History repeats itself, sort of.

This week my darling fourteen-year-old daughter asked to hang out with a friend after school. An older friend. A friend with a car, and piercings, and a wardrobe consisting of various shades of black. She’s known this friend for a few years, and she seems nice enough, but I’ve been hesitant to allow them to hang out alone, for obvious reasons.

But now my daughter is just a few weeks shy of her fifteenth birthday and getting her own learner’s permit. She’s a good kid who gets good grades and, for the most part, has good judgement. So, after a lengthy pause for consideration, I said okay.

They drove farther than I would have liked and arrived home a bit later than I had told her, but I gave her some leeway with a warning to be on time next time and utilize her phone’s map app to estimate travel time. It wasn’t until she was nibbling on chicken nuggets later that I noticed something shiny in her left nostril.

“What’s that in your nose?” I asked.

She denied anything.

I persisted.

She denied some more.

I called her out.

She accused me of being some nose-inspecting creep and ran away to hide in her room.

I followed. I let her know I could see the piercing and that she needed to be honest with me.

She accused some more, denied again, screamed, and cried.

Then, after a while, she admitted her friend had taken her to get her septum pierced.

Because of course she did.

There was another girl. She was also just shy of her fifteenth birthday. She snuck downtown with her bedraggled group of friends and got her nose pierced at a kiosk on St. Mark’s Street for $7 that she had saved up from her babysitting money that she hadn’t handed over to her mother immediately. And her mother found out, as they always do. And this girl suffered the terrible consequences.

She suffered being threatened with a knife, being kicked out, having the locks changed, and eventually running out of couches to surf and parents who wouldn’t ask too many questions. She suffered hunger, and homelessness, and many many scary situations that no child should have to go through. But she also learned. She learned she wanted more. That she wanted to do better, to be better, to be the best version of herself that she could be.

So, when my daughter told me last year that she wanted a septum piercing, I did my research. I found the best piercing place in the county, and the highest-rated specialist on staff. I told her she could get it done for her fifteenth birthday if she waited a year and decided she still wanted it, because kids are known to change their styles constantly.

But she couldn’t wait.

Why? Because kids do dumb things. They’re still learning, and challenging the rules, and that’s normal and expected and even okay. So, when my daughter admitted to her sneaky sneaky ways, we had a long conversation about trust and honesty. She may not hang out alone with that friend again for a long while, and she lost the privilege of hanging out with friends after school until she can regain the trust she lost. Then she got a hug, and the suggestion of a smaller gauge when she’s ready to change out her piercing.

In a few weeks, she will celebrate her fifteenth birthday surrounded by friends and family in a beautiful new house that she loves. It’s the exact opposite of how I spent my fifteenth birthday. She has her entire future ahead of her and all the possibilities in the world. She’s brilliant, and funny, and talented, and makes really dumb choices sometimes. But I couldn’t be prouder of her. And maybe a little proud of me too.