I’ve always been a hairy person. Among my siblings, I’m the only one with a lot of hair on my skin. It made me feel special. I walked with a certain pride in my strides when I was young because wherever I went, I was the only one who had that kind of skin hair. In class, in my church group, among my friends, and at parties. People saw me and cast alluring looks my way. I grew pompous. Inflated. I was special. I had something a lot of people didn’t have. When I hit puberty, I started having a love-hate relationship with my skin hair. The hair on my legs was fine but hair started growing at places I didn’t like them to grow. My arms, my chest, the sides of my thighs and before I could say jack, I saw a strand of hair growing from my under chin. I was developing a beard. I got concerned because I didn’t see any woman my age with so much hair.

When I went to boarding school in SHS, the issue of my skin hair split opinions. There were friends who thought it was cool. They would lay next to me and play with the hair on my skin. Others thought it was disgusting; “A woman shouldn’t have that much hair. What are you using them for?” Some even said I was coming as a boy at birth but on the way to delivery, my sex was swapped. It was funny the way they made jokes about it. Sometimes I laughed along with them but in my closest, I was thinking about it. 

When I had my first boyfriend, I clung to him because he told me, “It’s your skin hair that drew my attention to you. You’re different and it’s so beautiful.” He put my fears at the north pole of the compass. At rest. I recall telling myself, “If he loves me because of my hair then men love hair. Those ladies at the hostel who have different opinions are all haters.” At the university, I’d grown enough to be ushered into the world’s definition of what was beautiful and what was not. You look through magazines and you don’t see hairy women. You watch TV and all the women people call beautiful are women with shiny skins. In TV adverts for creams and other beauty products, I didn’t see a woman with skin hair. They all had smooth, shiny skins so I started treating my own skin the same way.

I started shaving my leg hair and that of my arms. The most stubborn hair I had t deal with were the ones on my chin. You cut them in the night and in the morning they’ll rise up with the sun. Waxing was painful but I fell for it just to get rid of the hair on my face. No matter how I treated them, they sprung back to life as if to tell me, “We belong here so you can’t get rid of us that easily.” All through those periods, I met men who loved my hair and wanted me to keep it so I kept it for them and also met men who wanted me to shave so I did it for them.

But through it all, I wasn’t happy. It was like I had to change to make someone love me so I was swinging like a pendulum in my relationships. One says hair and I keep my hair. One says no hair and I get rid of them. I made a decision to make peace with what I have so I can attract the kind of men who wanted what I have. I stopped shaving the hair on my skin except for the beard. The beard brought some kind of look I didn’t like so I fought it heads on. It got to a time, I was shaving every day until the skin there started getting rough and bumpy. So sometimes, I will let myself go and leave it there to enjoy the sunshine until I felt like shaving it off.

I met Kenya a year and a half ago. He saw me with the fluffy hair on my skin and still told me he loved me. At a point, he would touch my sideburn and say, “Look at you…a woman who has sideburns, something I’ve been struggling to have since my infancy.” I will playfully tell him, “If you want it that desperately, I can cut some and plant them on your sides for you.” 

It was sweet how we started. He allowed me to be myself and said nothing about my skin hair. The first day we had shuperu, he played with the one on my chest and even made sweet jokes about it; “God is not fair. Look at my chest, bald as an egg. A man my stature deserves something to cover up my chest but God gave me none but instead gave everything to you a woman.”

He was in love with me and everything I came with. Because of that, I stopped shaving my leg and arms. To be honest, the hair that grows on my skin is beautiful. They are not too long to make onlookers uncomfortable. They look like fresh grass growing in the rainy season; thin and glorious, especially when the sun falls on my skin. I was not surprised that he loved my hair. A year later, this guy has become everything I never thought he would be. At first, he made lovely jokes about my hair and we laughed. These days, he makes funny jokes about my being because I’m a woman with hair on my skin. 

I don’t keep pubic hair. They grow too fast but I’m always on top of them, trimming and making them look clean. He saw me shaving one day and he said, “After that, put the blade on your skin too. A woman shouldn’t have that sort of hair on her skin. It’s disgusting.” He didn’t say it in a jovial form. He said it to hurt my feelings. I told him, “I’m made of hair and cream. You can’t complain about my hair as though the creamy side of me doesn’t exist. Are you now jealous that I have what you don’t have?” It turned into a little argument. He even compared me to other women in our circle and asked, “Don’t you see their skin? A woman’s glory is her skin. Why are you covering yours with hair?”

It got to a point I told him, “If you think the hair on my skin gives you a headache, just walk away instead of sticking around and taking medications that don’t work.” He responded, “Oh is that so?” I retorted, “Yeah I mean it.” He answered, “Take your hairy body somewhere and let me walk away.” Weeks later, we were not talking. I called him; “So you meant it, right? That’s the end of us, right?” He answered, “You’re a woman, you should learn to be submissive and listen to your man. Don’t act like my opinions don’t matter.” 

We had a lengthy conversation and he told me everything he said about my skin was just a joke. He promised that he was not going to talk about it again if I found it offensive. We made up and came back again. Everything had been fine but the only problem we have now is the fact that every joke he makes about me has my skin hair in it. 

Recently, he was eating waakye he bought from the roadside. The only thing I did was serve the waakye. While eating, he found a piece of hair in it. He said, “Now you’ve grown so much hair you have to serve it to me, right? Today is my waakye. Tomorrow it would be in my soup and then in my kooko. By the time I realize, I eat hair from morning to evening because the woman in my life has too much hair to feed generations.”

Damn that hurt. 

He brushed it off as a joke and apologized for it. I knew he meant what he said but because I took offence he decided to apologize. 

We talked about marriage recently and we were talking about meeting our families. I’d seen his parents before and I relate to his family very well. When we talked about the knocking rite and the date, he said something like, “You’ll have to shave what’s on your skin before we go there. They might look at your beard and ask who is marrying who.” He then laughed. He saw that I was angry and he also got angry. He screamed, “So, I can’t play with you again? What’s the use if I can’t play with the woman in my life?” 

There are so many things we can play with but when the joke is reduced to who I am and something he sees as a flaw in me, then I have a problem with it. Currently, I’m giving the marriage second thought. I don’t want to live with a man who will perpetually remind me of something I don’t want to remember. I can’t bear to see him laugh at me and call it an innocuous joke, no I can’t stand it. We’ve had a discussion over it severally. He changes and comes back to the same place again to tease me. I want to know, is he ever going to change? Would I be petty if I use that as a reason to walk away from the relationship?

I can bear all the flaws he comes to the table with but I can’t bear to see the man I love use me as his joke board. What should I do? 

—Faith

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