On the priority list of pregnancy-specific physical indignities, the newly darkened coffee-colored line emerging in my belly seemed well placed at the bottom. It didn’t hurt me or the baby, it was perfectly normal and would go away after delivery, my friends, my doctor and the internet assured me.
The so-called linea nigra, or line caused by hyperpigmentation during pregnancy, was another indicator of the massive hormonal changes my body was going through to grow a baby, but by far one of the more benign manifestations. How could I be conceited about a little line in the face of nausea, pelvic pain, constipation, and sleepless nights, not to mention an obviously healthy pregnancy that everyone would pray for? Well, I’ll answer here.
For starters, my linea nigra neatly lined up with the rectangular group of stomach hairs I’ve been at war with since puberty. Body hair has always been a concern of mine, a concern that I can trace directly back to an insult uttered at me by a boy on the eighth grade bus. He pointed out something I had already half-consciously wondered about: Am I hairy, and does that hairiness make me undesirable or objectionable in some vague way in middle school? (This was in the mid-2000s, when Britney’s dolphin-smooth body was the beauty standard.)
Hairiness was something of a birthright: my grandfather and my father both had monobrows and real chest mats, which, unsurprisingly, was no balm at the time. The boy’s cruel beard about the black hair on my half-pubescent arms was all I needed to confirm, and so began to hate my body hair.
Since then I have shaved, waxed, waxed, lasered, threaded and bleached. I obsessed over my attractiveness, measuring it by hair that always came back, thicker and stronger. But I grew up. Big eyebrows are back in fashion. I came to recognize that alongside robust body hair was great hair. I came to believe that there was something inherently misogynistic about society’s insistence that a female body resemble a hairless cat – and also that it was a woman’s personal choice. woman to take care of her hair as she saw fit. I learned which hair removal regimens I wanted to adhere to and which other parts of my body I would just leave alone.