We all have pieces of our pasts that we struggle to face. I’ve come to terms with many of my mistakes: the decades I spent consuming laugh-track TV and trans-fatty snacks; the years of bad fashion choices; the hours of my youth wasted at the mall; the poems, the perms, the bangs. But I’ll never be able to accept what I allowed to happen to my eyebrows.

I didn’t see them coming. My parents never had brows like these. My mother’s mother, the grandmother we called Gigi, she didn’t have my eyebrows. She was the one with the moon-shaped face and the aquamarine-colored eyes, the one who modeled for Norman Rockwell in the 1930s and married a captain of the Yale football team. My eyebrows probably came from my father’s mother, Jean, who grew up in Racine, Wisconsin. She married Leslie, a cardboard box salesman who liked to tell people that he was an heir to English nobility. Leslie developed a side career managing young stage actresses in Chicago. Sometimes he brought one home, in the middle of the afternoon, and introduced her to my young father on their way upstairs. After thirteen years of marriage, Jean divorced Leslie, and then two years later, she married him again, finally resigned to her fate.

In black and white pictures of Jean as a brooding young woman, I see traces of my own messy brows. The dark tendrils begin where the top of my nose meets the lower ridge of my forehead. From there they unfurl up over my eyes, in a form too graceless to be called an arch, and extend out past the edge of my lashes almost to the hairline. In their natural state, they are equally thick from end to end. They don’t taper femininely or end in a point. The strays, if ignored, will sprout in places where eyebrows aren’t supposed to reach. Unaltered, my eyebrows are darker than my mousy natural hair color. They cast shadows over my eyes like storm clouds.

It’s possible my eyebrows came from my mother’s side. Her brother, Uncle Mac, had his father’s football-star build, his mother’s sparkling eyes, and two big bushy orphan eyebrows. Uncle Mac didn’t have an easy life. He was kicked out of Andover for bad grades, he struggled with gambling, he quit drinking at least once, and wherever he went, the exhaust cloud from a Pall Mall cigarette followed. The eyebrows, on the other hand, worked for him. They fit the package. On Uncle Mac, my eyebrows were just right.

Before the eyebrows hijacked my face, things worked. I wasn’t the prettiest girl in school. My features were never small and delicate like Lisa Olstein’s, my complexion wasn’t fresh and flushed like Kate Dacy’s, but I wasn’t Marjorie Obermeyer, either. I didn’t have those eyes that bug out or a father’s nose to grow into. Everything was pretty much in proportion and it all cohered. I looked in the mirror and what I saw made sense.

I was fifteen when they started getting thicker and darker and began to creep towards one another like ivy between my eyes. The change was gradual, like my 9th grade weight gain, and I couldn’t see it any more clearly than the shifting proportions of my torso.

“How’s everything,” My father said, trying not to sound concerned.

“Fine?” I said, standing over my after-school snack, a giant boiling pot of fettuccine.

Everything was in turmoil. I did my best to contain it. I wore jeans two sizes too large and long, floppy cotton sweaters that hung over my mysteriously expanding hips like a curtain. Friends began to date boys seriously and I was cast in the role of protective one. Clair asked me to come along when she didn’t want Paul to think they were going on a ‘date-date.’ Jill dispatched me to the other side of the cafeteria to tell Brad he was being a dick. Clair was pretty; Jill was cute; I was the funny, fearless one. Out at a carnival one night, I stuck my face through the hole cut out of a plywood muscle man. In the souvenir Polaroid, it’s my head over a big hairy caricature of a body builder. It’s not funny, the way a girl’s face over a muscle man’s body is supposed to be. In that picture, I just am a man. It’s the brows that do it.

My mother didn’t have the eyebrows but she was wrong in other ways. She was blind in one eye, tomboyish, and much too immersed in books. My mother was Gigi’s perpetual work-in-progress. She left home for good in her teens and came east to Miss Porter’s School in Connecticut. This was the last thing she did according to Gigi’s plans. Midway through college, my mother hatched her first baby. Then she left college, married, transferred to another college, divorced, graduated, and married again. You get the idea. My mother had her struggles, but dark bushy brows were never among them.

