Sitting on the toilet, looking at the newly found dark curly hair between my legs, I feel horrified, and disgusted. I didn’t ask for these hairs, these weren’t supposed to happen until I was a grown adult, what are they doing here on my 9 year old body!? Not only is there hair but there is discharge too and it’s stuck in the hairs, is this supposed to be happening, is something wrong with me? It hits me then, we have things that cut hair, I search through the bathroom drawers and find the tiny scissors, this really seems like a risky idea, I put them back and grab the trimmers I see on the countertop. I can’t see the blade on these so they seem like a safer option. I turn them on, my entire body tenses as I and bring them closer to the foreign patch between my legs, I pinch up pieces of hair and run the trimmer between my body and my fingers, careful not to touch my body with them because cutting myself and having to tell someone and explain what I was doing would be worse than the actual pain itself. As small tufts fall into the toilet ( flushing them is important so I can be sure there is no trace of what’s happening to my body or how I’m managing it) I can feel the panic in me lesson. My body was out of my control there for a minute, but I figured it out, I can manage this, I will just keep cutting all of this off forever and  everything will be ok.

The bathroom door swings open, and my mom stands in the doorway with an angry, horrified look on her face. “What are you doing?” she I’m sure says but in my mind hear as a shout. The weight of the world falls on me, my face reddens, my throat closes, tightness sets into my entire chest and I mumble out a meager “getting rid of it”. She leaves without saying anything and I’m left knowing that apparently what I’m doing is not ok, and I’m not sure why, I’ve seen my mom shave her pubic hair in the shower on the many occasions we’ve showered together. I also know that I’m going to keep doing it because I have no idea how else to deal with this stupid hair, that I’m convicted should not be here yet. This was supposed to happen when I was a grown adult or something, you know, when the period thing happened? “When I’m older” I was told. Im not “older”, my mom didn’t get her period until she was 17, I had so long to go this shouldn’t be here yet.

I kept using that trimmer, guiltily knowing it wasn’t mine and I was using it on the gross parts of my body and probably shouldn’t. I’d also gotten my period by now, about age 12. When girls at school started talking about shaving their legs I remember coming home and asking my parents if I could shave my legs. I was met with lots of comments like “why”, “Its so much work you’ll just hate it”. I ignored them all and pressed further until they said “yeah go ahead I guess”. So excited I ran to the shower having no idea the ins and outs of this process, I grabbed the shaving cream ( I had after all seen a Venus commercial before, it couldn’t be that hard) and lathered up and took away strips of hair and foamy cream. How fun! Then I had an idea, I could try this out with the other hairy parts of my body. So I shaved all the hair off my vulva, none on my mound, none on my outer labia, I was satisfied.

The next days itching and and red painful bumps didn’t even phase me, I was so glad to finally be rid of all that hair. I wasn’t just shaving I was full on shaving against the grain, trying desperately for my entire vuvla to feel as smooth as baby skin. Once I realized this just wasn’t possible with a razor I considered waxing, but that meant id have to find a way to go to the store without my parents or any adult really and buy waxing kit and get the money for it somehow. Where there’s a will there’s a way, and I figured it out. So I sat in my room, pre waxed strips in hand since that’s was all they had. I played the strip down and ripped as hard as I could. I looked down ready to see smooth buttery skin, and instead saw that my pubic hair was much stringer than my eyebrow hair and it had decided that it was staying put. Worst part was now I had weird sticky wax all over my pubes. Back to the drawing board.

Tweezing hair was my last resort, I sat in my room with tweezers, got the nerve and plucked the first strand. That hurt, so I decided that I’d just do the bikini line but all of my vulva. I remember bleeding a lot and just not caring, I was finally getting somewhere and id heard that if you plucked your eyebrows too much that sometimes they just stopped growing in, if only I could be so lucky with my pubic hair I thought. I tried this bikini line plucking for about 2-3 times before I decided it was too painful and gave up. Not that I was anymore accepting of my pubic hair, I didn’t even like saying “pubic hair” it was still such a dirty word for me.

My journey with pubic hair since then has been shaving all of it off until about 4 years ago, I even shaved through my first two pregnancies all the way up until I gave birth. My last one I was more relaxed about the last month of pubic hair grooming and just let it be, I couldn’t see my vulva anyways. Four years ago I started to experiment with just shaving my bikini line and letting the hair on my mound grow in about 1/4 of an inch. From there I played more with shaving shapes into my pubic area to help them feel cute, creative, and artistic to me. Art was art and surely if I made my pubic hair into art I would feel more comfortable with it and it worked, but also so did seeing other women at Bodysex circles fully embrace all of their beautiful lush bushes. Pubic hair has always been great on other people its just getting comfortable with my own that has been a journey. I know now that when I think of getting something like electrolysis or laser removal on my pubic area I feel scared, because while I wanted it permanently gone for so long now id be sad if I had done something that permanent. I would have never got to experiment with my pubic hair, or learned to love and accept it.

I know now, that for me growing my pubic hair out is a bit uncomfortable physically, and that I don’t shave because of the trauma of my pubescent body but because its a preference. Making a choice outside of that fear has been so powerful and endearing ad I feel confidant about my body and how I choose or choose not to groom it. I had no idea how much I’d be humbled about my pubic hair acceptance until about a week ago when I was thrown back in time. I was typing on the computer when my daughter sitting on the toilet, going pee, said “Hey Momma, how do you get rid of pubic hair other than waxing?” Immediately, panic set in.

Read my next blog post here to find out how I handled this situation.

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