If I only had the time

Today, the Resident Fan Boy is celebrating his first birthday in Victoria in 19 years.

Younger daughter has informed me by text that she also wants to light the candles this year, because she is "22 years old!". Pray for us.

While she was meticulously baking and decorating the cake yesterday, I entertained her with this latest Randy Rainbow concoction. I swear the man has the tidiest eyebrows on YouTube.

Browing out

Some people have canaries in the mine-shaft; we have younger daughter's eyebrows.

The Accent Snob went to live with elder daughter. He is too elderly and too anxious to make the trip to Victoria, and besides, our apartment won't take pets.

The morning after his departure, half of younger daughter's eyebrows disappeared. We take to a brow bar regularly, precisely so she won't have to worry about tweezing. However, sometimes when she worries, she tweezes. After the last incident, I hid the tweezers. So this time, she plucked them out by hand.

And, of course, she had her farewell solo recital the next day, and her cosmetics and jewellery had been stored against our impending move, so I found myself racing through Rideau Centre to find eye shadow, mascara, cheap trinkets, and an eyebrow pencil. Spent the evening printing up internet articles about over-plucked eyebrows. I left them on her bed - because telling her would only embarrass and enrage her. I'm her mother and any suggestion is "treating her like a little kid".

The next morning, when the Resident Fan Boy took her to church prior to her concert, he noticed more of her eyebrows were missing.

I packed food for the after-recital reception (including a pumpkin pie younger daughter had baked by herself!), and improvised a small eyebrow-repair kit.

When I got there, I just had time to notice that her brows had been filled in - Groucho Marx style. It didn't look too bad --- from a distance.

Then I sat in the front pew in dread. I'd sent out a handful of emails, and an announcement had been made at church. Fifteen minutes before the start, four little old ladies had scatter themselves throughout the nave. I handed out programmes and smiled warmly - I hope. I texted elder daughter that I hoped for at least ten people, outside of immediate family and her accompanist, might show up.

My heart was sinking.

Then, people started to arrive: about ten members of the church choir, who have watched her grow up; two of her fellow voice students; the eccentric lady who greets us in the church neighbourhood; younger daughter's math and science teacher from her high school; our next-door neighbour; the church organist who set younger daughter on this path by arranging for her to sing at services.

About twenty people in all.

Younger daughter, in her element, did long introductions to each of her five songs, but not too long -- and she was funny!

And oh....how she sang. I'm her mother, but she really sang well: Ave Maria (the Schubert one she loves from Fantasia; "Memory" from Cats (her personal choice), "Se tu m'ami".

Her singing teacher particularly wanted her to sing "Nothing" from A Chorus Line, because she blew the audience away with it last year, and she also sang her other entry to last year's Musical Theatre Kiwanis competition:
I have videos of her performance, but, of course can't share them here.

At the end, there was a standing ovation. I wish I'd remembered to bring a bouquet, but perhaps the reaction was enough.

Brow beaten

The Resident Fan Boy warned me about a week before I returned home that younger daughter had tweezed her eyebrows.  We've been taking her to a brow bar regularly for the past two or three years, but she told him she saw one stray hair and then she had to even the brows out...

The RFB sent me a snap and although she looked very different, it wasn't a disaster.  When I arrived home in the late afternoon after about twelve hours since waking, younger daughter was the only person home, as the RFB and elder daughter were still at work. I didn't mention her eyebrows, but reminded her that we were taking a favourite cousin out to dinner, and that she might enjoy dressing up and putting on some make-up.

The cousin arrived, younger daughter descended in a dress for the occasion -- and with next-to-no eyebrows.  The rest of us exchanged startled looks and pointedly said nothing.

When she was away from the table, elder daughter asked what I was going to do.

"Keep quiet and try to start a conversation through texting," I sighed.  I was massively jet-lagged and my speech was slurring a little.

The next morning, I printed up an article about eyebrows, looked up some tutorials on YouTube and texted younger daughter, upstairs in her bedroom, sending her one of the links:
How do you feel about your eyebrows?

I still feel beautiful!  Simple steps from "beauty - allwomenstalk.com" (the link I'd sent) would help to give advice on how to regrow my eyebrows!  As a matter of fact, they really are embarrassingly over plucked!  

This happens to everybody when they first start plucking! It happened to me and it happened to your sister!

And I thought of elder daughter's pencil-thin brows the summer after some jerk in Grade Seven accused her of being a lesbian.  I thought of Jean Harlow.

The next time younger daughter was out of her room, I snuck in, left the article I'd printed up, and removed her tweezers for hiding.

She hasn't mentioned missing them, and slowly and fuzzily, her eyebrows are coming back.  She draws a dark thin line through them each morning.