I have childhood memories of horror when I remember my mother asking me to “cut the hair” on the mole on her face.

Cut the hair?

Um, no thank you.

Do it yourself, right? Why on earth would you ask your teenage daughter to do such a thing?

I’ve had nightmares over that strangely wiry, long freak of nature. Where did it come from? And why did it have to come out of a mole? I think the concept of the hair alone was frightening enough but when you couple that with an overactive researching, reading  personality, good grief. All those articles tell you that these moles with hairs growing out of them are cancerous. So when your mom asks you to trim hers…up close and personal, the next logical conclusion is the mole is going to kill her or keep curling and growing until it sucks the life out of her.

But for some reason, I did it anyhow. More than once. Every single time. And then, every single time,  I never thought about it again.

That is until the day I realized that along with the grey hairs on the top of your head, aging also means you acquire those wiry goat hairs on your chinny chin chin as well. Somehow the advertising campaigns missed the goat hair message.

It was subtle at first, I would rub my hand over my chin and feel one. And pluck it. And then over the years along came another and another and another.

Dear God where do they come from?

And the one that you occasionally miss and see it is an inch long? Why? WHY DOESN’T ANYONE TELL YOU THEY ARE GOING TO GROW? I don’t know if anyone else sees them… but I do. I feel them. And if I feel one and I don’t have a pair of tweezers on me to immediately pluck it (pluck…not cut, I am not my mother.) I start to freak out. Serious anxiety. To the point where I’ve bought about 100 pairs of tweezers over the years and make sure I have one in the car in my purse in the drawer next to my bed…I don’t even need a mirror…I’m that good. No mirror, no daughter to cut it. I just NEED TO PLUCK IMMEDIATELY!

Now here’s the sad part. Are you ready? Not unlike my mother…I have asked HWMMS to pluck one of these hairs for me from time to time. I don’t have any scary ones growing from a mole…but I do get that one wee stubble that for some darn reason I cannot get for the life of me…it is then I give in to the utter embarrassment factor and deal with the obvious genetic similarities for my own sanity. And of course the husband obliges. (For better or worse, right?)  And of course my husband makes fun of me telling me I’m his bearded wife.

And then sometimes, out of nowhere, my husband surprises me with finding the longest hair ever somewhere under the rolls of neck that he pulled out still stuck in the pinch of the tweezers. Which honestly makes me wonder how long exactly has that one been there and how did I not see it before?

At least I hope to only traumatize my husband and never ask one of my offspring to assist in the beard grooming of old age.

For better or worse, like mother like daughter.