Keeping secret makes for one close shave

The coarse dark hair sprouting on my daughter’s legs screamed: puberty. Emily and I both pretended not to notice that from the knees down she was starting to resemble our dog Blackie. Finally, Emily cracked. “Mom, do you think I need to shave my legs?”

In a vain attempt to halt her adolescence, I said: “I read that Justin Timberlake loves girls with hairy legs. If I were you, I would seriously consider leg hair extensions.”

But a fear of spending eternity in a hell populated with a bunch of other deceitful mothers made me tell her the cold, hard truth: “If you ever intend to wear a skirt, shorts or a bikini, and want a boy who was not raised by two left-wing feminists to like you, you need to shave your legs.”

The next morning, Emily and I went to the drugstore to pick out the ideal razor. For a kid who only yesterday had shown an interest in shaving, she was well-informed. “This girl Lauren in third period said we should buy the Venus because it is good for shaving around the knee. . . . Does that purple one on the top shelf have a floating head? Madison says that it is all about the floating head. . . . Two girls at camp last summer used Nair, but aerosol pumps cause global warming so I don’t want to do that. . . . Oh, and swear that you won’t tell Dad that I am shaving my legs.”

I couldn’t believe it! Not the global warming part: I had long suspected a connection between vanity and global warming. It was the “Don’t Tell Dad” part that was disturbing. “I swear. I won’t tell,” I weakly agreed.

By agreeing to keep her secret, I was adding to the large collection of secrets that I am already keeping from my husband. I pictured myself trying to explain to Dr. Phil why I allowed leg hair to destroy my marriage.

It is not my personal secrets -- the crush that I have on the cashier at the supermarket or my clandestine donations to the Democratic Party -- that concern me. Marriages can withstand affairs, overbearing mothers-in-law and the occasional unscrewed toothpaste cap, but no marriage can withstand complete honesty. The only reason therapists instruct their clients to tell their spouses everything is that they want to keep them in therapy.

The secrets that weigh on my marriage are the ones that I keep on behalf of others: Monica’s struggle with bulimia, Cathy’s “difficulties” with monogamy and Linda’s afternoon sojourns with the Gallo brothers, Ernest and Julio. I wasn’t sure my marriage could withstand one more secret. Even a tiny secret like Emily’s decision to shave her legs. And Emily didn’t make her secret easy to keep.

The first time Emily shaved her legs, she stepped out of the shower hemorrhaging like a midget vampire with a leg fetish had attacked her. Miraculously, my husband failed to notice the Band-Aid convention that was taking place on Emily’s legs. So much for Madison’s endorsement of the razor with the floating head.

A few days after the preteen leg hairs were transported to the Pacific Ocean via the shower drain, my husband commented that he could finally tell Emily and Blackie apart.

“Why didn’t you tell me that Emily is shaving her legs?” he said accusingly.

“What?! Emily is shaving her legs? I can’t believe it!” I exclaimed.

I quickly headed for the bathroom. “Where are you going?” he asked.

“I’m going to check on the toothpaste cap,” I said. “I think I may have left it off of the tube.”