The other day while I was visiting with my Mom via FaceTime she paid me a compliment on my current haircut. I’ve been letting my hair grow for the past year, in an attempt to grow a bob. My former stylist, Wendy, used to say that whenever a woman has an identity crisis, she grows a bob. I’m not certain that I’m going through a crisis, but I have changed my hair a lot through the years.
The first time I can remember being aware of my hair having a style was the day I decided to play beauty parlor in the back yard with a pair of safety scissors. Iremember waltzing from tree to tree, drifting in my own world, chatting with my imaginary stylists as I cut random locks if hair from my head. My poor mother was totally unaware of my snipping until she called me in for lunch and noticed the clumps of blonde hair on my shoulders. At first she thought she’d be able to even it out herself but I’d done too good a job for that. I was whisked to the beauty parlor and my one time little girl bob became a “pixie”.
I don’t remember the next time I went to a shop for a haircut. Most of the time, my mother was my hairdresser. She was very good with barber shears and could shape and feather hair. It was always so exciting to get my hair cut. Mom would sit me in the high chair (we had a high chair in our kitchen until I was twelve or thirteen) and wet my hair with a comb dipped in warm water. Then, she would bend down in front of me, comb and snip, step back, examine, comb and snip some more. Eventually she’d say, “You’re done” and I would run up to the bathroom to check out my new do in the mirror. Many times my eyes would begin to tear up. I would wonder why I wanted my hair cut in the first place and then walk back down to Mom in the kitchen. She’d ask “Do you like it?” I don’t remember what I said, but I hope I never made her feel bad. As I look back at my childhood photos, my hair almost always looked nice.
Along with the variety of cuts, my fine blonde hair had its share of permanent waves. Mom would sit me in the kitchen with a towel around my neck, carefully rolling my hair on the tiny perm rods which I would hand to her alternately with end papers. Even though the whole process should only have taken a couple of hours, our kitchen was generally a three-ring circus, with the constant traffic of my younger brothers and sisters, cats, dogs and the occasional phone call interrupting my mother’s train of thought. Luckily Mom was a professional ring master and eventually the perm was done. Except for the smell of the chemicals, I loved getting a perm. My hair is so soft that even rollers couldn’t form a curl that would hold without the help of Little Miss Toni.
I started sleeping in rollers very early on. By the time I was ten, I was rolling my own hair every night before bed and carefully wrapping the curlers with an old stocking around my head to keep them in place as I slept. Mines weren’t the soft pink sponge rollers either, they were black brush rollers with bristles inside that stuck in your scalp to hold them in place. I never really mastered the use of picks, so my rollers were clasped together with bobby pins. I was pretty good at the rolling too, I didn’t even need a mirror. Despite any discomfort the rollers may have caused, in the morning I had a head full of bouncing blonde curls.
My quest for finding my hair history evolved into a much larger task than I had expected. For years I’d been saying I was going to organize all the family pictures into one spot, collecting them from the various albums and boxes where they were stashed. It took me two days but I finally finished late yesterday afternoon. What I learned by looking at close to 2,500 photos was that for most of my life, my hair has been in a bob, and it looked good! It wasn’t just a style I ran to out of
uncertainty, instead, it seems to be a style that suits me and is me. So, I guess in my case, Wendy was right! The difference is that when I go for a bob, I’m not entering an identity crisis but coming out of one.
For so much of my life, I’ve wanted my hair to look like someone else so I could look like someone else. I would want to look prettier, sexier, more provocative or alluring. That’s why I would cry after a haircut; even though my hair had changed, from my forehead down, I was still me. For too long, that just wasn’t good enough for me. It may have taken me 57 years to figure it out, but thank God I have. Looking back through all the years of my childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, early parenthood and on to the present, the hair may have changed, but the face is still me and I’m happy with that.