My Mole

I have a mole on my face.

A mole - not a freckle - a mole. Sounds outrageously unromantic, doesn’t it? Mole… what an ugly word. At any rate, you’d be surprised how rare a face mole is. Thank the lord for Cindy Crawford, Marilyn Monroe and Ginger (from Gilligan’s Island, not my dog) who turned the facial mole into a ‘beauty mark.’ I’m lucky my beauty mark landed where it did - positioned above the right side of my top lip. What if it had been on the tip of my nose or right between my eyes? I’m lucky.

I held my 2 year old niece the other day as we were doing ‘lipstick.’ She did my lipstick, then reached her little index finger out and touched my beauty mark. She looked at me and then did it again. I chuckled. It’s not the first time the mark has caused curiosity.

Today I like my beauty mark. I wouldn’t even recognize my face without it, nor do I think I’d like it. But I haven’t always been that way.

I remember, as a kid, standing in front of the bathroom mirror with a knife in my hand staring at the mole. “If I didn’t have that I’d be cute,” I repeated over and over. Plus, the small white scar of a mole removed would certainly be easier to cover up with makeup than this mole. Luckily my fear of pain won out and I put down the pairing knife.

I usually forgot about the mark until someone commented on it in which case I’d become very self conscious. In the locker room, after Jr. High gym class, I remember a girl getting so close to my face and shouting “WHAT IS THAT? IS THAT REAL?!” I was completely horrified. I shouted back “Of course it is! You think I get up and draw it on every day?!” She was convinced that my mole switched sides of my mouth frequently. She also swore I copied Madonna, (who was rumored to have tattooed hers on LONG before tattoos were so commonplace).

I’ve had people reach out and touch it (aside from my darling niece who can touch it any time she wants to), stare at it for what seems like forever, and had NUMEROUS people jokingly tell me I “have chocolate above my lip.” I fell for it the first 5,000 times – frantically wiping at my face not wanting to look like I can’t eat my chocolate. They all chuckle at their cleverness as if I haven’t heard that joke before.

One day, while getting ready to go swimming with friends, my Grandma grabbed my face and studied it. Keep in mind; she’d seen me regularly for the past 10 or so years. She studied me as though the thing had just popped up on my face and announced, in front of all my friends “Oh honey, you’re gonna’ need to get that removed. No man is gonna wanna kiss that!” I crumbled. Everyone turned to look at my stupid face which I was casually hiding behind a beach towel. How could my always warm and loving Grandma say that?! I stared out the window all the way to the local pool thinking about my life doomed to no kisses - imagining man after man turning me away because of this grotesque growth above my lip.

Then I became an adult.

Turns out men were okay with it. In fact, they thought it made me look like a super-model (again, thank you Cindy Crawford!) I also noticed that girls drew moles on their faces for Halloween, and I had cast mates in various musicals upset that they can’t draw on their trade mark mole for the stage because I’m standing there with a real one. How about that?!

So I’m okay with it now. People have called the beauty mark “glamorous” and “classic” and who could feel badly about that? I’ve also had a fun way to leave mouth prints on notes, and describe myself to someone. Aside from the time Mark told me I might want to “get it removed because it could be cancerous,” (perhaps a miscommunication?) life with a mole on my face is now pretty good.