This picture doesn’t look like much—a corner of a standard-looking bathtub. There’s nothing artistic about the shot, so why would the writer insist on such a plain picture preceding her post? Because she won’t be able to look at that corner the same way for quite some time—maybe ever.
Exit third-person narration.
That corner is where I recently taught my almost twelve-year-old daughter how to shave her legs. That corner is now emblematic of a rite of passage and the safe space I hope to always be as a mother.
I started shaving my legs in sixth grade. I don’t recall if I asked my mother for permission, and she told me to wait, and I subsequently rebelled, or if I just decided to do it on my own one day. The former is more likely, and I will wait for my mother to confirm as she reads this post.
What I do remember is the huge gash I got on my outer right ankle. I remember the blood trickling down my foot into the drain. I remember rinsing out the piece of skin on the razor. I remember showing the battle wound to my friends and then seeing them pull back their Band-Aids.
We clearly didn’t know what we were doing. We had no clue that we could get hurt. (Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think?)
Make no mistake: I am not blaming any of our mothers. We were young girls who thought we were ready to be women.
At the beginning of the summer, my daughter asked if I could show her how to shave her legs. She had waited longer than I had; she’d finished sixth grade. Instead of telling her to keep waiting, I launched into a lecture of sorts.
The choice she was about to make as a girl on the verge of womanhood needed my horror story as a warning.
She would need to be prepared to answer yes to a series of questions: Was she ready to keep up with the constant maintenance? Would she be patient and careful as she used a razor? Was she doing this for herself and not because someone told her to?
She passed my annoying mom test.
I started the bath water, lathered my right leg, and showed her how to move the razor from bottom to top. I went extra slowly over my outer ankle. I taught her how to stabilize her leg in that pictured corner. I then performed the first glide of the razor on her leg. I watched her do the rest of her right leg on her own. No cuts. She was ready for me to walk out of the bathroom. She could call me if she needed more help.
She didn’t. Insert pun: there was nothing prickly about this milestone in adolescence and motherhood. (Why do we not talk about these milestones?)
The first time I returned to that bathtub corner after the lesson, I thought about safety. We follow safe sleep protocols when our children are infants. We safely secure them in car seats. We teach them how to be safe when crossing streets and walking in parking lots. We explain how to keep themselves safe online. We tell them that they should always feel safe confiding in us. We should forever be their safe space.
My daughter, who now shaves, is nearly twelve. She has cried to me. She has snapped at me. She has asked me hard questions that I can’t always answer. She trusts me. I hope she always knows I’m her metaphoric bathtub corner, here to stabilize and support her. (The same goes for her brother and sister, with shaven or unshaven legs.)
