I have dreams at least twice a month about hairy legs. My hairy legs. In my dream I’ll be somewhere in public, look down and the hair on my legs is about 1/2 inch long and I’m horrified. In some dreams I only had hair on the backs of my knees, which is really interesting if you think about it.
My daughter might have a Masters degree in psychology, but I’m usually great at analyzing myself, but the ‘dreams about hairy legs’ took me almost 50 years to figure out.
In real life, present day, I could care less if there is hair on my legs, but that wasn’t always the case and I believe this is why those particular dreams still come to me.
Put on your seatbelt because I’m driving the WAY BACK machine and I’ve had wine.
I believe my hairy legs memory starts when I was in first grade; you know how memories can become fuzzy over time. I remember walking to the bus stop and looking down at my skinny little girl legs and noticing the hair on them was unruly. Long and unruly.
I did what any normal person would do: I stopped walking and took care of the situation by licking my palm with saliva and ran it along the hair on my legs trying to smooth it down.

Crisis averted.
Only it wasn’t. That was just a temporary solution to the problem as I noticed either later that day or the next that the issue was still there.
WHAT TO DO?
I think I complained to my Mom many times about this and she poo-poo’ed my worries. You know how moms are.
Finally either I just i figured it out, or Beverly told me to do this: I used some Avon lotion to assist with he unruliness.
But in the end, this really only helped a bit more than my saliva. In my eyes the hair was an eyesore.
If you think I grabbed a razor and shaved the hair, you’d be wrong; Mom said I couldn’t shave my legs until I was 13, which is funny because there really weren’t that many rules being enforced in our home.
THIRTEEN? How will I survive that long? I felt like I looked like the Monkey my Mom always said I was. (I loved to climb on everything)
BLAME IT ON BEV FOR MY NEXT SOLUTION
My Mom was a waitress and she always wore knee-high panty hose under her pants along with her orthopedic nurse shoes.

My plan was pretty genius if you really think about it.
I remember finding a pair of my Moms knee-highs and putting them on. They came up pretty high, like to my thigh, but when I started walking, they would slide down my skinny little girl legs. Hmmmmm…how in the world could I get them to stay up?
I’m {almost} A GENIUS.
I found some safety pins and pinned the falling down knee-highs to my underwear.
PROBLEM SOLVED.
I remember walking to the bus stop wearing a cute dress, happy as a well fed monkey because my legs were now as smooth as silk when my plan suddenly started to fall down apart.
As I was walking, my underwear were slip, sliding down. I pulled them up, only to have them slowly slip, slide down again.
My plan had holes in it {just like my head} and I failed again to cover up my hairy monkey legs.
You do realize that I tried to invent Garter belts for kids, right?
Where I learned this Garter Belt idea from is beyond me, but since I didn’t have much supervision, I probably saw someone wearing a garter belt on HBO or at a strip joint.
I’m just kidding, we didn’t have HBO.
I HELD OFF TURNING INTO EDWARD SCISSORS HANDS UNTIL I WAS ELEVEN

I might have gotten over the hairy leg issue for the time being after my garter belt contraption didn’t work…but by the time I was eleven I took matters into my own hands and shaved my legs, even the backs of my knees.
If you think that shaving my legs was a smooth situation, you’d be wrong. I’m lucky I didn’t bleed to death because there was a LOT of blood as I was a novice with a razor.
Later that day when Bev came home and saw the crime scene in the bathroom she cussed and probably tossed one of those 10lb orthopedic nurse shoes in my general direction.
Hey, a HAIRY girl has got to do what a HAIRY girl has to do.
Not Letting History Repeat Itself
Well lo and behold, I gave birth to two hairy AND adorable little monkeys as well. They both begged to shave their legs early on, but I insisted that they waited until they were at least in middle school before they took to the razor. I recall we/they tried the NAIR hair removal cream first and almost died of chemical inhalation. (I can still smell it!)
I texted them yesterday asking how old they were when I let them shave and they confirmed middle school; so 11? 12? But at the beginning I would only let them shave from their ankles to the top of their knees.
Why? What is the thought process here? Did I want my girls to mimic a cricket?
I have no recollection at this point, but they both confessed that they currently don’t shave above the knee all the time. Perhaps I started a trend.
So shave share with me some deets.
Did you have hairy legs as a kid? If so were you embarrassed?
Have you ever heard of NOT shaving above the knee?
After typing that last line, I can NOW only picture someone shaving ABOVE THE KNEE and leaving the lower portion hairy. Guess what I’ll be dreaming about tonight…
XOXO
