Here I stand, vulnerable, disappointed, and excited all at the same time. With Nads waxing kit in hand and dressed in skimpy mom underwear, I am cutting the little green organic strips to embark on an age old tradition - the female waxing session. As I am preparing the skin for the pain, big kid is staring in bewildered awe at how I can place this sticky stuff on my body, and rip it off with the immediate blood curdling scream of "OUCH!" that almost involuntarily follows. Typically she hides behind my bathrobe, and peers out as if she has just painted something with poop and hiding will make me not notice it. Trying to engage her - and soothe her fears - I ask her to count to three after I have placed, rubbed, and smoothed the strip down. Fears are perfectly normal here, because lets face it, I am ripping hair out by the root with acute force and then repeating the act until I resemble a newborn baby. This is, by far, the worse modern day torture that we inflict upon ourselves (and I am convinced that most countries use currently as a method of torture). Mind you I have not only one witness to this event, there are two... big kid and little baby. Both are girls, so in one way I am looking at this like preparation to an unavoidable right of painful passage someday.
As if this isn't bad enough, that I have to do these dirty deeds in front of my kids... lo and behold, the husband wanders in. Great, now it's a freak waxing circus. Immediately, I smack boxes up and down and start shuffling things around on the bathroom counter to look like this is not actually what I am doing. In my flurry of smacking random objects, a long strip gets caught on my elbow and is hanging listlessly like a toilet paper strand in a tree after Halloween. Feeling utterly embarrassed about this whole *deer-in-the-headlights-look* I am finding it very difficult to keep my composure. Big kid still firmly placed behind the bathrobe (little baby looking at me in confusion), I finally decide to cave in and admit that I was waxing. In unison with big kid, and little baby, the husband is staring at me like I've gone completely crazy with a "Why the hell do you have a waxing strip hanging from your elbow?" look.
IS THERE NOTHING SACRED ANYMORE? Have I really been degraded to the point of waxing in public as that would have less of an audience then my own bathroom? I don't even remember having this many eyes on me even when I went to the judgmental nail parlor down the street - with the shady back room that you are forced to take the "walk of shame" to. Passing over twenty or so women en route to this waxing dungeon, eyes following you with each advancing step. Glazing you over with their dilated pupils using that head to toe stare thinking, "what is she going back there for?" Shuddering, I hold my head low ensuring avoidance of all possible eye contact until the door closes to the closet sized room. Without fail, you always walk out of that little room hairless, confidence broken, and shamed by the whole vulnerable process. That experience was considerably more private than this entourage in front of me. I can already see my kids mentioning this in therapy as a traumatic experience they endured in childhood.
I vowed then and there never to wax during the day again, and to instead leave this process to night time activity when husband is gallivanting about town and kids are asleep. Sadomasochistic things like self waxing should (and now forever will) be a private affair.