“Mum, why are you putting my shaving cream on your legs?”
My three-year-old daughter has caught me in the bathroom in the middle of my annual summer-readiness routine: shaving the hair on my calves, which have been hibernating under trackies all winter. My daughter thinks the shaving cream is hers because on certain nights she’s allowed to paint the bathroom tiles with the sweet-smelling foam.
“What’s that stick for?” she asks. I drop the razor into the sink and take a deep breath. I know my answer could affect the course of my daughter’s relationship with her body.
My most shameful childhood memories are all linked to my body hair. At age eight, I remember standing in line at the pool. A classmate helped me shove my ponytail into a cap. “You have a hairy back,” she said. Something about her tone told me it wasn’t a good thing. I made a beeline for the water. With every nauseating lap, my silent prayer intensified: Please let this be another one of her pranks.
Author Tami Sussman and her daughter. Source: Supplied
My cousin later confirmed my worst fear during a family hang. “Yep, you have a snail trail at the back of your neck,” he said between bites of pastrami. “Some girls have it on their stomachs – that’s even worse.”
“You inherited your father’s hairy genes,” Mum apologised. She said I could wax my legs and bleach the rest when I turned 12
Seething with self-loathing, I ran to Mum and threw myself into her hairless arms. “You inherited your father’s hairy genes,” she apologised. Mum said I could wax my legs and bleach the rest when I turned 12. The countdown began.
Fast forward a few years to my first half-leg wax – the gateway drug. Scalding hot wax dripping down my shins, hairs ripped from their follicles, stubborn in-growns tweezed out one by one. I was hooked. It wasn’t long before the half-leg became a full-leg, underarm and eyebrow wax. Then my bikini area was added. Throughout the 45-minute ordeal, I’d take deep breaths and repeat a mantra in my head: Suck it up, you hairy freak.
I lightened the hairs on my arms, back and stomach with supermarket body bleach. Yep, the one that smells like ammonia and itches like a biblical plague. By the time I was a high school senior, my sideburns and upper lip got a good schmear of radioactive cream cheese, too.
When I wasn’t dealing with the hair physically, I was taming it psychologically. I agonised over upcoming events by the water, and never rolled up my sleeves if the day got warmer and I hadn’t had time to touch up my forearms. Waiting. So much waiting for the hairs to reach a waxable length again.
In Year 10, some friends recommended shaving, so I hacked at my calves with Dad’s razor. The floor looked like a Pollock drip painting. This is what has to be done to be normal, I thought.
As a uni student, I spent my measly earnings on rent, groceries and laser hair removal. On the prisoner restraint bench, limbs splayed while a technician tasered my butt, my mantra became more of a question: I wonder how many people are walking around pretending to be hairless?
The seeds of suspicion had been planted, but I continued to make weed control a priority. Even at age 31, I mourned a lost shaving opportunity when I went into labour earlier than expected.
In the maternity ward, a midwife caught me absentmindedly tracing the lanugo fur on my newborn’s ears. “Don’t worry,” she said, “that hair falls off after a few months.” My infant child’s first introduction to body shaming, at 16 hours old.
I want my daughter to revere every inch of her body, unconditionally
My daughter’s birth coincided with a peak in the body positivity movement. Flooded with social media tiles promoting self-love, I began to direct some compassion towards my hairy self. Naturally, I started to think about the relationship I hoped my daughter would have with her own body. I want her to revere every inch of it, unconditionally. I want her to spend summers swimming, playing and exploring with abandon. Or at the very least, roll up her sleeves when she’s hot.
So here I am, with two daughters now, wondering how I can make this happen. Do I schedule reminders about how normal it is to have body hair? Do I swap traditional bedtime stories for nightly instalments of feminist literature outlining the histories and cultural implications of hair removal?
All the parenting experts tell me kids don’t always listen, but they categorically model from their parents. The media experts tell me visibility leads to normalisation. My young children aren’t watching #hairygirl TikToks yet, but they’re watching me shave my legs.
I decide that this is the summer I’m going to ditch the shaving cream. I’m going to make friends with my body hair – or at least get awkwardly acquainted with it.
My actual friends have their reservations. “It won’t have an impact unless everyone does it,” one of them says. “It’s like recycling, we all need to commit for there to be large-scale change.”
“I’m not brave enough,” another shakes her head. “But I appreciate all the people doing the important diversity work for me.”
We’ve come such a long way as a society in championing diversity in size and shape, contour and colour, but progress is slow for body hair. This time of year, it feels excruciatingly slow. Like a 12-year-old girl, waiting for her hairs to grow back to a waxable length.
writes for children and adults, with a special interest in body image, mental health and diversity.
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