Seventeen Years Ago…

Seventeen years.

That was my, rather surprised, answer to a question asked of me the other day.

This question: How long have you had your ears pierced?

Honestly, I hadn’t even realized that it had been that long! 😯

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Back in 1999, I believe… when I was almost 9 years old, I won Reserve Grand Champion in a 4-H “Impressive Dress” competition.  The prize?  A Walmart gift card.

When my mom asked me what I wanted to do with the money, I told her that I wanted to get my ears pierced.  I had wanted to for a while, but Mom wasn’t sure I was old enough.  (Totally unfair, I thought, considering my sister was only four when she got hers pierced! 😦 😛 )

Anyway!  Mom and Dad decided it was okay so off to Walmart we went! 😀

I’ll just go ahead and say: this was not a good first experience.

I’m sitting there… and the lady is taking simply forever to get the dots marked on my ears.  Which was making me kinda nervous.  (And she still got the earrings ever so slightly off, but that’s okay.)  And Mom is standing there with this mom look on her face, making me more nervous.  Then a friend of hers sees us and decides to come over and watch… and talk to Mom about how nervous I look.  Making me even more nervous!!

Seriously?! 😐

So- finally! -the lady decides she’s ready to do the piercing.  She gets me all pumped up and ready for it…  She puts the piercing gun up there and– BOOM! –all finished.  Right??  Nope!  Ya see, the back of the earring somehow got stuck in the piercing gun.

She couldn’t get the earring out of the gun, therefore, she couldn’t get the gun off my ear.  She was tugging– as gently as she could, I’ll admit– and trying so hard to not hurt me, but it still hurt.  Not excruciating pain or anything, but still!

When she finally freed me from the piercing gun and was able to get the back out and snap it onto the earring post… I think she probably figured I wasn’t up for getting the other ear pierced.  But I still wanted her to do it.  And she assured me that, in all the years she’d been piercing ears, she had never had this happen before so I wasn’t worried about it happening a second time.

I should have worried.

This is what my first earrings looked like, only they were gold with darker blue petals.

Because it happened a second time.

Yes, the earring back got stuck in the gun on the second piercing too.  And again we went through the whole tugging and pulling and twisting– and trying to be so gentle and not cause pain…..

News flash: it still hurt!

By the time we were done, I was nearly crying… she was nearly crying!  It wasn’t even that it hurt all that bad!  I mean, I definitely remember it hurting, but I think most of it was just fear that had me nearly freaking out.

We finally went home and my mom made sure I knew to be careful of my ears and to be sure I cleaned them regularly…  But I was a tomboy.  And I wrestled with my brothers all the time.  Seriously– all. the. time.

So I ended up getting an earring pulled out (not ripped out, so please don’t freak out!)… 4 times, I think, before the 6 do-not-remove-the-earrings weeks were up.  (It wasn’t the same earring every time, but what does that matter, right?)

“I don’t know how it happened, Mom! We were just wrestling…”

Yes, it hurt.  Yes, it bled a couple times.  What did we do?  Mom cleaned the earring, cleaned my ear, and put the earring back in with a stern admonishment that “Y’all need to be more careful!”  Sure enough, though, about a week later, there I was placing an earring in Mom’s hand again and explaining that we were just doing _____! 😛

Anyway, I made it through the 6 weeks without any damage done and I’ve never really had any trouble with those piercings for the nearly 17 years that I’ve had them so– Yay!  Thank God! 😀

I love to wear dangly earrings.  A lot.  And, though many people have told me things such as:  “You’d better not wear those big earrings around the kids– they’ll pull ’em out!” – or – “I work with (or have) small children and I’m afraid they’ll pull my earrings out if I wear long ones!”  I can’t say I’ve ever really worried about that.  (I suppose I got over that in those first 6 weeks- haha! 😛 )

I am around kids of all ages (newborn-teens) all the time!  And I have never had one do any damage to my ears. 😉  Sure, the little ones like to play with or tug on my long, dangly earrings from time to time…  They’re curious!  But you just have to be careful.  And teach them, as you do with everything else, to be gentle or simply “don’t touch”.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticizing anyone who has these worries… if you’re worried about it, certainly don’t wear long earrings!  I’m just telling how I’ve dealt with it.

❤ Love babies! ❤ Love long earrings! ❤

And… travel forward in time to just a few years ago.  (Gosh, I can’t even remember how long ago it was now!)  I decided that it was time to get another set of piercings!

Good idea, right? 😀

This time, my younger brothers came along for the ride– determined that getting your ears pierced hurt bad enough that it was gonna make their 20-something-year-old sister cry.

Brothers….. 😛

Anyway, this time went a lot better! 😀

Until she was finished.  She seemed to think they looked good so…. I turned to my brothers……  And they were like: I, um… I think maybe you should look at those.  They’re a little… off?

My reaction:

Yeah… they were way off.  Well, at least, one of them was.  (Seriously, only a person with severely bad eyesight could possibly have thought that looked good!)  So we talked to a manager and she told me that I could take out the one earring and let that hole heal over for a couple months, then come back and they would re-do it for me.  I agreed.  With one whispered stipulation to my brother– “I’m not getting it re-done unless it’s a different lady doing the piercing.” 😛

And that’s what I did!  I spent two months letting that hole heal, feeling kinda ridiculous at first for having two earrings in one ear and only one + a hole in the other.  Several people, when they noticed, were kind enough to let me know that I had an earring missing & then I had to explain what had happened.  But the second time around (with a different lady), things went much better and I’m quite happy with the end results! 😉

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So how about y’all… do you have your ears pierced?
Tell me about it! 😉