Nose Ring

I’m not sure if it was dealing with the knowledge that Bryan was sitting in our house in North Africa hearing our market being hit with heavy artillery from the army barracks down the road, or simply managing two toddlers for two weeks completely by myself that made my desire to do something “crazy” so uncontainable, but about this time last week I was weighing whether I should chop all my hair off, get a tattoo or pierce my nose. The itch for something new and different was eating me alive. After weighing my options I decided that, in light of how much my husband likes my long hair and how uncommitted I was to any particular symbol to permanently place on my body, I would go with the nose ring. 

So I did it. And I love it, (though for the record, for a woman who has had two babies without epidurals I was shockingly near fainting when the lady shoved the needle in my nostril). And best of all, unlike every other secret of my life, I was able to keep it hidden from Bryan for a full week of late night phone calls. I tell Bryan everything, whether I want to or not, whether he wants me to or not. I couldn’t wait to see his face when I got off the plane in North Africa (where incidentally, every third woman or so has her nose pierced too).

On Sunday night the girls and I took our regular evening walk around the neighborhood here in Nairobi. I was going through the list of things I needed to do before the girls and I flew out – packing and weighing cargo, dropping it by the hangar, buying a few more solar lights for friends, getting a yellow-fever shot for Mikat… As we walked I continued what has become a habit by now, looking up at the tall apartment complexes and cozy urban duplexes and wondering which ones were available to rent, what kind of plants I would put on the veranda if I lived there, whether or not I would hang a wind chime. I am so hungry for stability these days and a home we can actually live in, I have taken to internally rearranging people’s furniture in their houses, mentally scooting coffee tables and rehanging pictures to suit my own tastes while politely sipping tea and nodding at small talk. While we walked that afternoon, I prayed a prayer that went something like this: God, I am so homesick right now that my common sense may not be enough to keep me out of North Africa. Tomorrow I am emotionally all in as I start blasting away at the last few things I need to do to get there. If you don’t think that’s a good idea, and I don’t mean to be pushy about this, but I really need you to make that very, very clear. Like, before tomorrow morning.

Ten minutes later my phone rang and I got my answer. A merciful, heartbreaking answer. For the first time since this wretched war began, fighting was taking place in our own town. Bryan could hear the gunfire, see the women and children running to the bush, smell the chaos and fear in the air.

So on Thursday, instead of the girls and me tumbling off the little 206 onto our dirt airstrip and making our way down pock-marked dirt-roads to our cinder-block house where the girls have a bedroom freshly painted pink, my scruffy husband stepped out of a taxi idling in the paved driveway to the shrill delighted squeals of his daughters. He dropped his dusty pack, kissed me and then said the nose ring looked beautiful.

That night after the girls were in bed Bryan and I talked for a long time. He gave me updates on our friends in neighbors in North Africa – Mahmoun has a new baby girl, Jamal Musa married an Ethiopian; he filled me in on some new Arabic words he picked up while he was, you know, speaking almost exclusively Arabic for two weeks straight. My favorite was Gisma which means something like an unearned blessing, or good fortune. He brought me up to date on the current political landscape in our area. I in turn basically filled him in on what foods Annabelle has decided are no longer appropriate for human consumption, what parts of the floor MaryKat has had potty training mishaps in. 

We were still talking as I got out of the shower that night. At which point I absently-mindedly put the towel up to my face and yanked the nose-ring right out of my nostril. 

I promptly panicked. 

There were all the stories of peoples whose piercings healed over before they could get the stud back in, (“Baby, I really don’t think it healed over in 45 seconds…”), people left with grotesque scars or complicated infections. I sat in front of the mirror for 30 minutes digging at my nose as I tried to get the corkscrew stud back in while regaling the man who hadn’t enjoyed running water in two weeks with these horror stories and cursing my carelessness. I was so frustrated.  

Finally, completed defeated and with a tacky fake-gold mushroom earring of my grandmother’s keeping the hole open, I crawled in bed with my husband for the first time in two weeks and bawled my eyes out. I snotted up his chest crying harder than I had in a long time while he told me that everything really was going to be ok, that I hadn’t ruined our reunion, that I was his gisma. After ten minutes of red-eyed hiccupping I turned to him and said, “You know, this isn’t really all about my nose ring. I think I am crying about everything that isn’t going like it’s supposed to.”

He looked at me with an honest-to-goodness attempt at not smiling (I appreciated the effort) and said, “I kinda figured.” At which point I started crying again.

I think what I hate most about trying to make a difference in a freaking complicated part of the world is how it makes horrible things sometimes feel like a relief and turns good news into a disappointment, at least for those of us who have the freedom to come and go at will. When bullets are flying in your market, there is a certain clarity that you shouldn’t bring the kids up, no matter how badly you want to, and the ease of that decision is a relief. When you hear news that everything has calmed down and it is safe to go home, there is sometimes a belly-ache of anxiety under the joy. How long will we be able to stay this time. What might my kids witness when we go back? 

It’s also really complicated to articulate all of this clearly and honestly to friends and family back home. Sometimes I want to weep and wail on the phone to a dear friend about how messed up it all is and how bad things are in our area. But then I am in danger of creating panic when we announce that the coast is clear and we are so happy to be going back, which we really are. Similarly, I sometimes push back against the media narratives of a dark continent with imagery of a beautiful place and our own local security to the point that a Facebook status update saying we have been evacuated to safety doesn’t make sense. But you said everything was fine in your area...

Not to sound like a Chinese philosopher, but the truth is, all good news carries a whiff of danger and all bad news has a hint of promise. Hope and fear are always lurking on the horizon, gracefully taking each other’s place in line as the seasons change. And what is so hard about this season is that nothing is clear cut. This is not the end of our time in North Africa. But neither is it the beginning of years on end of being settled in our home there. This is a dip on a wide and choppy sea.

We are thinking through ways to introduce a little more stability into our lives. I know you are not supposed to be a very good judge of your own mental state but I think we have a good feel for our own pulse right now. And mine is saying I need something new, something that brings just a bit of fresh air as we keep sailing forward. I’m not sure exactly what that will be yet. I do know, however, that it will not be another piercing.

Okay, mine is not remotely as impressive as the my North African friend in the top picture (can you even see mine in this picture?!) but if you look close there is a little silver freckle on the right.