Down the Drain

                                  Down the Drain



         I just finished teaching my oldest daughter how to shave her legs. A first for me and a first for her.  She really can’t be old enough.  I tried to persuade her to wait, at least until Spring at the very least.  That would give me another couple of months to plan and fret.  Not only do we need to prepare her legs, we need to prepare me.

         Explaining my desire to be able to stop shaving every November and restarting in April doesn’t sway her; she is resolved to shave away all that little girl hair.  I bit my tongue to stop my mother’s words from escaping through my lips, but they were echoing inside my head: “Once you start, you’ll never stop.”  These words would have been as useless to her as they were to me…so many years ago.

         For her, this isn’t removing hair from a leg: it is a rite of passage.  She is desperate to move into womanhood; she doesn’t know what is waiting for her there.  I relent, and go get the razor; she beams as she runs up the stairs.  I drag my feet behind her, thinking all the while, “my little girl, my little girl.”  She giggles and acts scared that the razor will remove skin along with hair. I can’t tell if she really is scared or if she is just dragging this moment out.  When I tell her that we can wait, she takes the shaving cream out of my hands.

         She asks if it will hurt, and I think for a moment of all the nicks and cuts, the razor burn, and the chore of shaving every couple of days.  I swallow all this and reply, “Of course not sweetie.”  I end up shaving her first leg.  With each swipe of the razor, clumps of hair are removed.  Not just any hair, I thought, it’s my daughter’s baby hair.  Like baby teeth, once this is removed she will never have baby hair again.  It will grow back as woman hair…stubble.  For a moment, I allow myself to imagine the hair fairy coming to leave a dollar bill under my daughter’s pillow and removing a bag of shorn-off leg hair. 

          I get back to the task of de-hairing her little girl legs.  The soft, thick downy coat on her legs will be gone and they will be smooth, and God help me, shapely.  Each mowed path brings her closer to her goal of maturing, and brings me farther from my illusions of being able to stop time.

         Deciding to get into the spirit, we giggle and laugh during the rest of the shaving.  I envision that I can hear her giggle getting more knowing with each removed follicle.  Then I get exiled into the bedroom as she shaves her other leg.  I sit in a chair and stare at the wall until I hear her emerge from the bathroom.  When she descends she pauses at my chair for a moment and gives me a secret sort of smile.  Then she moves past me to play dolls with her sister.

         She is playing dolls!  Thank God this transformation will take time.  I was afraid that her now hairless legs would metamorphose her into a teenager all at once.  We can take this slow and steady.  I take some slow and steady breaths.

         At bedtime, I sit on her bed and we talk about shaving.  She and I have this in common now.  Unlike her little sister, we both wear bras and shave our legs.  I succumb and encourage this collusion on women’s secret rituals.  If I can’t stop her from growing up, I might as well be her conspirator.  I lean over and kiss her goodnight, but she stops me by placing both palms on my cheeks.  She stares intently into my eyes, while I silently pray that she doesn’t say anything to start my tears, which I have been suppressing.  I smile, and ask her, “what?”  She isn’t looking deeply into my eyes after all: she is looking at my eyes, or, more accurately, my eyebrows.  I should have known.          

         “How do you get your eyebrows to arch like that? And when can I start?”