My mother complained somewhere in her mid-fifties – maybe younger, too, but I can remember one specific incident in which her own mother was present – that her mother hadn’t warned her at all about the experience of menopause. Not that my mom was somehow unaware of the phenomenon; more that she wanted to be able to commiserate with someone close to her about the unpleasantness that they would be sharing / eventually had shared. She could’ve benefited from some personal anecdotes, however unscientific, about how this senescent process had affected a body similar to her own¹¹.

I understood the complaint then, and I sympathize with it now. For, you see, I suddenly have beef with my dad. He didn’t warn me about my eyebrows.

Yes, I could see with my own powers of observation – however limited they may be, I had an ocean of exposure on my side – as my dad’s eyebrow hairs grew up over the rims of his glasses, then crashed back down under the weight of their own, overgrown mass. He blamed an experiment in which he traded the hair atop his head and above his eyes for meet-and-greet tickets to a Moby concert¹². But few were fooled. They hadn’t grown back weird. They had grown up weird.

I was warned about the rebellion of my eyebrow hairs. Not in time to prevent the uprising, if ever I could have, but at least enough to mitigate it. But what I was not warned about – what I had never, to the best of my memory, considered – was that the skin under those brows might feel the spark of rebellion and try, similarly, to make its escape.

Why didn’t anyone tell me about eyebrow dandruff?

 

 

¹¹My grandmother shrugged – though, to her credit, apologetically – and said that she had never had any woman give her that version of The Talk, mother or otherwise. People “just didn’t talk about that sort of thing,” so she had no roadmap.

¹²Which was most memorable, it seems in retrospect, for the cartoon the singer drew on Dad’s CD, thanks to the fact that my father was not a pubescent girl at the time. Nor ever, to my knowledge.

x

Year 7, Day 13

April 15, 2020

Prompt: Non-Fiction