Kiss the Girl

The other evening, I was setting up for a Relief Society activity at a local park. I was talking to my pal Kathryn as we searched for a water spigot and telling her briefly about the anniversary get-away Glen and I had gotten back from that day. Out of nowhere, Kathryn started to laugh. She reached for the collar of my shirt, and I assumed that something had inadvertently gotten stuck there and she was removing it, but it became clear pretty quickly that she wasn't "fixing" anything on my shirt -- she was just kind of jiggling my collar. And she kept giggling! I was extremely confused until she said, "Looks like you and Glen had a really good time." And then I realized . . . she'd spotted my infamous birthmark.

The one that looks exactly like a hickey.

In the exact spot on my neck you'd basically expect to see a hickey.

This birthmark was once a cause for embarrassment, like the time I was in Sunday School when I was 14, and Brother Pratt, who never looked up from his lesson plan while teaching, asked me totally out of the blue who'd been chewing on my neck. Cue the boys in my class to suddenly want a look at it.

It has since progressed into a joke, like when we learned the German word for "hickey" in my 101 class (knutschfleck) and my skit group exploited the birthmark to make me appear an even more villainous roommate (in the skit, i had stolen a roommate's boyfriend and come home with a "knutschfleck").

It really doesn't show up in pictures, mainly because of a mixture of 1) being photographed from the left, 2) cruddy cameras, 3) shirts that manage to cover up that part of my neck, or 4) my hair covering up that part of my neck. That didn't stop my sis-in-law Jami from covering it up when she did my make-up and hair for the wedding last year, mainly because all four of those fortunate circumstances wouldn't be coming into play that day. Seeing that in all my pictures would bug me, she said. (She was right. It would have.)

 An instance of "cruddy camera", so you really can't see it too well . . . but it's the best one I could find in a one-minute search.

I've gotten pretty used to this mark being a part of my life, but I sometimes take it for granted that other people don't immediately know it's a birthmark, like Kathryn. So once I realized what she'd been assuming, I laughed, too. And I had to tell her the sad truth that my husband had not been responsible for it. Although maybe I should have just let her think so. It's good for people to know you and your spouse get along.

-Me

"A kiss is a lovely trick, designed by nature, to stop words when speech becomes unnecessary." -Ingrid Bergman