Love in small gestures
Let’s be honest - there is something about a face that just looks bloody weird without eyebrows. Women lead the charge for ‘eyebrow appreciation’ as they basically act as a photo frame for the rest of our face. There is so much attention on shaping, tinting, feathering, and waxing, that we have no doubt failed to remember the pure functionality of eyebrows. As someone getting back into an exercise regime (without eyebrows), I now have an abundance of appreciation for why I actually need them: to stop sweat from running straight down my face!
But it has become more than that when trying to reconcile the weirdness in the mirror – thankfully I’m a fair-haired creature, so an absence of eyebrows and eyelashes hasn’t been as much of a shock compared to what my brunette cousins must experience. And for men as well. Nonetheless, there is something missing in more ways than the obvious. So in an attempt to look (and feel) more ‘normal’, I ordered fake eyebrows (called ‘eyebrow wigs’ … who knew !?). They are made of human hair and are stuck to some adhesive thingy already in the loose shape of an arch that are supposed to just get glued to your face. Sounds so simple! Weird. But simple. It was therefore a surprise to me when the moment came to inch my foot through the door of ‘normal’ and apply said fake eyebrows, that I instead started crying in front of the bathroom mirror. With one half-stuck half-cocked eyebrow. Had it really come to this? That in some desperate attempt to look and feel more like me, I was sticking someone else’s hair to my face? And that those, plus a fake fringe, would fool everyone else (well, more like fool me) into thinking that I was regaining some semblance of self-confidence.
I was wrong. This was about so much more than eyebrows. This was about finding acceptance and recognition in a face that looked anything but familiar. And it was joining a long line of reasons about why cancer brings about so many reasons to ask questions without easy answers.
It also became about recognising love in small gestures. When my beloved walked into the bathroom to find me in this teary state, he looked perplexed. And not just because I had a half-applied eyebrow hovering somewhere on my forehead! I couldn’t get the first one to line up properly and didn’t even want to try the second. But he just took the glue stick from my hand, peeled off the eyebrow, and said “Let me”.
And there it is. The myriad of ways that people need people is beyond definition. It comes in any small gesture that just says: “I’m thinking of you in among all the chaos of whatever else is going on in my life right now”. When someone passes away, or something devastating happens in a friend’s life (like hearing “Jodie’s got cancer”), people confess to not having made contact because “I just don’t know what to say”. That is ultimately about them. The opportunity for connection, for humanness, has been lost. Because it’s actually about the other person and what they need. And for the record, we don’t all need grandiose statements and offerings, because those start to look and feel as if they are about some publicly recognised act of giving for the ‘giver’, as opposed to the gift of simply caring. Of acknowledging that you can’t offer an answer to fix whatever the problem is, or to provide some profound life meaning that will make all the bad news wash away. It’s just about being present. Listening. Connecting. Saying “You matter”. And sometimes it’s just about helping to stick fake eyebrows onto a teary face that otherwise says, “I love you”.
