Moms: Leave Your Daughter

In my 13 years of parenting, I’ve spent no small amount of time in online parenting spaces — message boards, Reddit, Facebook — and I know by now what topics have proven to be boundless sources of discussion. Screentime, picky eating, flu vaccine, sure, but there’s one niche subject that never fails to make a repeat appearance and hit me where I live: “I feel guilty even writing this,” it often begins. “But my daughter has a unibrow. Now that she’s getting older it’s more noticeable. I wonder if I should tweeze it or take her to get it waxed? I worry that if I don’t do anything she’ll get bullied. What would you do?”

The answers are always well-intentioned, carefully worded, and varied. Anecdotally, the most popular approach seems to be suggesting the mom (it’s always the mom) has a conversation with the daughter (almost always a daughter) about her general appearance and hair removal options. There’s waxing, tweezing, bleaching, or even microplaning (which, come on, is simply another word for shaving).

I can appreciate the care these folks are bringing to the question. But as a former unibrow kid, I’m begging you: please don’t be the one to bring up your daughter’s unibrow.

You might hear “former unibrow kid” and think I was adorably distinguished looking as a child: a little Frida Kahlo. No. You know Maggie Simpson’s rival? The Baby with the One Eyebrow? It was way more like that.

As I’m sure you remember very well if you’re over a certain age, in the ’90s, having very thick, very dark eyebrows was not the slay it is today. Back then, the name of the game was “pencil thin.” If you could time travel and wanted to blow a girl’s mind in 1995, you shouldn’t show her your iPhone, or tell her about 9/11. Just say “In the future, girls actually brush up their eyebrows to make them look bigger and bushier.” Like her over-tweezed brows, she would never recover.

My own unibrow was present from at least my toddlerhood. But while I’m sure it didn’t escape my mother’s notice, nobody else brought it up until middle school.

It’s not like my unibrow was a constant source of torment for me. But it’s never fun for your peers to pick apart your perceived flaws, and so, after the first couple of mentions, I did what any red-blooded American girl would do: I grabbed a razor, artlessly ran it straight down the middle of my eyebrow, and then denied having done anything, when those same taunting middle-schoolers asked “Do you… shave your eyebrows?”

And, of course, that was even worse.

So when I asked my mom if it was OK if I got my eyebrows waxed at the salon, she said yes, no doubt glancing at my eyebrow stubble. I realize that I may seem to be working against my own point here. Why, when we as parents have the power to keep our kids from emotional pain, would we let them run headlong into it?

Because if you are a girl with a unibrow, the truth is that someone, at some point, is going to let you know about it in a way that will make you feel embarrassed and ashamed. I can’t imagine how much worse that experience would have been if that person had been my mom. Sure, she let me go to the salon for waxing once I’d butchered my brows — but crucially, she hadn’t been the one to start the conversation. She was just there for me when I had to deal with it. Because no matter how loving and well-intentioned, ultimately what you’re telling your child when you proactively broach the subject is, “There’s something weird about your face and if you want to change it, I support you.”

This message coming nicely and lovingly from you is not better than hearing it rudely from a bully: because at the end of the day it’s the same message, and it’s one we expect from a bully. Don’t teach her she should expect it from her mom.