There is no dignity in childbirth.

My dream of a homebirth got unceremoniously trashed the moment my baby was discovered to be in breech position with her head under my ribcage instead of down toward my pelvis, ready to be born.   They scheduled me for a planned cesarian and I left the medical offices with my head spinning.

The big day arrives and the hospital felt surreal. I was here to have a baby, but I wasn’t in labor.

They took me into the surgical suite and pointed to a skinny, metal table and asked me to get up on it.

It felt comical.  I was massively pregnant.  I couldn’t see my feet, and bending in any form was nearly impossible. I attempt to mount the table and even with help from the nurses I feel like a penguin, flapping my wings and struggling with the task of getting up high enough.  They managed to steer me into position with an ungraceful plop.

I had kind of hoped there would be cat posters on the ceiling telling me, “you can do it!” like in my OBGYN exam room.  There was nothing to look at besides a very functional ceiling.

The nurses are fussing with my gown and the last bits of surgical preparation. Even after months of pregnancy, and the emotion of knowing I will have a baby within the hour, I am still a little embarrassed that I haven’t shaved in months.

I started shaving before I was even a teenager, the second I even suspected I was growing hair I removed it.  I knew hair was icky and I wasn’t supposed to have it.  I had nightmares of being the girl with hair sticking out the sides of her underwear and being laughed at by the world.  No thank you.

I shaved or waxed religiously for 30 years.

Now, for the first time, I’m not doing any kind of hair removal.  I can’t see myself. I can barely reach anything.  It is all so uncomfortable.

I don’t feel the least bit sexy.

I had formally given up on hair maintenance, and I put my razor away months earlier.  I decided to deal with it after I had the baby and I could move freely again.

Now I am lying on a metal table, under the lights, with all eyes between my legs.  I have the mental image of a cartoonish amount of hair sprouting from my body.

The nurse comes over with a razor to do her surgical preparation.

“OH MY!,” she says, and starts to giggle softly.

That catches me off guard.  It is really THAT bad?

The nurse finishes her thought out loud, “I didn’t realize you weren’t shaved. You are so light.”

My mind heard a record scratching and snapped into focus.

Ma’am, I am fully grown out.  This is my full bush.  I have given this my full pregnancy hair growth potential.  I am a creature down there!

This is a room of humans who made a career choice that involves a daily view of pubic hair.

I have learned, just now, in this moment, that if my bush was an earthquake, I wouldn’t even register on the Richter Scale.

What?????

It matters, that up to that point, I had never actually seen my own vulva or my pubic hair.  I could only imagine what I looked like based on what I could feel with my hands, and I really tried to not spend time touching myself. When I did touch, I was generally shaving my hair off.

It would be a few more years before I would look at myself in the mirror and see what my nurse had seen in that surgical room.   My blonde hair is so light that it almost colorless.  The hair on my head is fine and somewhat thin.  It makes sense that my pubic hair is similarly thin.  At my thickest bush, you can easily see through the hair to my skin. It is more like an attempt at hair.  At best, I can give myself a participation trophy for the effort, but there just isn’t much here. I tried.  I gave it all I had.

Under the bright lights of a surgical table, the nurse couldn’t tell my hair existed until she was standing right next to me.

That was unexpected.

Every woman I had seen has dark, thick curls.  From a distance it is quite clear that puberty has happened, and they have adult hair. I assumed that my body would be no different than the other women.  I’m a grown up.  Grown-ups have hair.  Magazine articles on all the racks write think pieces on the best ways to remove it.  Waxing salons give you options on “styles” you can get. Everyone has unmanageable pubic hair.  We all grow a bush you need a machete to find your way through….Right?

It was the opposite land I never expected to crash into.

What if you never really grow it to begin with?  It’s there, but only a little.  What if you need to get all up in my business before you even know it’s there? Does it still count?

I want to look like a grown up too.

Now what?

I later learned that as we get older, our pubic hair goes grey.  It gets thinner and for many, will stop growing altogether.  We become naturally, (mostly) hairless again.  All that work, and years of shaving/waxing and fretting over hair and it will just take a bow and exit stage left anyway.

I didn’t realize that I wanted hair until I found out that I can’t really have it.  Life likes to do that sometimes.  I spent 30 years worrying about removing something I didn’t actually have, only to really, really want it when I discovered the truth of my genetics.

Today, after nearly 15 more years in the land of, “welp… I tried.”  I keep it from getting scraggly, but I really don’t do much maintenance anymore.  I let it be, in all it’s minimal glory.

What was once an imaginary beast to be tamed, has turned into a small reminder that I too, am a grown-up.  I am enjoying what I can manage to grow while I can grow it.

I promise it’s there.

It’s a bit dark to really see it right now.  Here, let me get a light.  It kinda glows a bit when you shine the light on it from the right angle.

You can feel it is there…

You know what, nevermind.

Art: Epilation des Schamhaars, Holzschnitt von Peter Flötner. Wiki Commons

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