The beauty of plucking

It was a Saturday night, after dinner and we were bored. Okay, I was bored. So I volunteered to pluck Gillian's underarm hair. Owain and Cait held her down.

There is nothing like sitting down, lips pursed, eyes squinting into my daughter's pits and plucking out underarm hair - strand by strand.

She went: ouch!ouch!ouch! OWWW!!! ouch! Oooh... ow!! OOOUCH!!

And I went: for goodness sake DON'T move! Stop squirming!

To take her mind off the pain, I thought I'd give her one of my hard-earned beauty tips - stuff I had learned the hard way. So I told her seriously about how she should NEVER EVER use those commercial applications for hair removal - you know, the roll-on, the cream, the spray etc which promises to remove unwanted hair?

I can still remember the smell of ammonia in the bathroom when I lathered on the cream to the pits, held my arms up above my head and patiently waited for the requisite 5 or 10 minutes for the chemicals to do the deed - all the while getting colder and colder while my sister or mother banged on the bathroom door hollering at me to be done. And when the stuff finally did the job, I used the spatula provided to wipe the gook (and hair) off. Yes, it was effective alright. I went around with baby-soft hair-less pits. After several rounds of this, the underarm hair grew back - and this time, with a vengeance! It grew, I told my round-eyed children, like the Amazon must have grown before global warming came along. Lush and thick. Like a primeval jungle. You know how its one hair to one pore right? I say. Well, after using the stuff, it was two or even three hairs to one pore!! They were spouting out all over the place. And they were thicker and coarser than before!

But why mummy? Why do we have hair there? Caitlin wanted to know.

I was stumped. Good question. I don't know. And I said as much.

That is a great mystery to me. I never believed that any aspect of God's design of the human body was irrelevant - birth has taught me that much. But what was the point of having hairy pits? What was the biological function? I mean, it traps sweat and dirt, breeds bacteria and generally creates a bad pong. But as I write, a guess is forming in my mind - could it be... pheronomes?? Hmm, got to go back and explain to the kids again...

Anyway I digress. Pheronomes or not, to get rid of the hair, I used the hair-removal cream.

I finally gave up using the creamy hair-removal stuff but not before all the damage had been done. For years after that I lived with a jungle in the pits, self-conscious about raising my arm, never wearing tank tops or sleeveless tops.

Later I discovered waxing and could walk around with hairless pits again! I loved waxing - the big swish of exploding pain as the therapist whipped the hardened wax off the pit! Woohoo! I loved waxing so much I even contemplated getting a brazilian. My loving sister called me a masochist. But sadly, I finally stopped going for waxing because it was high-maintenance and expensive and of course, I had discovered the hypnotically soothing qualities of plucking. Nothing like peering, squinting, brows furrowed, neck contorted, mouth parted, fingers cramped and tense for a session of plucking. I'm likely to get carpal tunnel syndrome in the long run, but it sure is fun to pluck!

And that's why plucking, I told Gillian serenely, works best. Short and sweet. Or waxing. But plucking is better - low-maintenance and cheap.

"Ow mom you're pinching me!" she protested.

"Nonsense!" said I. But I have to say the light was rather dim. I could have grabbed a nip of flesh while grabbing the hair. Hard to tell, in that light.

After that, she sighed with relief and gratitude (I think more because I finally stopped plucking than anything else, cupped her pits and went to bed.

I think I'll buy her her own pair of tweezers. Next time we can pluck together, side by side.

Now that's what I call mother-daughter bonding at its best.