I Can Pluck That!

I am the child of mixed heritage.  I am a third generation medical professional, and my mother could look me in the eye and ask “Did you have a BM (bowel movement) today?” if ever I mentioned cramps, in a clinical tone that still sends chills down my spine just to think of it. I was also raised in the South.  We didn’t have periods, or even the monthly curse.  No, “Aunt Martha came down on the bus”.  You could be publically embarrassed by this query about odd relatives, (Oh, honey, did Aunt Martha come down on the bus today?), but so it went.

So please bear with me if I refuse to say the word “menopause”.  I just don’t like it.  I really prefer “The Change”, which seems so much more soothing. “Menopause” has menacing air to it, as though it was waiting to attack, or was somehow malevolent… which of course, it is.  “The Change”, on the other hand, seems more like an earnest New Age group who wear crystals, meditate, do yoga, and ring chimes; or perhaps an aging hippie activist love-in situation, replete with Sandalwood incense and guitars around a campfire.  I can live with The Change.  I may have to do battle with Menopause.

This topic arises because the girls were discussing laser hair removal the other day.  I’ve had it done twice, and may have to do it again.

You see, I was blessed at birth with a unibrow, the kind that goes meandering from ear to ear.  Boon, the lovely lady who currently waxes my eyebrows laughingly says I should set up a donation station for all the Asian women who have none.  If I could figure out how, I would, too. I really would. If it hadn’t been for Brooke Shields, who came into womanhood at approximately the same time as me, I probably would have resorted to the same tactic as the head cheerleader at one of my High Schools, who just shaved off her eyebrows completely and drew them on fresh every morning.  You could tell how late she’d been out the night before by how off-kilter her eyebrows were…The seventies were an interesting time… Anyway, Brooke inspired me to just pluck the middle of my brows, thus indicating the presence of two eyes.  Over time, this evolved into waxing, shaping, and all that girly stuff.  It turns out, eyebrows are fairly manageable. 

As I aged and went through the hormones of pregnancy, however, it became clear that the unibrow was somehow connected to a mustache that would make Burt Reynolds proud.  If you’ve been there, you know.  One of the gals who worked at the front desk in the O.R. casually remarked one day that she found facial hair on older women revolting.  “Why don’t they just deal with it?,” she wondered out loud.  I wanted to strangle her, of course, because how could a twenty-something know anything about going to bed with a peach fuzz face and waking up looking like the Goat Woman of Mykonos?  I didn’t strangle her, of course.  I snuck up to the locker room to see if I had suddenly sprouted one of those amazing chin hairs that could pass as pogo sticks, or the sharp ones on the upper lip you could use as ink quills… If you didn’t know it, those mini Swiss Army knives that fit on your keychain have an awesome tweezers.  I highly recommend obtaining one if you’re over thirty.

This isn’t something that goes away, either. We were on vacation on the Big Island of Hawaii and stopped at a lovely volcano-heated natural seawater pool in a public park.  An elderly couple was there.  He was mending his fishing net, and she was floating about, chatting up the non locals.  Thing was, the easiest way you could tell them apart was by their swimsuits, as she was sporting the most amazing Fu Manchu I’ve ever seen in grey, let alone on a woman.  My boys were more than non-plussed.  They wanted to know what in the world was going on here?  I just said she had given up.  It seemed hardly the time for a dissertation on the relative merits of Evening Primrose and HRT.

But what should I do about my mustache?  This was more problematic, as I like to be fairly low maintenance.  I tried bleaching, which seemed the least labor intensive.  Not effective for us darker haired ladies, really.  Sugaring: tasty, but no. Waxing:  That seemed to be a full time job!    And I am in no way patient enough for the lovely ladies who thread….As it happened, I went to work for a plastic surgeon for a while, part time, and one of the perks was access to the laser.  So I had carbon laser treatments on my upper lip for about a year, and this made a significant impact, at least until The Change began.

See, one of the really fun things about The Change is that it’s a process.  A bell curve, if you will.  And no one can really tell you anything about it.  Here’s a typical conversation with my doctor, who is a middle-aged woman, and actually is invested in the subject:

Me: “I’ve been thinking about biting the heads off of live chickens”                                                    
Dr:  “Are you still having your monthly?”

Me: “yes. Aunt Martha still comes down on the bus.”
Dr:  “AH.  Sounds like Perimenopause.”

Me: “Huh?
Dr: “Oh, that’s the indescribably vague time before and after menopause when you get to have all the symptoms, and suffer all the irritations, but we can’t actually CALL it menopause because your period hasn’t changed.”

Me: “So what has medical science done to advance our understanding of this bullshit?”                            
Dr:  “Pretty much nothing to help understand the causes.  It turns out there’s not much money in what makes women crazy. We can give you some pretty nifty SSRI’s (Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) to help with the mood swings however. Everyone else in the country is on them, no one will even notice.”

Me:  “So the pharmaceutical companies spent a gazillion dollars on Viagra so we could listen to Bob Dole talk about his hard-on, but no one will spend a dime to keep me from axe-murdering my family in their sleep”.  
Dr:  “Not unless there’s a book contract in it, no.  Oh, but we could put you back on the Pill.  That sometimes helps.  Sucks to be a woman, doesn’t it?  So, which prescription can I get you?  The one to prevent the pregnancy you don’t need since your husband is fixed, or the one for depressed people, even though you aren’t depressed yet?  You realize of course that neither of them will help with the night sweats.”

You can see why I get hostile.  Anyway, after The Change began, I found that I was suddenly back in Tom Selleck  land, from a hirsute point of view.  Getting waxed on a bi-weekly basis with daily tweezing was making me postal. So when a Living Social coupon for 75% off Laser Hair removal, you can bet that I jumped right on it.  I called to make the appointment immediately, and found that every other woman in a thirty mile radius had bought the same coupon.  There was a three month wait. I booked my appointment and began not waxing, and not plucking, per instruction.  Shaving my lip seemed so barbaric.  I tried the electric razor, but it didn’t cut close enough. So I broke down and got out a fresh blade for the old manual razor, praying I wouldn’t have to put toilet paper on my lip the way my son did.

Finally my scheduled date came around, and I was surprisingly nervous.  I mean, I already knew all the tricks, like tucking my tongue under my lip to raise the follicles to their doom.  This time, there was no carbon, but the click and zing and burn and smell of torched hide were all the same, and it was over in no time!  It looked great for about a week, and then I had to shave again.  Months went by, with me going in every 6 weeks, before I finally began to see the light at the end of the tunnel. The dusky shadows were disappearing and I had distinct hairs.  Now there were patches, like mushrooms, sprouting only here and there…. Now just a few… I have one more appointment, and then a safety net 8 week follow-up, and I should be down to the place where I can comfortably tweeze whatever sprouts.  I don’t ask for much, just for life to be manageable enough to say “I can pluck that!”

Dry Gin Martini, MD, hair of the dog.