...

I am mourning the loss of my pubic hair. I waxed for the first time at 18, the summer after my freshman year of college. I have extremely sensitive skin that made shaving a non-viable option, but as the young and insecure product of hearty eastern-european stock, so was allowing my abundant pubic hair to be visible. My mother is naturally hairless and shamefully modest; I have never been able to discuss hair-management, secondary sex characteristics, or bodily existence without her passive scorn. I lied about where I was going when I first drove to the waxing parlor, and I have lied about it every time since, silently rending the hair from my barely post-pubescent body to hide my shame from the world

My experience waxing was an unextraordinary account of sexual confusion and discomfort. I felt attractive, desirable, mature, like a newly ripened fruit, laced with the poison of knowing someone might want to eat me, and the wanting someone to want to eat me. I scheduled my waxes to allign with social events I considered to be most important, internally consumed with being the sweetest summer cherry just out of reach. I stood in the mirror and disolved in my baldness until my body was reformed as a bug-like monster. I chased my sexuality desperately against the current of my own disgust and wept over the corruption of my innocence, body and soul. I crumpled under the weight of my adult form until I learned to ignore it and drink two beers at the beach.

Luckily the season's changing would eventually relieve my torture; I only waxed in the summer, so as the weather shifted, I could retreat back under my bush like a soft quilt. I'm by no means asexual, but being able to conceal my pubic hair allowed my sexuality to settle back into a state of mystery. My grooming was no longer an public declaration of collective, indiscriminate seduction, an advertisement of my readiness, a Mark of Cain. The private parts of me were private again, and in that privacy I could explore or ignore whatever parts of my sexuality I wanted. The garden regrew, and I was returned to a state of innocence.

This cycle has followed me each year since that first wax, with my bikini's shrinking as time passed. But this winter, I realized that the garden has stopped growing back. The density of my hair has diminished greatly—a blessing for most women, something that waxing parlors advertise but can't promise on their websites. If I am to continue in this cycle of hair removal, this is a blessing: it will slash my waxing budget, make each summer easier than the next, until eventually I am as smooth as a seal and blooming like a flower for the world to pick. But as I look at the sparse patch of hair who's unrullyness used to disgust me I am turned to sorrow. I see the growing distance between myself and innocence and I am terrified, my turbulent relationship with my sexual maturity persisting, but moreso, I see my body destroyed at my own hands.

There is much to be criticized about the mysticization of women's bodies; I do not draw a divine spirit of femininity and fertility from my pubic hair. But there is undeniable awe and beauty in every basic function of the natural world, so much of which I will never understand, including my body's production of that hair which I systematically erradicated. The grandiosity of not only the energy expended unconsiously by my cells to create them, or the life of that energy as the food that I eat, but the generations of my familial, cultural and genetic, lineage that grew the same hair and passed it down to me (albeit unintentionaly).

In its modernity, my family has become deeply disconnected from our cultural heritage; partially through choice and partially through tragedy, I have been left without a close-knit extended network of aunts and uncles and cousins who share in hearty meals at holidays while recounting an abundant shared past. My family unit is a tight-lipped, conservative quartet, and while I love both my parents deeply, their cultural assimilation to American Protestantism, Capitalism, and independance mean that I will live a life without the secrets of my family, past or present, ever being whispered down to me. I will make poppyseed rolls from the same recipe as my mom, but it will come from a Slovak-American cookbook and not a line of well-gaurded family secrets. As my relationship with my brother deteriorates and much of my cultural heritage is coopted in the name of war-mongering (I am Slovak, but the reigon my family is from is now technically in Ukraine), I am painfully aware of myself as a rapidly crumbling link in a fragile chain.

I look now at my thinning hair and see a desperately persisting last vestige of my ancestry asserting it's presence in my body, it's creation, as it resists my destruction. I will never overcome the shame of body hair that is shared by all women; I may even wax again this summer. But after seeing and feeling the permanance of its consequences, I want desperately to embrace my hair. Not as a symbol of my sexuality or lack-there-of, but just as an acceptance of my body as something that is not just my own. Long live the bush.

i rode my bike to the beach and swam in the ocean in my littlest bikini with my bush out. small victory.