I can trace the beginning of the end of my childhood to the first moment I chose to take razor to skin and remove the protective coating of hair evolution had afforded me.

It was the summer between fifth and sixth grades. I would sleep until 10 am as I was completely left unattended for the first time in my life, fumble in a half-hearted exercise that resembled household chores and then I would escape. With my backpack stuffed with poolside essentials like Fruit Roll-ups, quarters for the soda machine and whichever edition of the encyclopedia I was reading at the time (I was an awkward, nerdy child), I would pedal down the hill with careless abandon on my blue Huffy 10-speed to the public pool.

At this pool, the calm and quiet of our strangely bucolic, yet suburban neighborhood would break. Actually, it would shatter violently on the hot concrete like sheet of ice. Tween girls (before there was ever a term as tweens) would squeal and shriek in mock objection to getting hoisted and tossed around in the water by boys of the same age and social curiosity. And I would be doing handstands alone in a corner in the three feet.
I would watch these girls erupt from the water as their legs, all golden from the sun, would glisten in the sunlight’s reflection from the water.
I would then look at my stubby, chunky legs also wet and sun-kissed, but minus the glistening. What was the major difference? It was the protective coating of dark brown leg hair. I decided right then and there I had to have legs like those.
That night I pedaled up the hill, a much more demanding and depressing ride than the one to the pool, went quietly into the house and headed straight to the bathroom. I got in the shower and snatched up the first shaver I could find.
In my memory it is blue with rusty, jagged teeth where the razor blades were supposed to be. In retrospect, I will concede I may be using a little melodramatic creative license. The pool of blood I found myself standing in and the missing chunk of flesh where my ankle was supposed to be were probably because of an unskilled, shaking hand belonging to a child thinking, “Please don’t walk in, Mom. Please don’t walk in.”
My mother would have blown a gasket had she seen the Full Metal Shower Curtain-style carnage I had created. She wouldn’t have wondered what had taken me so long to decide to do this. She wouldn’t have wondered why we didn’t go to the spa to have it taken care of. She would have eaten my face.

In an article published on PhliiyMag.com in their Trend section called “Pretty Babies,” the tale is told of a generation of little rich girls are being taken by their mothers to spas and salons to have facials and eyebrow waxes. They are getting bikini waxes before there is anything remotely bikini area-esque on their little bodies.
One aethetician even discussed two little girls being brought in by their mother for microdermabrasion, a procedure usually reserved for people in their late 30s and beyond.
A mother is supposed to protect a child from the many barbed attacks he or she will face in an unkind, judgmental and superficial world. One eyebrow or two, she is supposed to tell that child how beautiful they are.
And dear holy whom/what-ever you believe in, she is certainly not to make the appearance a 9-year-old’s va-jayjay an issue of pressing urgency. In fact, if my mother did it right, she’s supposed to unrealistically encourage her daughter to keep her kibbles and bits covered until said daughter is either in her late 40s and married to her first boyfriend or is old enough to be sneaky about showing it to the captain of the JV baseball team in the laundry room of his apartment complex.
Kids are supposed to find out about these things on their own schedule which generally coincides with nature’s schedule. They are supposed to be slathering on blue eyeshadow in their mom’s bathroom when the babysitter is downstairs making out with some boy who sneaked in under the cover of darkness. They are supposed to be nicking their knees with borrowed razors. It’s the dues we pay.

Many of these procedures, while making women look and feel pretty, are pretty aggressive. I’m a full-grown adult who has given birth, broken a leg, gone through a car’s windshield and fallen through a plate glass window and I almost certainly I will never allow someone with hot wax and a strip of linen near my bikini area ever again because it hurts so badly. No one wants to hear a waxer say, “Uh-oh. Today is free” especially not a little girl who probably already feels awkward about her changing body and its new agenda based on betraying her at every turn for the next 40 to 50 years.
People wonder how Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears grew into the pill and booze-fueled train wrecks they are. It’s not hard to venture a guess, but what is confusing is how many people are willing to do that to their children.
Moreover, it’s not natural for parents to treat their kids like accessories that must be groomed until they meet their own misguided Keeping up With the Kardashians agenda. It’s not cool for moms to be OK with their children growing up too fast to be safe, let alone encouraging and facilitating it.

If they really need to take someone for a full day of spa treatments I am willing to sacrifice myself for the well-being of a child.

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