Unibrow Chronicles: Lessons in Imperfection from My Dad

My dad’s eyebrows are infamous in our family, coming together as one looking like a clip art icon of a bird flying above his eyes. The impenetrable jet black hairs are as thick as a finger and are woven together tighter than the fibers of an N-95 mask. Dad was always experimenting with new ways of taming his ferocious brows. In the family lore, we have so many hilarious dad eyebrow stories that to help me write this, I asked my siblings to send voice memos of their favorite dad brow stories.

The evidence that all five of us siblings are my dad’s biological children is our inherited matching unibrow. The provenance of these brows ends with my grandfather who never knew his biological father. 

I started begging my mom to let me tweeze my unibrow and shave my legs in the fifth grade when we moved from an all Latino barrio of Los Angeles to West Garden Grove. Once I had mostly white friends, I was painfully aware of my body hair. I came home crying after a friend took me aside on the playground and politely told me, “Lauren, I think it’s time you start shaving your armpits.” 25 years later, this is the only friend from elementary school I still talk to, which shows you what I value in my relationships: honesty.

I found salvation when my twenty-something aunt babysat me. While my mom was out running errands, my aunt microwaved her honey body wax. In one swift motion, like Moses parting the sea, she separated my unibrow into two. 

That’s what an aunt is: a cooler version of your mom who translates between mother and child. My mom converted and bought a wax machine. 

By 12, my dad and I could share eyebrow shaping tips. 

My dad was a macho, 230-pound, foul-mouthed longshoreman. I like to think of him as the cholo Ron Swanson. They have matching mustaches and have the same attitude toward privacy and rugged masculinity. Once I asked my dad if he had a will, and although he’s never seen Parks n Rec, he had the same response Ron Swanson had, “I have what’s called a Gentleman’s Agreement.”

Imagine Ron Swanson getting his eyebrows done, that's how hilarious it was when my dad signed up to get his eyebrows threaded with my sister and me. But my dad has 4 daughters. He doesn’t shy away from spa services. He used to take our brother to get his nails done with him saying, “I am trying to teach him you got to be clean and get nice for the ladies.” Now as a 22-year old, my brother has a skincare routine that would impress any girlfriend and eyebrows women would kill for.

When my dad left the salon, his white shirt was littered with eyebrow hairs. He wiped his bloodshot, watery eyes and said, “You didn’t tell me that shit hurt so bad.” 

My dad preferred to do his own eyebrows. But every few years he would take a razor to his brows and shave them off completely! 

He looked like a character from a horror movie, his face looking familiar but incomplete. But he acted like it wasn’t a big deal, saying, “I fucked them up. I had to shave them to start over.” 

My dad’s attitude towards his eyebrows is one of his greatest lessons on messing up and starting over. 

Every time he disappeared on a bender, he'd return and start a health kick, working overtime to catch up. Every time I hung up the phone when we were screaming at each other in anger, he'd call back, speaking calmly as if we were getting a do-over. Every time he fucked up, he'd recommit to doing better. 

I never realized how hard it was for him to start over. Each time, he had to let us see him in his faults and show up anyway. The same way people had to see him browless for weeks. 

I’ve spent most of my life as a perfectionist, working hard, avoiding mistakes, and making myself ill covering the tracks of my mistakes. Living in fear of being discovered as a fraud.

As an adult, I had to confront feeling like a fraud and start owning up to my mistakes. You know you're important to me if you've received a phone call from me apologizing for things that happened even decades ago.

At one point a friend needed space from me after seeing how I had hurt her. I went to my dad for comfort and he shared his wisdom in stories of redemption, “Baby, you know how many times I fucked up and didn’t think I could face you all? But I kept showing up.”

If I could forgive my dad and accept him and love him as he is, then people could love and accept me with my faults. 

I’ve made progress in trusting people to see and accept me in my personal relationships, but I’m still hiding in my professional life. I’m actually deeply disappointed by my career (a topic for a future newsletter).

I write often but rarely publish. I never believe my work is good enough and worry too much about what people will think. I want to take more risks and be more vulnerable in my writing.

I want to be like my dad and have the courage for people to see me without eyebrows.