Marquette University Intimations Project

C. Anderson

It’s the last few days of December 2020 and it’s been such a long year, I don’t remember what I’m even crying about at this particular moment. I’m frustrated with one of my sisters, I think, (I’ve always been more susceptible to emotional pain than physical pain ) and my mother is comforting me in my room. In a moment of weakness, I tell her about my nose ring, the septum piercing I got without her permission a few weeks before. I’m hoping my emotional instability will make her less angry. 

Well, I don’t tell her right away, I make her guess. I have the septum piercing tucked inside my nose, so she can’t see it on my face. 

“Oh, no, Caraline.” She says, her face falling. This is a woman who was upset when I got my ears double-pierced at 17. “Bellybutton piercing?” I make a face. The only cultural significance bellybutton piercings have for white people is their association to Paris Hilton, which is something I am more than fine with missing out on. 

“Nipple piercing?” Now my mother’s making a face. I can’t help but laugh at her. My parents are so stiff sometimes, I’m surprised she even thought of that. But, too painful and too promiscuous, even for me. I’m still an Anderson.

I lift my head up so she can see the glint of silver inside my nose. 

“It’s a septum piercing.” I move my hand to flip the small piece of metal right side down. “Do you want to see?” My mom stops me, certainly not as pleased with me as I’d like her to be. 

“No, I don’t.”

My plan to appeal to my mothers’ emotions fails spectacularly and we spend the next 48 hours arguing ceaselessly about whether or not I should take it out. I insist that it’s important to me, indicative of my bodily autonomy and let’s be honest, my sense of style. She insists that she just doesn’t like it and that it’s wrong I got it without her permission. At some point, I tell my dad about my new body modification. He puts a bit of floss in his nose and asks me if we match now. My sisters both ask me privately why on Earth I told our mother. 

Why did I?

I’m pretty sure it was because I wanted to be understood. 

If my life was a Jenga tower, COVID is the cat that jumped on the table and knocked it over just as it was my turn. Without sounding too privileged, COVID is the asshole who stepped on my high school graduation and crippled my first year of college. Because it happened at this point in my youth, COVID has felt more of a coming-of-age experience over anything.

I was not the type of kid who flourished in high school. I was the kid who was forged in high school. Graduation was supposed to be this sweet release after four hellish years of build-up, so it was quite the disappointment when the year ended quietly after the shade of COVID was globally drawn. It was an even bigger disappointment that my college experience was crippled. I had always loved the idea of independence, I remember the jealousy that would slosh around in the pit of my stomach every time we dropped one of my sisters off at college after a break, this deep desire for the freedom that space from my family would create. But when I got to school and there were no new friends to be found, I needed the support that my family could provide. College with COVID feels hollow, and even with students and staff wearing masks everywhere, it was hard to feel like failure to adjust wasn’t your fault.

When the world falls to shit, you orient yourself, you focus. You focus on best friend waiting back home for you or how your dad texts you dumb puns everyday. You keep yourself satiated with pictures of your canine niece and nephew. You drag yourself to tomorrow on Valentine’s Day cards that come in the mail and being put on speaker while you listen to the rest of the family have dinner. The trick is to just barely get by. 

The nose ring hurt a lot, but the guy who pierced it for me was an old, cranky Greek-American man who also happened to be a sweetheart. I’ll see him again when I go to get it repierced in a few years. I had to take it out because my mom gave me an ultimatum I couldn’t ignore (“Take out the nose ring, or you can’t leave the house”), but in hindsight, the experience was a lot like COVID. I don’t have any physical signs to prove that I carry these events with me. Sometimes, I wish they made purses for memories. A place where you can put them down for a little while.

In the big picture, neither of these events took up very much time, but it’s still okay that these things mean something, and it’s okay that they mean something different for everyone. My mom saw the nose ring as a threat, turning her child into something that she didn’t recognize. To me it was growth, change for the better, a way to move forward. It’s a good thing I can move forward with or without it. And it’s a good thing my mom is not gonna be in charge of my body modifications forever.