Lauren’s Law: Piercings

Leave it to me to take a scandalous title and make it the most PG story ever. It was the ‘90s, and I had one mission: to get my ears pierced.

It started with a family trip to Claire’s at Marley Station Mall for my older sister to get her ears pierced. Cue my sister fainting from what we’ll chalk up as the excitement from such a monumental moment in her life. Despite my crying and begging, only one Burke sister hugged the Claire Bear and left with holes in her ears that day.

I decided that I had to take matters into my own hands. So I put pencil to looseleaf paper and drafted a letter to my mom. The note below is word-for-word with a few minor spelling corrections. Please excuse the grammatical errors. I’ve had to stop myself multiple times from correcting those.

“Dear Mom,

How are you? I’m fine.

I know you hate me asking but I think this is the only way to talk to you. I need my ears pierced number one I won’t feel like a baby. I would start wearing sweaters instead of sweatshirts. I wear that stuff because I’m so busy trying to make myself pretty that I never wear dresses or sweaters but if I had my ears pierced I would wear a dress every day. Please let me get my ears pierced. It make me the happiest girl on earth and I’d also have the nicest parents in the world. So please let me get my ears pierced for my birthday.

Love,

Lauren”

There’s a lot to unpack here. Primarily, I was so dramatic for a 6-year-old. How did my mom not cave when I offered to wear dresses or sweaters? It also blows my mind how big of a tomboy I was, and how my oldest daughter refuses to wear anything other than dresses.

Lastly, not bad for a first-grader, but still not good enough to get my ears pierced until fifth grade. But what a glorious day that was, and bonus, there was no fainting that day.

Lauren Burke Meyer is a Severna Park native who was inspired to write Lauren’s Law as a humorous play on the well-known Murphy’s Law adage: “anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”