A Hairy Situation

So I just took anonybabe down to meet two tellers who work in the bank building where my company rents space. They commiserated with me while I was with child and told me a little about the joys and travails of parenting young chillens. They both happen to be of eastern European descent, which got me wondering whether they have as much body hair as I do.

Anonybabe is hairy. She had a thick black inch-long thatch on her head when she was born, which shocked her dad and I. You would think I'd been running around with the mailman if Anonybabe didn't have her father's facial features transcribed eyebrow to chinbone on her own. Anonyhubby is of mostly Swedish descent, and was a white-blonde towhead until well into puberty. My hair is dark brown and my body hair is now thick and plentiful, but I started life as a blondie, and with very little hair on my head until I was about 4 and no dark hair anywhere else until I was about 20.

A.B. was covered in fuzz at birth, as babies are wont to do, and it was as dark as the hair on her head. It was everywhere: on her shoulders, on her upper thighs; there was an especially thick triangle on her lower back pointing down to her butt crack that hasn't entirely gone away. We were told all of Anonybabe's head hair would fall out at about 3 months, but although it thinned a little and lightened considerably, she held on to most of it. Now at 9 months she has a full head of blonde hair with dark brown tips that is easily 3 inches long where it hasn't been cut. I can already see the little blonde baby fuzz beginnings of a unibrow on her. She won't necessarily grow to be a hairy woman, but I could definitely see it happening.

In my family...in my extended family even, there was a complete vacuum of knowledge about body hair. My mother's was naturally very light -- she's never even had to shave above her knees it's so light and sparse. To this day I don't know if I have any hairy aunts. If they were, they never let on that they had hair to get rid of in the first place. So when, in my sophomore year of college I started to sprout dark thick hairs in previously unhairy places: my chin, my nipples, further and further up my thighs, it was like it was this secret abomination. I had moments of panic where I thought I was a freak of nature and then I would comfort myself by thinking okay, somehow, somewhere, there must be women out there who are as hairy or hairier than I am.

Of course there are. My own grandmother is. Many many women are. But I had no clue.

Which brings me back around (finally) to the eastern European tellers. These two ladies may be naturally smooth as a baby's bottom, but I was imagining that they weren't, and that they had a family culture that sat them down a la the birds and bees talk and told them all about body hair. It made me think about how different communities have such weird little bubbles of knowledge and ignorance. And it made me think about all of the things I don't know to tell my daughter. I'm kind of humbled and excited in the face of that. We both got a lot to learn.