My Mama's Mustache & Other Inherited Stuff  

I hated Mother's mustache; it would have done any man proud along with the three-quarters inch whiskers she sported at 90 years old.
Bear with me here folks, I'm fifty five, and by the look of my older sister's, of which there are ten living, I will follow in her footsteps. The difference of course is that I will pluck and shave or whatever. (My sister's do, Mother did not.)

The point is, I cannot change this heredity.(can I?) I wonder if that is one of the things parents will be able to choose for their babies.
1 boy-full mustache-prominent Adams-apple
1 girl anything but hairy

Too late for me!
It is all about acceptance now. I need acceptance everyday in order for welcome change to take place. I learned in an AA twelve step room the only point at which change can occur is at the point I stop fighting everything and everyone, and accept reality as it is.

In the years when I was in AA, at the young age of 35, one lonesome, thick, black hair set up camp in a cleft on my chin. I plucked it when ever I remembered, often with embarrassment and a string of bad words. I felt like a woman targeted with the "ugly virus." No wonder one of my boyfriends said I could never be called pretty, but maybe handsome. We are no longer together.

The biggest blow of all was when one of my daughter's griped, "Why did I have to come from such a hairy family?"
No making up for that one. :-)
But I had to concede, it was annoying.

Acceptance. I joke about Mother's mustache, I joke about a lot of things Mother passed down to me. They are mine now. The jokes are on me.

I had a strange relationship with my mother, mostly non-existent. Still, there was a month, or five weeks maybe, I call it five weeks in my memoir. I have to be careful due to memoir detectives in my family, one wrong mis-step and they got me. I should actually count it down to days for safety.

There was a period of time in 1995 when my mother spent several weeks at my place in Carolina. It was a horrendous time. I journaled my way through it like a word psycho, the more words on paper, the less in my head.

Ten years later I took these pages out of their red plastic box, (red for danger) read and cried and read some more, like hair washing, each sudsing got my insides a little fresher. When I began reading them as entries in my book, Mother began to disappear, and the girl she used to be emerged. Just a little, enough perhaps to understand she was not much different from myself.

She was a woman caught in an uncontrollable mess.

There is no scorn or slight in the naming of my broadcast. I have cultivated full acceptance of my mother, and of myself. What others choose to think is none of my business. I learned that in AA also.