Friday, September 26, 2014

My Hair

It's Friday! This was originally posted on August 28, 2008.  By the way, I changed my hair style three times in 2013. That might be a record high for me !

Until next time, enjoy!
                               
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Ex-husband #2, while he was married to me, felt that it was his mission in life to continue Mother’s legacy regarding my hair and its imperfections. In the dozen years we were together, I had more than that amount of different hairstyles and not all were my choice. It was never curly or wavy enough nor was it ever long enough to suit his tastes.

One of his favorite choices made me look like a poodle! It was extremely curly on top and straight on the sides. Yuck! One time I tried one of those zigzag hair bands. I showed up to pick him up and in front of his colleagues he said, “What did you do to your hair?” Absolutely nothing, thank you. You could tell by his inflection that I hadn't towed the line as was expected of me.

In my experience with the dynamics of a relationship, I've noticed that when a relationship is doing badly, one will withhold what the other so desperately wants. In our case, one of the many things he wanted me to have (the list was endless) was long hair and I just kept cutting it. Ear length, chin length, whatever, as soon as it started growing I had it chopped off. When we separated, I started growing my hair and by the time our divorce was final it had grown out nicely.Yes, he did comment on it. By the way, his favorite hairstyles were the ones that required hours of effort on my part, electric curlers every morning, hair products and a body wave every three months.

Now for reasons that are unclear to me, I've longed to be a redhead for years. I had several hair stylists tell me that I had the skin coloring and eyes to carry it off. Well… for my 43rd birthday, I had my hair color professionally changed. I loved it! I spent 11 years as a redhead and most of the time, folks thought it was my natural color. Even my GYN thought so and she should have known!

All good things come to an end. In the fall of 2007, I started reading articles about how “gray” is the new color for woman in their fifties. I decided I’d go to my natural hair color, whatever that was, with a lot of natural gray as highlights. So I went to my favorite hair stylist of the moment. By the way, in the four years that I've lived in Northampton, I have gone through six hair guru’s before I found my present one! I was never happy with the coloring job, or the hair cut or whatever. Because I never do anything half-way, I decided that I didn't want to go through the process of growing out the color. So she used a number 4 electric razor blade on my hair. Yep, not quite a cue ball, but close.

The majority of folks in Northampton and at Smith College liked it. They marveled at what a nice shaped head I have. That was a big gamble I took, because really who knows what kind of shaped head one has until you have no hair to hide under any longer. The ones who didn't like my new look either said so, or just ignored the fact that there were babies out there that had more hair than I did.

Ironic isn't it? Fifty-two years after my mother shaved my head, I go do it. The difference this time was that it was my choice. It wasn't forced onto me by someone else's desire for perfection.