Hair Care

My hair stylist, like any woman's, is really more like my therapist. And she's been kind enough over the last half decade to pretend as if my sessions with her have just been about my hair.

This is the cycle:

I'll grow my hair out very long. Not quite as long as it was in high school (which was Splash like), but long by modern standards. I marvel at the length. Love pulling it up at night to wash my face, love how it looks spiral-curled--like a woman on a procedural show. Love how it feels when it falls on my shoulders or when my husband runs his hands through it. Love it fully, for about three months.

Then one day, after I finish blow-drying it for 20 minutes, and am dripping with sweat, I storm out of the bathroom and yell at my husband, "That's it! I can't take it any more! I'm chopping it off!" (It has been my experience that women don't get "hair cuts." They "chop it off.")

So I get an emergency session with my stylist and she chops off my hair into a bob. These are my only two speeds: long straight hair, short angled bob. And when I see the bob I gasp with excitement and exclaim, "I love it! This is how my hair should always look."

I love the volume of the bob. How quickly it dries. The compliments I get, mostly because it's so drastically different. But then, one day, after spending 20 minutes with the flat iron trying to fight with my cowlick and get the back to "bob" just so, I storm out of the bathroom and yell at my husband, "That's it! I can't take it any more! I'm growing it out!"

And so it goes.

I refuse to use any products, but I want my hair to have volume, shine and to stay in place. I have naturally wavy hair, but only in the front. The back is straight as an arrow. I'm constantly contemplating bangs. 

My husband loves my hair up. Especially in a ponytail. He loves how it "shows off my face" and how "effortless it looks." But for me, I find that when I wear a ponytail, I have too much face. So I have to have a few wisps of hair and larger earrings to feel less exposed. And effortless? Yeah, right. Hint to the men: the more effortless a woman's hair looks, the longer she spent on it.

Color is a different, more maddening story all together.

As a child, until the age of two, I was bald. When the hair finally started to grow in, it was cotton white. Hate to brag here, but it was adorable. Especially when my mother pulled it into ever-so-slightly curling pigtails. My hair was a defining characteristic. My name was synonymous with "blonde."

My best friend, whom I met the first day of preschool, was a redhead. I loved her immediately. Together, we were the towhead and carrot top who wore macaroni necklaces and played at length with My Little Ponies. We were special. Our hair conveyed this.

After my car accident, at the age of eight, my hair was such a tangled mess of blood and rocks and sticks and glass that the doctors insisted on shaving it off completely. My mother refused. When they fought her, saying it was so matted and tangled that it would never unfurl, she said she wanted the chance to try. And so, for the three weeks I was bound to the hospital bed, 800 miles from home, my mother worked meticulously to unravel my blonde mane. This was our daily activity. She would pick gingerly at the ends, finding that if she could just get a one-inch-by-one-inch section of hair untangled, it would be a successful day. She sprayed it and combed at it until my head ached so tremendously she would have to stop for the day. And eventually, near the time I was to be discharged, she had picked out every piece of gravel and every shard of glass and successfully brushed out the entire three feet of my white, silky hair.

Then she called for a shampoo.

And it was a celebration. Nurses piled in the room to watch as the stylist rinsed the dried blood and then combed my hair out in a fan shape on my pillow to allow everyone to take pictures. It was the biggest of victories.

My mother had saved my hair.

And for the rest of my childhood, we had such fun with it. Crimping it for school pictures (yes, I was super cool), braiding it for gymnastic tournaments, having it professionally styled for my brother's wedding. Buying all kinds of scrunchies and banana clips and mastering the side ponytail.

But as I got older, my hair progressively got darker, just ever so slightly, until my senior year of high school, when I decided to take the plunge and get highlights before moving off to college. I think my stylist back then gave me less than five foils, but it made me feel more blonde. Feel more me.

My mother was thrilled.

It began simple enough. A few highlights every semester break from college. I was maintaining the color of my youth. It just took a few streaks of bleach chemicals every six months to keep the magic alive. But as every woman knows, a few innocent highlights are a gateway dye.

