Struggling through with joy... |
kind of.
Struggling through with joy... |
My father had epic eyebrows. Unruly, wiry, thick, my mom trimmed them with tiny scissors every so often because they grew so long they hung in his eyes. When I was a little girl, I would pet them as he lay on the couch resting. He used those eyebrows to great effect, wiggling them when he said something outrageous, which was often, glowering with those great black hedgerows above his bright blue eyes when someone was doing something stupid. They slowly turned white as he aged, but they didn’t lose their power as they lost their color.
I inherited those eyebrows. Not nearly as bushy, thankfully, but with more curl because it isn’t enough for me to have thick, wildly curly hair. I also have thick, wildly curly eyebrows. As with many things I share with my father (skinny legs, a propensity towards anxiety, depression and dark thinking, a wicked temper) I resented my eyebrows for years. Initially I didn’t notice just how alike our eyebrows were, which may explain the paucity of desirable suitors in high school. Then I discovered tweezing and trimming and shaping, and my lifelong obsession with eyebrow maintenance began. I’ve tweezed so much, in fact, that some of the eyebrow hairs have given up and, thank God, simply stopped growing. But they still curl and grow freakishly long, so I continue to be groom them with an old toothbrush and trim them with tiny scissors. My eyebrow ministrations have decreased these days because I’m busy and middle aged, and I care a little bit less about how I look. Sometimes things get a little unruly, which is how I found myself staring at a long eyebrow hair sticking straight out at me last week. It refused to lay down even after I brushed it with my handy old toothbrush, and it popped back up after I layered a little eyebrow gel on it. “Hello!” it seemed to say. “Just a little visit from your dad.” I left it. I wear glasses most of the day, so the rebellious hair would likely go unnoticed. It is a reminder of all the things I share with my father, good and bad. A reminder I’m getting older, will likely age in some of the same ways he did, will hopefully have the privilege of living longer than he did. A reminder that for all my efforts at inner peace and calm, I am still his daughter, prone to overreaction and the great joy and delight that sometimes come with it. It is the gentlest touch from him, like his hand on my head when I was a little girl, reassuring me he was still there.
1 Comment
Lakshmi
5/14/2019 09:00:29 am
Thank you for sharing. We change so much as we grow older, don't we ?😊
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