Fight the Frump (aka - fighting fur)

At 28 years old and the harried mother of two small boys I was starting to feel downright dumpy. My friends from school were all living it up in glamorous city jobs, going out to nice restaurants, buying glamorous clothes and basically living the dream of the 20-something girl. Don't get me wrong, I love being a mother. I wouldn't choose to do anything else, yet I couldn't help but feel that perhaps I was missing out on something. My life was so different from theirs, that I decided to try to close the gap a little. 

I decided to get a Brazilian wax.

Why on earth I thought a Brazilian would make me feel less frumpy I have no idea. Perhaps it was just a bit 'sex in the city'. 

I took myself down to the local hair and beauty and salon having told my husband that I was going to get a leg wax. This is not unusual, as a mother I sometimes make the time to pamper myself with self grooming luxuries such as a hair cut and leg wax about once a year.

However, when I had rung them salon, I had booked in for a Brazilian as well. I was terrified at the thought of it. It wasn't the pain that I was worried about, but the fear of having a stranger intimately close to the most private part of me. I was sure that I would be wrong somehow, that I would be ridiculed for how unkempt my bush was. I thought of doing a trim the night before, but had heard somewhere that you needed a minimum length for the wax to take hold, so decided to leave it 'au naturale'. It is a small town that we hadn't lived in for very long, and I didn't know anyone, so I was sure that I would be able to do it anonymously. Although I was nervous about having a stranger applying hot wax to my nether regions, it would be FAR worse if I they were anything else but a stranger.

The girl who was doing the waxing was a perky, leggy blonde who looked a few years younger than me. She was very chatty and put me as much to ease I could possibly be given the circumstances. She kept telling me that I would never go back to non waxed after I had had a brazilian, because 'it felt SO much better'. I nodded with her, trying to agree in order to be polite while thinking in the back of my mind that given my current beauty routine was lucky to include de-haired legs, it was highly unlikely to go any futher than that ever again.

As she got started, she reeled back in horror at the length of the hair and suggested quite bluntly that I probably should have thought to trim before coming. I knew I would manage to do something wrong. How humiliating. 

As she chatted away, she asked the usual questions that people in those sort of professions usually ask. I find it hard enough to be comfortable talking to a stranger about my personal life and family even when they aren't spreading hot wax over my map of tasmania and ripping it off. However, she managed to find out a lot about me and share quite a bit about herself including that she had gone to the same highschool as my darling husband and that she had been in the year below him. She hadn't known anyone named Chris though, which I felt was a bit strange as Chris had been school captain, very sporty, and had said he was friends with everyone, including lots of people (mainly girls) in the year below. Here this girl was, (Kelly), who seemed bubbly and effervescent; exactly the sort of girl who Chris would have been attracted to being friends with, and she had never heard of him. I was quite confused  Had he not been as known and as high profile he had always told me he was? It just didn't make sense. 

As I was pondering this, Kelly got on with the job of waxing and the subject matter changed to the fact that the centre line of the area being waxed was excruciatingly painful. A fact that she had purposefully decided to not tell me, deciding that not knowing beforehand which bit would be most painful would be better for me. A girl who had gone to the local high school to become a beauty therapist in the area of waxing had made a judgement about the psychology of pain. 

She suddenly changed the subject back to Chris and said, 'Did your husband have a nickname at school' – I thought for a moment, and then said, 'yes! It was Bear'.

'Bear!! Of course I knew Bear! He was a great friend of mine!', she exclaimed.

On one hand I was delighted that the mystery had been solved, and my husbands' visions of school popularity hadn't been fictional, and on the other hand quite dispirited that my certainty of anonymity while getting my nether regions de-furred had been shattered. 

As she gave me my change while it was finally over, she waved 'say Hi to Bear for me!'. 

'Sure I will', I replied, but what on earth is he going to think of what you have done to me?