The Curse of the Puberty Fairy

I was looking down at my legs during my last class of the day. It was pre-algebra, and Mrs. WhateverHerNameWas was spieling about positive and negative numbers. We had been given an assignment of some sort and were sitting in groups on the floor.

That's why I was staring at my legs. First staring, and then trying to hide them somehow underneath my body. Hiding legs as long as mine wasn't easy, even back then, when I was twelve.

You see, that day was the first time that I had noticed that all the girls sitting in my group on the floor had already begun shaving their legs, and mine were still covered with that soft, barely noticeable hair that has never known the harshness of a razor.

On that day, when I came to the knowledge that I was lagging behind my friends in the matters of womanly hygiene, those little hairs were as obvious to me as flecks of pepper in a salt shaker. I was mortified to find that I was still a little kid when my peers had made the transformation into seeming womanhood. After all, one who could wield a razor was surely mastering other feats such as proclaiming their need for Midol or dying their hair!

Panic ensued, and I began to wonder if I was the only one in my 7th grade class who had not started her period and were there other shaving areas I had been innocently neglecting? How did one go about shaving legs, anyhow? Seemed like there was something about using soap or not using soap...

I determined that I would just have to figure it out myself; there was no way I was going to ask my mother or my sister, because surely they would laugh at my inexperience and wonder what had taken me so long to enter the world of puberty management. How could I be so stupid as to think that strapping on my first training bra was the only hurdle to be jumped in the road to maturity? (Which may as well have been yesterday, for all the progress I've made in that area.)

Growing up always came slowly for me. I got "the talk" when I was 8 because my older sister was concerned about contracting AIDS, and when one of us needed to be informed of something, the other had to be included or we would just get the news second-hand. I covered my mouth during the majority of the lecture to stifle my laughs and cover my unsquelchable grin. Still ranks as one of my parent's favorite parenting moments with me, I'm sure.

My period arrived when I was thirteen, and thankfully it came when no one was home, so I was able to deal with the transformation without any embarrassing interference; until my sister showed up with her friend, who somehow discovered my secret and proceeded to congratulate me as though I had accomplished something that I had actually striven to achieve.

Thankfully, there were a few areas where I managed quite well on my own: application of deodorant and knowing when to tell my mother that I could curl my own bangs and still obtain the same degree of mockery from pre-teen vixens at school. That was about it, but it was something.

Seventeen years later, I still find myself sometimes baffled by what mainstream society has deemed "normal" in the beauty department. I have never had a Brazilian Wax, a facial, or any kind of Botox or colon cleanse. Maybe I'm missing out, but I think that as long as I have mastered the basics that I was a little slow to pick up on all those years ago, I'll be fine without the rest.

I do have one regret though. Maybe if my mother had fed me more hormone injected beef, I would have graduated from that training bra by now.

*Originally posted July 2009.