My family has a thing about eyebrows. I’m slowly beginning to realize this.

A long time ago, when I first started shaving my legs, my kid sister was preoccupied with copying me…with a twist. One time she took an especially long time in the bathroom. I walked in and noticed that both her eyebrows were missing. I asked her why she had done such a thing, but all I got was a giggle.

It was my birthday on Monday and I went home to see my parents. When I headed home, my father waited with me in the car for the train to arrive. We were having a conversation and suddenly I noticed that his eyebrows were missing! Now, this is odd since my father has thick dark eyebrows which I think were present the last time I saw him…three weeks ago. Since I get my eyebrows and eyelashes from him, I was briefly worried that my eyebrows will fall off when I reach his age. Quickly realizing that there was probably another bizarre explaination, I interrupted him in mid-conversation and asked, “What happened to your eyebrows?” Now, my sister had shaved off her eyebrows over twenty years ago, but somehow I felt like that same gullible person again. My father looked me straight in the eye and giggled (like my sister) and said, “Oh, don’t you know, when you get old, the barber shaves off your eyebrows.” I continued looking at him and asked, “You mean, the barber did that to you?” My dad responded with some hesitation, “Yes.” This is how I quickly figured out that it was he who shaved off his own eyebrows. My own logical explanation is that he probably has some gray hairs in his eyebrows and instead of plucking and trimming, he decided to shave them both off. Trust me, when it comes to my father, the most illogical explanation makes the most sense.

I thread my eyebrows to keep them shapely, but whoever heard of shaving your eyebrows off?