"Hairy(ette) and the Hendersons"

Any conversation with your partner that begins with "Your daughter just --" is headed nowhere good. I could have led with "Sophie" or "my future stepdaughter" or "the munchkin." But I didn't. Yet, sitting across the table from me at Cracker Barrel, his shoulder within easy slugging distance, Tristan just laughed as he read my text. After all, it was funny.

Immediately upon becoming Tristan's girlfriend, I also became his five-year-old daughter's go-to public potty partner. I found this endearing. Even when she insisted we always use the same stall together. Despite the awkwardness when she told me she liked my panties. Even when the first time I flushed the toilet she freaked out and covered her ears as if a 747 engine had blasted out her eardrums making me temporarily fear she had some OCD issue I hadn't learned about yet and that I'd scarred her with a simple act of sanitation. Especially when I realized my fly had been unzipped the whole time we'd been wandering around Chuck E. Cheese's, and she told me, "It's okay." Not-so-much to not-at-all when she insisted I had to stand guard inside the "big stall" only for her then to take a big stinky dump, assaulting my unguarded nasal cavities.


But the Cracker Barrel incident I'd just texted to Tristan would break up our bathroom buddyhood for several weeks.

I sat, popping a prim reserved squat in the public restaurant restroom with my future stepdaughter. I'd just pulled down my panties, and she was staring in that general direction, so I assumed she was going to reiterate her affinity for this pair. Instead:

"You need to shave your vagina."

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Say WHAT?!?  W! T! F!?!
Just like that. Matter of fact. No shame. No feelings spared.

"No.  I don't."

"Yes, you do!"

Realizing her mother must do that, I answered "Not everyone does that. It's okay for different people to do things differently."

With her finger to her lips, she hushed me in embarrassment.

Really? That was the part of the conversation that wasn't appropriate for the public pot and was horribly embarrassing to a five-year-old?  Really. And having shushed me for my insolence, back to her pancakes she went without a care. Sigh.

At this point, a few months into our engagement and a few more until our wedding, Tristan had assured me many times that Sophie adored me. Which I believed then, and still do now that she's officially my stepdaughter. And I love her and even miss her unintended insults when she's at her mother's. Example:

          Sophie: "Do you think these shoes go with this dress?"
                       (Gods - already a fashion diva at five!)
          Tristan: "I don't really know, honey. I'm not so good at putting outfits together."
          Sophie: "Yeah, that's what Mommy says."

He assured me of her fondness for me again between laughing gasps for air. But my run-away-train brain had already jumped the track and wrecked horrifically. Her partiality for me didn't concerned me right now. His, however, did.

Until this moment, for me, Sophie had magically appeared in the world five years ago as Tristan's perfect baby girl who just happened to have Mindy's mitochondrial DNA. Their relationship, much how I viewed that of my own parents, was strictly an asexual parental one. Right up until this golden-haired child had spoken those six horrible, hysterical words:

"You need to shave your vagina."

Nevermind that I knew Mindy and Tristan had dated, and Sophie was the accidental outcome. Nevermind that my bachelor's degree in biology couldn't have been attained without a solid understanding of the workings of the human reproductive system. Nevermind that in C. County High School's freshman health class we'd had to watch an entirely too graphic birth that made that poor boy pale, puke, and pass out.

The health video replayed in my brain, legs in the stirrups, but the only hair was on the crowning baby's head. Biscuits-and-gravy barf. Why did I have to go there? Why was I thinking about Mindy's vahoojay? (Sidebar: I never really called my crotch much of anything until learning that Tristan called Sophie's her nunu, which I had never heard but was familiar with hoo-hoo, both of which Mindy found inappropriate and preferred instead the much more anatomically correct va-jay-jay. Thus combining these, vahoojay was born.)

Tristan had seen Mindy's vahoojay! Mindy styled hers differently than I did. Did he prefer her style to mine? Dear god to whom I pray for random unimportant things, kill me now! Or at least gouge out my mind's eye.

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Fish without bicycles! roared my internal angry feminist. Wasn't it enough that I'd conformed to oppressive societal conventions by shaving my legs (which as much I hate to admit it, I do because I'm grossed out by my hairy legs, not because other people are)? Did I also have to risk nicks and razor burn on the most sensitive part of my body to compete?

I hissed as much to Tristan.

Tristan had had SEX with Mindy's vahoojay! Did he like sex with her better? Yep, I said that out loud too. And while you're at it, holy one, please, PLEASE cut out my tongue!


"Honey, you asked me about my preferences when we first started dating, and I told you I preferred the trimmed look, but that I liked your natural approach too," Tristan offered in an attempt to comfort me. Winking he added, "I like your bush."

I didn't feel better. Nevermind that all he'd said was he liked how trimmed coochies looked. Nevermind that Sophie, not he, unknowingly revealed that Mindy happened to sport a couture crotch. Nevermind that he'd hiked ten miles up and down a mountain; held onto me while I projectile-shat perilously close to the edge of said mountain; and then dehydrated and nearing heat-exhaustion himself sang me "Time in a Bottle" and surprised me with a beautiful engagement ring that he'd picked himself, all so that I could have my dream proposal at my favorite place on the whole entire planet.

What I heard was that he preferred her to me. "Bitches be crazy." Sometimes it's true.

Later as we cuddled on the couch while Sophie played in her room, Tristan tried to dig himself out of the hole I'd started for him, "On a scale of ten, if Mindy's style is a 9.5 -"

"I don't like thinking of her name in conjunction with vahoojays."

"Fine, if the style that 'She Who Must Not Be Named' happens to have is a 9.5, then natural is a 9.4. I like them both - it's the most minuscule of preferences."

"But hers rounds to a 10 and mine to a 9." Stubborn as I am, I was starting to give in.

"Gah! I like YOU better!" Putting on his best faux-Russian accent, he teased, "Come here, my wild Amazon woman, my beloved little ba-BUSH-ka.:

I couldn't help laughing. "Okay, fine, you win. But I'm calling my vahoojay Hairy-ette from now on."

"If you call her Hairy-ette, he gets to be Bushman."

***

Before I made the long drive home, Sophie insisted on giving me one of her stuffed animals so I could have something to remind me of her at my house. After all, she adores me, and I adore her. And just what adorable stuffed animal did she give me? A big, hairy jungle gorilla, now known as Harriet 2.

Welcome to my red-headed steplife!