I have hairy eyebrows.

There, I've said it. Girt big caterpillars. Thank goodness I didn't inherit my father's werewolfian arms or hobbithairy feet, but I do have fuzzy over-eye slugs. If I was born in a different country, I would call them by other names, all which roll much more delightfully around my mouth than the banal and hideous Eye Brow, plural.

méimáo
nunseop
kwalli
lhyatamhkre

I learnt the word hirsute in year 7.

bushy
furred
bristly
woolly
unshorn
shaggy

In the 1990's in Australia, eyebrows were thin and overplucked, like starving chickens in a tornado or a orangutang experimenting with a razor, or a child's drawing of Cruella Da Ville.

river_flows_young_woman_with_hairy_eyebrows_looking_into_a_mirr_ba0afaf7-776c-41fd-acd6-d1b69e39f599.png

your
eyebrows
are
perfect
just
the
way
they
are

Thanks mother, but instead of trusting your advice, which is well intended I'm sure, I'll instead allow a thirteen year old with a pair of tweezers to Jim's Mowing Service my face. It'll take years to regrow them into the natural caterpillar that inches it's way across my visage. I'll fight for years to slap the hands of Indian threaders away from the top of my brows, screaming 'leave it!' so that they only wrap and tug at the lower part of my brow with snapping thread.

Not that you're a shining example of making me feel confident about myself, dear Mum. That 'Vogue Book of Health and Beauty' you got me for Christmas made me feel even more inadequate for not knowing, as the other girls seemed to, how to apply make up.

and
then
menopause
arrives,
like
a werewolf
on the full moon of your fifties

Where is all this hair coming from? Are my caterpillars breeding? Why are they getting fatter? Why is one draping itself over my top lip? Why do they scatter and moult so that hairs grow from my chin and - ugh - there's one on my cheek? What kind of cosmic joke is this?

The wisdom accumulated over years of criticising my unmade up face and plucking hairs in the rear view mirror at the lights has made me more philosophical and less poor selfesteemish.

I can embrace my werewomanliness, my inner werecougar. She is loved. Her eyebrows are kissed. The man who loves her is getting older and more blind, so he only notices half the hairs, and as an act of marital care plucks them from her chin.

river_flows_old_modern_woman_with_hairy_eyebrows_looking_into_a_0ef72c35-4ced-456e-93f3-42921c5417fe.png

I make him promise to do so if I'm ever in a coma or too ill to brandish tweezers. I lick my forefinger and wipe salt from them after being in the ocean. I glance at them sideways in the mirror and catch them dancing like banshees. I occasionally try to tame them, but only in the way I might brush her teeth or moisturise.

Lo! The outer me is finally okay with my face. Life is too short to tear one's hair out over such things, I guess.

hair
today
gone
tomorrow

This short creative non fiction was written in response to The Ink Well's prompt of the week, 'make up'. Images by me and Midjourney.