MOTHERING MATTERS: My daughter is growing up, but she’s still my baby

I have permission to write this. Trust me, this time I asked.

I sat down on my daughter’s bed, and she pushed her legs forward.

“What can I do about my furry legs?”

My petite brown-haired daughter is only eight years old. I couldn’t fathom that my child would be worrying about something so grown up when she’s practicing the four’s in her multiplication tables.

“I need to shave my legs,” she announced. But I wasn’t quite ready for that commitment.

“Once you start, you’ll have to do it forever.”

“Mom, look at them.”

And while I don’t like to succumb to peer pressure, and I don’t want to propel my daughter towards womanhood any sooner than she’s destined to be there, I also wouldn’t lie to her. She was absolutely right: her legs have noticeably visible hair below her knees.

“I’ll call your doctor.”

Not that she had any health issue related to this, but I remembered when I began shaving my legs, soaping suds along my shin and calf. It seems my mother had made me wait longer than I wanted, and I needed to make sure I wasn’t committing some parenting faux pas by allowing my child to shave as a third-grader. I wondered if a depilatory would be more suitable for a child, so I left a message for the nurse.

“Did they call back yet?’ My daughter waited 18 hours before she had her answer: if it was OK with me for her to shave, then that was the route the doctor suggested. She questioned the long-term effects of depilatories on a child so young.

I have no memory of which razor I used when I began shaving my legs, but I’m almost positive I didn’t have shaving cream. I always thought that seemed more glamorous than making thin bubbles with a melting bar of Ivory soap. And razors have improved in the past three decades. We found some on sale that had triple-blade precision with the moisturizing edge on top. My daughter picked the purple bottle of shaving cream after I told her, “Lavender helps you sleep.”

Up to this point, I felt fairly proficient in this process, but teaching my child the technique of shaving worried me. Time after time, I’ve shaved an inch-long track along my ankle or over my knee because I’ve forgotten to account for an unusual angle.

“Don’t press hard,” I commanded as I squirted the cream onto her stick-thin legs. She rubbed the gel into foam, then took the razor from my hand, “I can do it, Mom.” I suppose I should be she thankful that she, like my three boys, is so independent.

“Wow, I told you!” she exclaimed. “Look at all that hair.”

“You need to get that out of the razor,” I began, but before I could finish, she’d pushed the clump sideways across the blade, leaving three small slices across her thumb.

“Never, ever do that,” I said too late as we held the blade beneath the spigot and banged it on the tub floor.

She rubbed her hand down the stubble on my shin.”How often do you shave?’ she asked, and I realized that this ritual has evolved and devolved during the 17 years of my marriage.

“Want to feel my legs?” she asked her brothers as she pranced downstairs.

“Eeeoouu,” my second son, a 6th-grader yelled, and my third son, a fifth-grader, would have said the same but he wasn’t home. My high schooler simply ignored her.

Despite her very grown up approach to her problem, I’ve held on to the one thing that reminds me she is still a child, my youngest, my baby.

She calls her legs “furry,” and for that, I’m thankful.

Original:gastongazette.com