When I think about it, it’s shocking that Gigi never tackled my eyebrows. They might have been her best hope. She was always trying to improve something: my table manners; my tennis game; my tolerance for mayonnaise. She embarked on plenty of fruitless missions. She sent me pleated skirts and quilted handbags, she URGED me to take ballroom dancing, but she never once mentioned my eyebrows. 

We didn’t talk about grooming in my house. After my mother had spent her childhood under constant scrutiny, she probably thought it was my privilege to be left alone. It was my father who taught me the dos and don’ts of shaving my legs after he caught me trying to do it in my bedroom on a dry leg with a single blade Bic razor. Trying to recall how I first learned about eyebrow waxing is like trying to remember when I found out about weed. No revelatory moment emerges. I only remember that one day, I just decided to say yes. There was probably a more experienced, well-groomed friend whispering in my ear: “Come on, try it. You know you want to.”

When the woman at the salon tore the strip of muslin from between my eyes, I was sure my flesh was on that piece of cloth. I checked the hand mirror, expecting to find a raw, pulsing wound. Where my eyebrows had been there were two dark rectangles, a dash above each eye like distracted interruptions in the middle of a thought: Hmmm?

I checked with my mother.

“Do my eyebrows look wrong?”  I said.

“Nothing about you is wrong,” she said, not looking too closely. “You are who you are.”

Still, I wondered.

Clair offered to come over and ‘do my face’ for me. She saw my dimly lit bedroom mirror. She sifted through my drugstore make-up selection.

“No wonderrrr,” she said.

But, now that I think about it, Clair had her own issues. She budgeted an extra hour every morning to give her hair the perfect messy curl. And even at sixteen, she never went to bed without dabbing Vaseline on her crow’s feet.

College came and I spent four years studying literature and trying to embrace my natural brow line.  They’re unique, I told myself, they’re striking, defiant. Think of Frieda Kahlo. I found one compatriot on campus, a lesbian who lived in the communal house and sported a single, heavy black eyebrow that she seemed to wear with pride. Every time I saw her, I wanted to raise my fist in solidarity.

I spotted that woman a couple of years ago in a hip neighborhood near downtown Brooklyn. Like a true maverick, she hasn’t relinquished the brow. Seeing it, still firmly rooted at the base of her forehead, took me back to a time when I was trying to make something fit my face that didn’t. I admire the way she has made her brow work for her.

Once in a while, I’ll blame an old friend for not setting me straight sooner.

We’ll be sitting somewhere in midtown, grabbing a dinner that has taken months to schedule, and rehashing ancient history.

“HOW could you let me do that for sooooo long?” I’ll say.

“The red jeans?”

“No….”

“The bobbed hair?”

“No.”

“The blue mascara?”

“No! The eyebrows.”

“Ohhhhh, yeahhhhh, what happened with those?”

It’s always the same. They all remember but no one is willing to share the responsibility.

Eyebrows might be the most important statement a face can make. My mother’s eyebrows told me that she had cancer. I came home to visit one weekend from the city and the chemo was already under way.

“Is there something wrong with mom?” I said to my father.

“You could tell?” he said.

“Well, she’s wearing a wig,” I said. “And she has no eyebrows.”

“I’ll let her tell you.” He said.

“I’m not that sick,” she said. “My eyebrows didn’t even fall out. I shaved them to see what I would look like if they did fall out. How do I look?” She reflexively raised the two pale, bald patches where her eyebrows should have been.

“Sick,” I said.

Her face without eyebrows was suggestive of the life that used to be there, like a branch without leaves. I had never realized how much presence and power those arches provided, when in full bloom.

My mother was right, she wasn’t that sick. She recovered in a few months. Her straight hair came in curly and her eyebrows grew back just as they had always been, healthily balanced with the rest of her features, while mine continued to languish heavily at the top of my field of vision like two morose teenagers you can’t kick off the couch.

Today, my eyebrows are still intense but tamed—they are more organized versions of their wild, younger selves. I am always discovering new ways to restrain them. My hairdresser likes to give them highlights. Once in a while, I overdue the grooming and my eyebrows begin to fade into my face like grown women lapsing into girlish passivity. When that happens, I stop tweezing and tampering and I wait for a strong foundation of tough, dark strands to re-emerge. When I remember the black, overgrown curves my eyebrows used to be, they are like giant parentheses around the lingering mysteries of my life.

Reprinted courtesy of the author, all rights reserved.