Raising My Hair

by Jan

My battle with my coif has been raging since I was a kid. While some may consider their hair to be a crowning glory, mine is more of a bee in my bonnet.

My difficulties began when I was in grade school. What had once been a fairly manageable head of hair grew into a shoulder-length web of snarls. I don't know if my family was conditioner-phobic or what, but I can remember painful brushing sessions during which my mother and I named each snarl, based on it disposition. A mild knot might be called Jessica Snarl, while a vicious network of tangled locks would be dubbed Severely Snarl.

Now, my parents were self-styled bohemian-intellectual types whose hair did not escape their D.I.Y. ethic. We didn't visit the hairdresser and we counted on Mom to provide us with occasional trims. My dad's trims being so occasional that he was known amongst the parents of my friends as "the one with the hair."

My first hair trauma started out innocently enough. I was eight or nine years old and goofing around with a playmate. Suddenly, he took it upon himself to pin me down and rub his hands madly through my hair until it knotted together in a pre-cursor of Robert Smith's 1980's look. Not being forward-thinking enough to see the eventual hipness of this style, my mother pulled out the scissors and hacked off a good foot of hair. I promptly avenged myself by pouring molasses all over my playmate's head, which did at least result in his apologizing.

Once my hair had grown out a bit, my mother must have taken pity on my raggedy head, because she scheduled my first hair appointment with the local beautician. After my hair had been cut and put up in rollers, the power promptly went out, preventing me from fully enjoying my first cut and style. And this was not the last of my hair dressing disasters.

Once the great snarl shearing had grown out, I went through a period of relative calm with my hair. I kept the same simple shoulder-length style through much of junior high school. My mother entertained kept me from suffering from hair boredom with elaborate braiding methods she had learned at a nearby renaissance festival. But then, sometime during eighth grade, I made an appointment with the hairdresser. I hadn't realized that I'd made the appointment for the same day as an upcoming after-school dance, but the salon was within walking distance from school, so I saw no problem with keeping the appointment and making it to the dance on time. I have somehow blocked out what exactly transpired in the salon that day, but I do remember the look of horror on my friend Holly's face upon my arrival at the dance. "My god! I thought you'd gone bald!" she cried.

I never did quite grow out my hair again. During my sophomore year of high school, I hitched a ride with a friend to a city nearby and proceeded to get a haircut and color the likes of which no one in my rural county had seen before. It seems pretty tame now, what with the 80's all over and done with, but I was working a dual-color, asymmetrical with one side red and bobbed and the other crew cut length and black with shaved-in designs. When my friend returned to the salon to pick me up, she took one look, scowled at me, and left the mall before I could get out of the chair.

During the remainder of my high school years, I simply resigned myself to the fact that any bad hairdo could be fixed and decided to test that theory by getting a completely different style each month. I remember being required to state my hair color on a form of some sort and writing "multi." The customers at the grocery store where I worked as a cashier were constantly giving me the business about my hair, asking what was wrong with it and whether I had actually paid the hairdresser. When I left the grocery trade for a post at the local library, my manager, perhaps confused by my shaved head with the tiny ponytail sprouting from the top, asked "Why are you leaving us? Is it because your religion forbids the use of scanners?"

I took daily abuse for my cutting edge style, but I kept clipping and coloring away, feeling it was my duty to mix things up a bit. I even found inspiration in my childhood experience and took to rubbing my hands through my hair to get that now-fashionable (but not at my school) Robert Smith look. On one particular morning, I had been asked no less than 10 times whether I had forgotten to comb my hair--before first period! As I was settling into my chair in that first class of the day, I voiced my frustration to my friend Sue. "The next person who asks me if I forgot to comb my hair this morning, I'm gonna scream at the top of my lungs in their face," I vowed.

On cue, my keyboarding teacher asked, "Jan, did you forget to comb your hair this morning?" What could I do but scream? The classroom went dead silent. My teacher was shaken, but tried to regain control of the situation. "Well, did you forget to comb your hair?" she stammered. I had already screamed, and I wasn't about to let her insult pass with twenty-odd classmates as witnesses. I looked around for inspiration and my gaze fell upon the stapler in my hand. "Shut up, or I will staple your mouth closed," I advised her. She grew pale and said nothing. Except for Sue's raucous laughter, the class remained silent for the remainder of the period. That's the blessing and the curse of a wild hairdo--at times it can drive you quite mad, but occasionally you can work that craziness.

After spending high school doing everything imaginable to my hair, I started thinking about growing it out a bit during my freshman year in college. A friend asked me to his senior prom, and that only inspired me further. If I got started right away, I could have a cute chin-length bob with a then-fashionable perm by the time prom night rolled around. So I grew and grew my hair, fighting the monthly urge to whack it all off and start over again. A few weeks before prom, I headed into a salon at the mall, ready for my perm. Everything seemed to be going well until the hairdresser started removing the rods. She looked alarmed and said, "Just a minute, I want to have someone else look at this." She brought over another hairdresser who rolled out a length of my hair and began to pull on it. My hair stretched out like some sort of nuclear waste tainted Chrissy doll. I was forced to have it trimmed back to the one remaining inch of healthy hair, and to suffer flashbacks to my childhood shearing incidents. Needless to say, no one was surprised to see me with a near crew cut at the prom.

During the remainder of my college years, I became strangely protective of my hair. I grew it out and permed it into the style Charles likes to refer to as my "Sandra Dee" look. It stayed that way until after graduation. As I was preparing to enter the workforce, I was debating what sort of look might be more appropriate. My hairdresser confessed that she had visions of some sort of updated shag that she thought was perfect for me, but I was hesitant. I described a more conservative style. "Oh," she said, "so you're going for a Murphy Brown look?" I had a quick flash of myself with a solid helmet of newscaster hair and my old daring came rushing back. "Go for the shag!" I declared.

You would think I'd have learned my lesson by now. But, just a few months ago, I found myself submitting to a makeover on live television. Believe me, dragging your butt to a television studio at 6:00 in the morning only to have your looks dissected while you sit there with wet hair and no make-up isn't all it's cracked up to be! Who wants to hear about how the makeup artist "created" your features? Or how you're in the fashion doldrums? But sometimes that's the price you pay for a head-turning hairdo and a couple of your allotted 15 minutes of fame.

Will I ever make peace with my hair? Not likely. But I've grown to enjoy the shear excitement of the search for the next good ‘do. Sure, there's always the fear that the unkindest cut is lurking around the corner, but that just keeps things interesting.

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