When I graduated college, I thought I needed a professional look, so I chopped off my hair. When my professional, angled bob landed me a job in a new city, I found a new fancy stylist in a new fancy salon. After a few months, I was pining for a fresh start with my hair to match the fresh start in my life.  I sat down in the hydraulic chair with a cape wrapped around me and said, "Chestnut me."

In I went as a (bubbly?) blonde, out I came as a (sultry?) brunette. The ladies in the shop loved it. They ooed and aahed, and I walked out of there with such confidence that when I got back to my apartment, the guys who lived in 12G flirted with me in the elevator. And I flirted back.

But I woke up the next morning with a massive hair hangover. I called my sister before sunrise, telling her I couldn't go into work. I was too embarrassed. People would hate it. And also, what colors of clothes go with my hair now? White? Pink seems to clash. Can I still pull off black? How the hell should I do my makeup?

At work, most everyone was in a state of shock. Though they had only known me about three months, they seemed betrayed. Disgusted, maybe. And in walked my boss, a powerful, scary woman not too far from Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada. She herself was a blonde, and maintained her highlights every two weeks for an astronomical cost. She came up to me, touched my hair, sighed heavily, and said for all to hear: "Why the hell would you do this to yourself?"

But that was nothing compared to my mother's reaction. She had no words. She was tight lipped, which is the worst (and most unusual) thing my mother can be. She looked around at me, trying to find a place for her eyes to land. She commented on my shoes and then my necklace and excused herself to cry in the hall closet. It would have been better for me to have come home confessing I had gotten knocked up by some random drummer who was out on parole.

It's been seven years and she still brings it up.

So after the Chestnut Incident of 2005, I began to allow my stylist to do more creative tricks with color to find a balance between dark brown and platinum blonde. She used a bit more highlights and juxtaposed them with some oxymoronic lowlights. Every session I'd sit in her chair and say, "Ok, I'd like it to be a honey carmel color." The next session I'd say, "Ok, really more hazelnut maple." Once I had her try for "strawberry banana." She probably thought I was just hungry. But she patiently tried every food coloring I could throw at her.

I would get frustrated because when I try a dark auburn or a deep brown, which I ultimately loved, the color would fade quickly. When I questioned my stylist about this she would say, "Your hair is naturally very light. It's hard to keep it dark."And yet, when I try highlights, I quickly get dark roots. To which my stylist says, "Yes, because your hair is not light enough that it can maintain the highlights very well."

She avoids being openly annoyed as I plop down, exasperated, in her chair, demanding she chop it off after she spent a year holding my hand through a rough grow out. And she hides her skepticism when I bounce in excitedly showing her a picture of Keri Russell (early season one) and demand that she "Make me look like her!" Because I think she knows we can lighten it up to nearly fluorescent, or darken it to the point of my mother disowning me, but after a few washes, my true color always surfaces.

And my true color isn't really all that bad. It's just not what it once was. I sometimes take this out on my best friend, the Ginger, because she insists on putting in a few blonde foils to "tone down the red." And I just can't forgive her. Because when you look at the picture of the two of us in preschool, the iconic image of our childhood that is framed on a wall in my home, she and I don't resemble the towhead and carrot top very much anymore.

Perhaps this is what is upsetting my mother. Her white-haired child is gone. Youthfulness and lightness have been replaced. I often wonder how differently things would have gone if she had just let the doctors shave me bald. Perhaps my hair would have grown in just as blonde and silky as before. Or maybe it would have grown in thicker, darker, maybe even curly. And maybe I wouldn't feel the need to have my hair be a constant gift to my mother. But I respect and admire her decision in the hospital to try to keep what I had. Preserve what was precious. Protect what was perfect. And however burdensome, my hair will always be an extremely intense experience that she and I shared more than 20 years ago.

So yes, my mom and I have issues with my hair today.

But I'm hopeful they'll be gone tomorrow.