Facial Hair

Ordinarily, women aren't supposed to have facial hair. I guess maybe I haven't read enough books on peri-menopausal or menopausal women to know better, but over the past year or so, my moustache is getting darker, longer and thicker. This hardly seems right. That my estrogen and progesterone levels should give way to their masculine counterpart, testosterone, somehow seems...well, wrong. I've got tits and a hoo hoo (vagina) and, well, I'm not supposed to have facial hair. It's one thing for your body to sag a bit after breast-feeding little people for years, and to give way to gravity but wirey, little black hairs sprouting on the softness of my cheeks and chin?

I started using Jolene's cream bleach when I was about 15. My girlfriend K. (thanks K.) told me that I should try it. She'd been using it for years. Her moustache was well on its way to developing into a goatee or van dyke, but she believed that turning it from its natural hue of auburn brown to golden blonde improved her odds of being noticed by boys. So, as any good friend would do, she passed me a wee spatula one sleep over and said, "Here, try this. Put it on for 5 minutes and lie down the WHOLE time. DON'T get up."

I thought that was odd to have to lie down to take care of the increasingly dark shadow under my nose but it turned out to be solid advice. That cream bleach sort of bubbles and gets airy and starts to fall off if you stand up. It doesn't get along with gravity. Five minutes of weird burning on my top lip proved to be one of the moments in life when you half expect a fanfare of angels to sing, "aaaaaaaah" in a sugary angelic like way. No angels. No trumpets. No fanfares. But hot dang, you couldn't see the dark shadow under my nose anymore. No more whispy fine brown hairs lingering on my top lip. I was...attractive.

Oddly enough, I'm not sure ANY boy ever noticed the hair on my top lip BEFORE or AFTER creme bleach. My husband, who knew me back then, says he only noticed my eyes and lips, no moustache. I had the moustache (peach fuzz), but it didn't bother him. It only bothered me. However, now that I'm a year away from 40, the odds are stacked against my aging body in ways that I couldn't even have predicted. Like, HOW does a white hair grow over 3 inches long on my shoulder every few months? And why is it that my husband is the one to find it? "Er, honey, keep still..." PING. OUCH. With my dukes ready to wallop him one, he stands triumphantly announcing, "wow, look at this doozy..." White hairs are better than black ones though. And those hairs I have, that are of the darker persuasion, well, they are sprouting up on my chin!!!! Not that you'll ever see them on me.

When I was a kid, there was nothing more disgusting and grotesque than an older woman, or old lady, with chin hairs. Well, unless they were BLACK chin hairs. I've had bone straight hair my whole life and all of a sudden I've got wirey, black, slightly kinked chin hairs. Not many thankfully, but they show up...every month, in the same spot. And are met with my LaCross tweezers. PING. Tricksters they are too, because they always look like they come out with the hair root, but alas one month later, there they are sprouting up like April asparagus.

Jolene's isn't really helping me anymore. I guess I can't diss a 20 year relationship, and I won't, but I'm sadly dissapointed. Obviously, not with Jolene's so much as my body's inability to continue responding well to the promise of sweetness. My moustache hairs have doubled in length and are starting to curl over my top lip. Ok, they are completely invisible to the average observer of me, however, I KNOW they are there and, I've begun plucking them too. So why, WHY, don't moustache hairs behave the same way as eyebrow hairs? Pluck them out long enough and eyebrow hair ceases to grow. Pluck your moustache hairs and ladies, they just get LONGER & THICKER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! There is some kind of cosmic injustice in a world that permits women to have facial hair, and won't deem it appropriate.

I shouldn't complain. I know there are women out there that literally have beards. Again, what kind of cosmic injustice is this???? And what if you can't afford to buy Jolene's creame bleach by the truck load or get electrolysis? Or, tweezers? It's not like women can shave this facial hair the way that men do. No-one wants to sidle up to a little femininely five oclock shadow. No-one that I've met in this world so far, anyway.

So, as I approach my monthly reminder of not conceiving, and I'm grumpy, bloated, craving chocolate and hate how my clothes fit...WHY do I have to contend with facing the mirror and those tiny shoots of black popping out of my facial pores? Isn't it bad enough that women even menstruate AND have PMS, do we have to throw facial hair onto the pile too!?!?!?!?

I won't even mention the moles. grrrrrrrrrrrumble.