Browbeaten

 For those who don't know, I'm in menopause.

I don't know why it's called menopause, by the way. It's meno-full-fucking-stop. My monthly flow isn't coming back, you guys. Neither is my youth, vitality, or natural lubrication.

I still have a sex drive, but the road is permanently closed, if you know what I mean.

The detour is DEATH, ha ha!

Anyway, I've experienced a particular physical side effect of menopause that no one ever told me about. Female Drunkards of a certain age, tell me if this is a thing for you, too.

I've lost my eyebrows.

I mean, they're not gone. No one broke in and stole them. They didn't fall off my face and get mixed with the dust bunnies under the sofa, never to be seen again because I don't know the last time I vacuumed under the sofa.

It's just that, apparently, whatever hormones are responsible for producing and maintaining those little strips of hair over my eyes have dried up along with those that used to make me bleed out of my hoohah every 28 days or so. Because my eyebrows, never actually lush to begin with, now resemble that streak of sticky soda you once spilled on the floor and didn't realize you hadn't cleaned up properly until it began to attract stray cat hairs and crumbs and look like something out of a petri dish growing in the doorway.

Or Minty, the Candy Cane That Fell on the Ground

We've all done that, right?

I think the last time I regularly went around without drawing in my eyebrows was back in the 90s. It's not that they looked great even way back then, but I was young enough and cute enough that I didn't care. Also, carefully groomed brows didn't fit in with the borderline hippie-chick aesthetic I was attempting to rock in those days.

But for years  I've had to enhance my eyebrows years to avoid looking like some kind of alien, or Florida Senator Rick Scott. Which I realize is redundant.

Gah. He doesn't even have the menopause excuse like I do.

And once I hit the menopause milestone, my already quite light and quite thin eyebrows simply gave up the ghost. I didn't stop growing hair in other places: not under my arms, or on my legs, or around my lonesome funhouse. In fact, I strongly suspect that most of the hair that no longer thrives above my eyes is trying to take up residence on my upper lip, where an old-lady mustache keeps threatening to sprout. 

But my eyebrows are sad, people. They consist of, like, 16 colorless strands that peter out to bare skin as they approach the outer corners of my eyes.  I used to have to tweeze them on a regular basis to maintain their shape and size. Hell, I even used to carefully shave them. They now sell cool little battery-operated gizmos that will give your eyebrows a precision trim. But old-school me just took my double-blade Lady Bic razor and scraped away at the delicate skin above my eyes, you know, in the name of beauty. If that's not a metaphor for GenX, I don't know what is.

We all wanted to be Molly Ringwald on the outside, 
but we were all Ally Sheedy on the inside.

Anyway, nowadays I carefully apply brown makeup to my eyebrows as part of my morning routine. It's not easy, because honestly I can barely see the skimpy hairs I'm attempting to darken and define. One of these days, if I'm not careful, I'm going to end up looking like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. 

Bring on that close-up, yo.

But you know what? That's OK. Of all the quirky physical changes that come with menopause (I didn't think it was possible to lose muscle mass in places where I never had muscles to begin with, for example), sparse eyebrows are among the least likely to constantly remind me that I'm advancing rapidly through middle age. Unlike, say, the jelly roll that has taken up permanent residence around my waist.

So...gals and guys, what physical symptoms of aging have taken you by surprise?