring into my nose. I remember that it really didn’t hurt. As we walked out into the sun of a June day, it felt as though I, alone, had made a good decision about my life and my body, and I hadn’t felt that way in a long time.

I’d like to say that that was the moment I decided to tell the ex-boyfriend to go fly a kite but that would take another week or so. I do believe, though, the act of getting my nose pierced was the beginning of something.

When light caught the glint on the right side of my nose over the years, for a brief moment it reminded me of that person I wanted to be and maybe in some small way slowly helped me become her.

I see a small sparkle of her in my wedding pictures. I see her clear-eyed and purposeful in pictures of Eliza’s birth. I see her now in my round face, my fleshy arms. 

Seth has always loved the piercing and in the past year or so when I’ve talked about taking it out, he’s always balked.

“Oh, it’s so beautiful in those pictures with Eliza,” he said. “Don’t take it out.”

He’s not the type of person to ask me to do or not do anything to my appearance. He’s not one of those men who has preferences about things like that. He just likes me – long hair or short, skinny or round, hair on top of my head, unshowered, in a dirty t-shirt, wearing his pants.

I think he didn’t want me to take out the nose ring because of all it represented but also because he didn’t want me to give in to anyone else’s notion of what a 32-year-old mother might look like. He didn’t want me to fall into a line of thinking that goes something like, “well now that I’m someone’s mother I shouldn’t…”

But he doesn’t have to worry about that.

It’s just that, somewhere along the way, I became that woman I wanted to be and the piercing became just a piece of jewelry. So when it fell out the other morning I took it as a sign and put it on the bedside shelf without a second thought. There was no ceremony, only a clear sense that it was time. I don’t need it anymore.

And the act of leaving the nose ring out doesn’t mean I’ve lost my edge, that I’m going to start wearing high collars and watching my language because, frankly, that sounds pretty boring to me.

To the contrary, I’m staring down what might be the bravest thing I’ll ever do – mother, at the same time, two children younger than two years old. I think that’s about as edgy as it gets. 

Read more or check in with Jennifer Savage often at http://www.newwest.net/savagemama

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