Thank You, Mrs. G, For Teaching Us How To Shave

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When I was thirteen, my friend Cheryl invited a small group of friends to her family’s beach house for a week one summer. It was as delightful as you’d imagine the beach in the summer to be, but its longevity in my stack of memories is due to the continued importance of the thirty minutes that Cheryl’s mom taught us girls how to shave our legs.

If you’re not someone who shaves your legs from the knee down, you might not know it’s risky business for even a veteran leg shaver. The knee, ankle, and frankly, the whole lower leg present lifelong potential for injurious shaving which requires bits of toilet paper to be applied to bloody accidents.

Patience and skill when shaving around your Achilles tendon will save on toilet paper.

One of our group of friends had massacred her legs in the shower during that beach week, which prompted Mrs. G, Cheryl’s mom, to take us aside and give us a tutorial. “Girls,” she said in a tone that made clear this would be big, “I’m going to teach you how to shave.” She motioned for us to gather around, and gradually this wise woman imparted her deep knowledge of proper shaving technique.

To this day, forty-five years later, I think of Mrs. G when I shave my legs. I know to go slow and deliberate over the kneecap. I’m mindful when dealing with the ankle bones. I value a smooth pass over the tibia. These are old treasures I carry with me, and they came from a thirty-minute instruction when I was an adolescent.

Teaching someone something mundane can be a piece of us that lives on through the ages like a song. You perform your knowledge for someone because you think it’s worth hearing. They might feel the same way and perform it for someone else one day. The odd thing is that we aren’t necessarily aware we’re teaching, and we never know when something we say has been born into a long life or fallen to the ground barely heard. But putting ourselves out there has the chance to be a gift that will endure.

I think one of the keys to a lesson that will live on for years is the respect with which it’s delivered. It’s our respect for the person we’re mentoring that opens the possibility of an impactful assimilation of the information. Even more, it’s our respectful embrace of the ground they occupy today and of the place they hope to arrive at tomorrow. Their hope is not our hope and it’s not our journey, but it’s our respect that might send them off better equipped. Respectful words have a much higher success rate than lesser words.

My husband told me recently one of the things I taught him that stays top of mind for him is when I explained long ago that our young kids “weren’t second-rate humans just because they were kids.” They were people who happened to be young and developing.

While this was an enduring lesson for my husband, it also speaks to my philosophy on anyone — kid or adult. Every day we all start living the same — as humans — but from places and viewpoints that can look vastly different.

Or, stated another way, if I were to teach a seven-year-old or a forty-year-old how to cast yarn onto a knitting needle, my tone and mindset would be the same. This is why I sometimes plop onto the ground and sit cross-legged to talk to a four-year-old. Now we see eye to eye.

If my husband and I raised our kids by letting them know from our attitude towards them that they had agency and legitimacy right out of the gate, then maybe they’d have self-confidence, happiness, and a greater sense of self from the get-go. That was my hunch anyway. It seems to have worked. They both seem at ease in their own skin and advocate for themselves out of a simple abundance rather than a fearful scarcity. They’re only two data points, but I still think it makes all the sense in the world.

When I think back fondly on some of the mentoring I received, it all involved being taught with patience rather than frenetic insistence. Teaching is a gift after all. We don’t throw a beautifully wrapped box with a big bow on top at our recipient and bark, “Open it!!”

My father-in-law patiently taught me that you want to make your pruning cuts to a tree branch not close to the trunk and not far away — there’s a sweet spot. He had lots of trees. I have lots of trees. I’ve pulled out that lesson many times.

My son taught me about finger-picking on the guitar. While this is a project of mine that’s on the back burner right now, I think of him each time I pick up my guitar. He’s a gentle teacher, just like the sound from the six-string on which he demonstrates.

My mom and grandmother taught me to knit. I love to knit. I love them when I do it because the pastime is one intergenerational activity handed down. It’s about quiet mentoring, sitting right next to each other, heads bent to the tiny details of a knitting stitch. The lessons are intimate. The learning is, too.

These lessons are so robust in the memory because they are love.

When I think about this kind of respectful, supportive mentoring — the kind that sticks to the brain and solidifies learning — I think about how I’ve mentored myself in the past. When I’m new at something or worry about failure, I haven’t always guided myself through the learning process with respect or care. But there are other options.

When I don’t know what I’m doing, I can help myself to learn how to learn. For one, I can mentor myself on what I already know — namely, that things will turn out fine, one way or another. I can teach this to my doubting, fledgling learner self because I know this from experience. I can remind myself of past successes which I easily discount when my newbie mentality sets in. I am my own best mentor when it comes to teaching myself to trust in myself. The trick is to remember to teach this, and then to hear it when I do.

The more I learn to teach myself with respect, the more expertise I have to teach someone else this way. Maybe one day I’ll even have the opportunity to mentor someone on how to shave their legs. If that doesn’t happen, I can always keep honing that skill myself, because practice makes perfect, even if the little splotches of toilet paper on the back of my ankles right now might say otherwise.

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Be well, friends.