Welcome to Everything Happened, an occasional newsletter where I rave! Rave on.
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I have about a half hour before I go pick up Polly from her first day of daycare (!) and I think I can crank out some updates. Something about the enormous windows in my office and using a huge monitor instead of curling myself into a cashew over my laptop makes me feel powerful!!! I love a huge monitor browsing experience!! The way the tabs just go on and on like a luxurious grand piano’s keyboard!! Octaves and octaves of tabs!!
What is new. At the end of January, I paid someone in a spare room of a gym to tattoo eyebrows onto my face.
I like to think I have a bit of a jolie-laide thing going on, like Ileana Douglas or Charlotte Gainsbourg, but pregnancy throws me into a tailspin where I skip the beautiful part of beautiful-ugly and feel, I don’t know, just obvious and grotesque. Like a really engorged zit. And maybe because medical-adjacent cosmetic enhancements are off limits during pregnancy, I make a hobby of obsessing over fixing my face and body.
I would drift off at night with my body pillow clamped between my knees, reading harrowing personal accounts on plastic surgery subreddits about the lengths people will go to in order to have, for example, less fat in their adorable cheeks. (Do not do buccal fat removal!! Too many facial nerves marbled through these fat pads!! Risk of permanent damage!! I have a Ph.D in risky procedures!! A Doctorate of Phace Numbness!!!)
Anyway, then I had the baby and I am so relieved to no longer be pregnant that, for example, injecting plumping acid into my face no longer appeals to me. (But never say never, venmo is @ohevie)
I have had a smooth postpartum period this last round but it is unglamorous. I sweat profusely, my armpits stink like Taco Bell even if I’ve just showered, and my chosen style of dress is “behavioral inpatient care.” I recently Googled “why does my scalp hurt” and I learned that by rarely washing my hair, I am contributing to an overproduction of inflammatory yeast at my roots. A yeast infection…on my head. One of my more humbling Googs!
The only enhancement I couldn’t get out of my head was microblading, or the permanent hair-stroke tattooing of eyebrows. My hormonal B.O. is not going anywhere, and I’m not interested in attempting real jeans. But I felt that if I woke up in the morning and did not see a garden grub looking back at me in the bathroom mirror, that would be a victory. My natural eyebrows are fairly sparse and like most of my peers, I did some damage at the end of the last century with a tweezer. I wanted to look like a garden grub in a Cara Delevingne costume. A local makeup artist told me via Instagram that I could achieve this outcome with her help, at least semi-permanently.
I brought Polly to the appointment, which I’m pretty sure I asked permission to do. I got kind of sad when I parked and unclicked her bucket seat, realizing it was the first time I had really bothered to take her anywhere at all.
With my first baby, I had an autumn maternity leave of sun-dappled afternoons taking the baby places just for yuks. I had been thrust deep into existential agony as a new mom but the carrying around the little hairless accessory part of it all? That part felt like such a lark. Wouldn’t it be funny if I had to feed my baby in the Trader Joe’s parking lot? On a bench at the park? What if I had to change a poop diaper in a coffee shop bathroom with no changing table? Too weird! And I liked the attention I got being out in the world with my fat, bald baby. Everywhere I went, I was awarded so much credit just for drawing breath. And I needed it.
It is a triumph that six or so years later, with my third baby, I don’t need to go collecting validation from irl strangers just to keep the psychoemotional lights on. (That’s what Instagram is for.) I don’t want to hear from strangers about what seeing a baby stirs up in them? It’s not any of my business. Mostly, though, it was winter, and it was cold, and there was a pandemic, and there were so many mediocre streaming shows to watch to completion. The world of Polly has mostly been a world of the living room. And no regrets, baby times are fleeting and I want her all to myself.
I guess I just felt shocked acknowledging how different things are now!! I was so young and scared then. I am now an ancient witch deity, 500 feet tall and filled with termites.
Back to the parking lot. It became clear why the makeup artist had sent me detailed instructions beyond just an address: the studio was inside of a gym that had been converted from a church. I walked in with my thousand-pound bucket of baby in the crook of my arm, my hair and her car seat cover dotted with beads of melted sleet and I took in what was obviously a gym. “Eyebrows?” I said to the reception desk worker. I was sweating and already running late. She pointed to a staircase at the far back corner past the choir loft of ellipticals. I lugged myself and my cargo up the steps and found a little alcove of offices that smelled like industrial carpeting and, latently, gym funk.
Polly, angel baby, was fast asleep in her bucket and I hoped we could get a least an hour more out of her. The studio itself was in full Marshall’s-obtained millennial splendor, glass apothecary jars of Q-tips and swabs, dangling house plants and like, mirrors shaped like moon phases. I noted that the esthetician’s eyebrows were really nice, which felt auspicious. She asked me if I had any other kids and I said I had three and she told me she didn’t have any because she doesn’t like kids. This felt..inauspicious. Like, you can just say you don’t have any…
The next three hours felt like a tattoo appointment, where there are periods of chitchat and long silences. I showed her my inspiration photos (lol) and she shaved and plucked the skin around my brows. She mapped my new brows by staining a bit string pulled taut between her thumbs, and stamping it on my face. Vectors crisscrossed my forehead from their origin points of my nostril, eyeball, tearduct, to reveal where my improved, semi-permanent eyebrows belonged. She matched the color to my existing brows, a rat-fur brown. Then with my ok on the final design she started carving away.
Polly stayed snoring the whole time, and the esthetician complimented her behavior. “She’s so chill!” I don’t enjoy it when people who don’t like kids go out of their way to approve of children who are acting temporarily invisible. But I was supine under her lights; she had the power to make me look like the text message suicide bully. I just smiled. Polly is easy, is the thing, to the extent that an incontinent, nonambulatory creature who depends on your body for sustenance can be easy.
I fed Polly afterwards in my car in the frigid parking lot, my brow ridge still dead from the numbing solution. I admired my new brows in my rear view mirror. They looked excellent.
When I got home, I gestured to my face and said to Nick: this was expensive, and it looks exactly how I want it to, and I’m really happy with it!!
“Great!”, said Nick.
And then I basically didn’t take the baby anywhere else for my whole leave.
Too many shows to watch. You get it.
yr mate,
Evie
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