Pins, clips and trans-generational identities

When in high school and university, my mom was, as her older and critical sister puts it, "a fashion icon". Designing and sewing her own clothes, driving her future mother-in-law crazy with her choice of wedding outfit (burgundy long knit hippy dress and black fake-fur short coat), fashion was an important part of who she wanted to be and how other people (including the nagging older sister) saw her. She wore her almost black hair very long and jewelry was in line with her style: bold and artistic. 

But as my mother never wore nail polish or lipstick out of some incomprehensible principle, she also never pierced her ears. All through the seventies and eighties she wore the clip-on earrings, some of them made by hand by her similarly fashion aware and creative friends. When I was growing up, the first earrings I secretly tried on, were exactly these. Then the first years of primary school rolled out and one day with my cousin we sneakily took the bus into the centre of town and went to have our ears pierced. 

While my earlobes were healing and my new identity as a pierced-ear-teenager was forming decidedly different from my mom's way of doing the woman thing, I failed to notice that something else started changing. My fashion icon mom became more and more modest in her fashion choices, was less enthusiastic about not only fashion, but also about the relationship with my father and how much he agreed on her pursuing the independent successful designer woman life she led before. More and more often her long black hair was tied in a braid which made her look tired and sad. 

One day, I went with her to the hairdresser where she decided to cut her amazing long black hair short. For me it felt like she needed to do something drastic, so as not to be the passive observer of how her life was disappointing her, but to make it seem like she was doing this all on purpose. After this transformation, the earrings along with other memories of her extravagant youth, were put in a tiered plastic jewelry box which I admired sometimes, taking out the earrings and necklaces as relics of the previous version of my mom. 

Her old clip-on earrings she gifted to me few years ago, a pair of green plastic flowers and another pair which looked like some sort of imaginary tropical orange fruit, now sit in my drawer and make me think. The intimate thoughts and longings for my mom in her less depressed part of life. The bold thoughts about women empowerment and the freedom to design one's earrings and one's life. And the bitter thoughts about the wild dreams being pushed inside a tiered jewelry box. And then I put them back and stick the pin-earrings in my ears, like everyday, without being able to grasp what decisions I will only later see I am making as I do that.