Diary of a Moustache

"You have a moustache," the little boy pointed and snickered.

Thus began my lifelong ordeal with the brown growth above my upper lip. I thought God was cruel enough when He sentenced me to the monthly misery of being a woman. Along with puberty came breasts, hips, and a moustache, a testament against my femininity.

I never really thought about it, until people started pointing it out. Classmates and cousins never let me forget what I had growing above my uper lip. I was teased constantly about my moustache. I would just smile and hold my pain in. I hated looking at myself in the mirror, so I tried not to. I pushed vanity aside.

My self esteem plummeted to the ground, shattered into a thousand pieces. My pretty eyes, my long eye lashes, my beautiful smile.....nothing mattered. The moustache screamed attention away from my positive features. I dove into the fantasy land of books. I hid behind the covers of novels whose stories described pretty, feminine , hairless women getting what they wanted in life and love. I lost myself in those characters and felt happier than before. In the meantime, my parents just thought I was a shy, introverted girl who preferred reading over all other social activities. When guests came, I hid myself in closets, bathrooms, book in hand, dreading the fact that I would have to face them sometime. My mother would make sure and call my name out constantly, until I had to abandon my refuge and face the music.

My mother was a strict woman. She wouldn't allow her daughters to try and enhance their beauty in any way until they grew older. So the question of me getting rid of my moustache never came up. It never even crossed my mind for fear of a harsh scolding. She had also warned me that if I tried to do anything, it would come back, worse than before. I wasn't about to risk that...or not until my sister's wedding.

It was the summer of 1991 when I discovered bleach. I was fifteen years old and my sister was getting married in a couple of weeks. All my female cousins used you bleach their hairy dilemmas blonde.

They convinced me to try it. And to my shock, my mother didn't try and stop me. In ten minutes time, heart pounding, I turned my brown moustache blonde. I was happier. The fuzz was still there, but not noticeable until one came within two feet of me. A handsome cousin (who I had a crush on at the time) told me I looked good and asked me if I had done something different to my hair. It's true, blondes do have more fun. So I was on cloud seven during that summer. Cloud nine would have been complete eradication of the offending hairs. But I couldn't ask for that much, not yet.

From that summer on, I bleached my moustache every week. I couldn't stand to see the bleach wearing off, exposing ugly brown roots. I wouldn't go anywhere without my little green bottle of Jolen bleach. I made sure I carried two, in two different places. In case one got lost (God forbid) I would have the other handy. High school and the first three years of college was spent in a bleaching frenzy.

I have to admit, my self esteem did improve. I grew more extroverted. But there was one thing that was still beyond my reach: men. I wouldn't let any man come close to me, for fear he'd find out too much and start disliking me. When guys used to talk to me, I followed their eyes. Maybe it was my imagination, but their eyes either went to my moustache or my breasts. The thought repulsed me.

I was a junior in college, when I decided to try a permanent new solution to facial hair: electrolysis. After much research, I went to a renowned electrolysis expert in my college town. It was a nightmare. She charged me fifteen dollars for fifteen minutes of painful hair removal. Little sharp needles were poked into my tender skin, currents were sent through them, watering my eyes. After the fifteen minutes, I looked into the mirror and saw red bumps, where she had yanked out half a dozen hairs. She informed me that they could come back, so I would have to have them retreated. To me that meant, more money, more time, more pain. I left the place with a heavy heart and a lighter wallet. I knew it wasn't for me. I would just live with my blonde moustache forever.

I graduated fron college, and took admission into a doctorate program. It was that first year of graduate school that I finally said goodbye to my moustache, temporarily. I woke up one sunny morning, hating my moustache with a new explosive passion. I was twenty three years old, and was letting a stupid little thing like that bother me.

And so, I looked into the mirror and said goodbye. I grabbed my purse and left for the nearest waxing salon. Everything happened so fast. I walked in and stammered, "I'd like to get my moustache waxed off." The girl laughed and had me sit on a bench, while she heated up some wax. In two painful seconds, she ripped off my moustache and the wax attached to it with a white cloth. Tears sprang up in my eyes as I saw the strip of hair on the cloth, dangling from her hand. It was dead. My moustache was dead, in the hands of a grinning lady. I looked into the mirror and saw a woman. A hairless, beautiful woman. I said hello to the smooth skin above my lip.

I walked out of the salon, dazed. As I was driving back home, the radio played "I can see clearly now the rain (moustache) is gone, I can see all obstacles in my way. Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind. It's gonna be a bright bright sun shiny day." I saw a cute guy in the car next to me and I smiled a genuine, girlish smile.



I'm a doctoral student at an East Coast University. This autobiographical story was written in two hours on a nostalgic sunny afternoon. The moral of the story is that appearances do matter. Our self esteem goes hand in hand with the way we look. The way we look dictates our attitude towards life and happiness. If we can change something in our appearance to make ourselves more confident, we should do so. If we can manipulate our education, our motivation, our spiritual drive to benefit ourselves, why can't we manipulate our appearances as well? Positive comes out of positive changes.