THE PRE-LABOUR BIKINI WAX

I haven’t seen my vagina in a good six weeks. Maybe even longer. I’m assured it’s still there because I can feel it. The pressure of the baby makes it throb like it does when you’ve had too much sex, the dastardly deed that got me into this mess in the first place.

I knew things were getting unruly down there because although I was vision impaired, I could certainly tell by a touch. Steel wool had definitely sprouted. And so, having ruled out going to a salon and having it done by a professional, despite my husband’s protestations to stop being a tight arse and spend the fifty bucks, I decided to give the old pruning of the hedge a bit of a go myself. Now don’t worry folks, I’ve done this before, although to be fair, normally I can see. 

I heated the wax up in the microwave, stripped down to my birthday suit (remembering only after I was naked to check to see if anyone was home in the house next door) and got to work. I trimmed with caution, (a left hander using right handed scissors, nothing was going to make this endeavour easy) then set about applying the hot wax in the general vicinity I thought hair might be growing in, while simultaneously considering how I was going to get the blobs I had dropped off our rented kitchen floor.

Having been unable to locate the ripping strips the company supplies you with, I cut up one of my husband’s old t-shirts. Excellent use of resources you may think, but the t-shirt was a well-worn, soft jersey fabric, so the strips were stretchy not stiff and rolled in towards the middle making it very difficult to cover the wax with fabric at all. For some reason, the actual ripping seemed far more painful than my last attempt and I even managed to break a few blood vessels just within my range of visibility high on my thigh. Not a good precursor to labour I'm afraid.

I gave up shortly thereafter, also because the episode had taken far longer than planned and I was now running late for my writing group and really didn’t fancy telling a bunch of post menopausal women what had delayed me.

I am led to believe by my ever-loyal husband that it looks like I took to myself with a whipper snipper (that’s weed wacker for you Americans) – different lengths of hair interspersed with bald spots and no straight lines. It’s not perfect, of that I am sure, but it’s still a darn sight better than it was. I think. Though I don’t suppose I can be sure. I haven’t seen either look. Unfortunately in less than eight weeks, plenty of strangers will.