Rebellious Thoughts of a Woman

The other day I noticed that one of my male students has a single hair growing from his chin. It was about a half an inch in length, and it was all by itself, hanging there in the breeze. It was so hard not to keep staring at it. At the end of class his two “best” friends teased him about his chin hair and how he only has one and he should cut it off. But he was not parting from his chin hair. He was a man with that, his first chin hair.

So what have I become now that I need to trim the chin? Out of all the developments my body has undertaken since the forty-threshold has been crossed the chin hair one is the worst for me. I am not supposed to have anything more than blond fuzz growing on my chin. What the heck? as my younger daughter would say.

It’s so humiliating to have chin hairs. With those chin hairs I remember what it was like to feel that the entire world was staring at the most gigantic pimple that was at the center of my forehead. I know that I am not the most feminine of women (to me that means that I haven’t bought into the whole cosmetic-fashion-industrial complex), but that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to be attractive, to be a woman. It doesn’t matter whose terms I’m going by, the chin hairs invade my sense of self in such a horrible way. Chin hairs are to my face what kudzu is to the landscape at the side of the expressway, any expressway.

Ugh. Laser them out. No. I am fearful of all optional procedures. I am not a hypochondriac but I am a medical pessimist, scared that I will be the statistic that is used to show how infrequently a procedure goes awry with me representing the awry part. Besides, I like the fuzz part, just not the hair part.

Have I become one of those women who you want to take out to a dark alley and thrust a tweezer in her face menacingly? “Lady, either you pluck them out or I will.”

Even when I do pluck, I always miss a few hairs. Or do they grow so quickly that I can never keep up with them? I need to go to the store and invest in a few tweezers: for the car, school, and my pocketbook so that I can pluck as soon as an unwelcome hair is detected, wherever I may be. So I guess that means that I will be the ladyless lady who you just may see plucking out chin hairs in her car while stopped at a traffic light.

Note: In this diatribe I have totally ignored the little side of the mouth hairs that are growing in too dark. They hurt so much to pluck that I prefer to pretend that only I can see them.