From hair to eternity: My life is a story of a thousand cuts
Surely I am not the only woman to have struggled with my own hair for years
"To have curls, or not to have curls: that is the question."
Oh, yes, yes, in my dreams, a hundred times yes. I've coaxed, cajoled, threatened and almost set my hair on fire to get my straight spaghetti-like hair to hold a curl.
I'm not taking don't for an answer. I'm a Dippity Do kind of person.
I've been trying to teach my follicles new tricks my whole life. Slight exaggeration: it's only been 59 years.
Until I was three, my mother shaped big soft ringlets around my teeny, cute face, and they held. My ringlets once made Shirley Temple's moptop run home to her mama crying!
When I was three, Mum decided it was time to get my hair chopped. Yes, the first cut is the deepest.
I refer to this event as magical. Imagine tiny evil hair fairies who run their tiny evil fairy hands through my curls vanquishing them to a curly-haired planet in the hair galaxy.
A trick on the tresses
Those sprites messed with my brain by playing a trick on my tresses.
Let's call hair what it is: dead cell matter!
Hair is not some vain superficial preoccupation. OK, maybe it is a vain superficial preoccupation, but I am not riding the vain train by myself. Over a lifetime, the average woman spends 14,000 hours tending their locks.
Let me tease you with some facts about this protein called keratin: 95 per cent of our skin is covered in hair. Hair grows almost everywhere except for the palms of hands, soles of feet, lips and eyelids.
On average we have 100,000 to 150,000 strands of hair, we lose around 50-150 strands of hair a day, and a single hair has a lifespan of about five years.
Women and men's hair are identical in structure, and hair is the most important forensic evidence.
On average, men spend five months of their lives shaving. I've read that women spend 40 to 55 minutes a day on their locks. (What? Can this be true?)
Think about the hair words you know, like perm, braid, tease, shave, scrunch, chop, curl, part, cut, frost, tease, fringe, kiss curl, straighten, razor, rag roll, dye, bangs, feather, layer, flip, gel, brush, mousse, highlight, condition, style and brush (and brush and brush our hair).
Over our lifetime, we spend over one and a half years trying to get our hair to do what we want. In my case, that's 7.34 years of curling exclusively with another 5.25 years trying to train my four cowlicks to stay down.
I keep telling them no one will get hurt.
They don't listen.
They were like mosquitos. But not mosquitos
In 1973, when I was a teenager, something happened involving curl-creating doodads that still gives me goosebumps.
We were moving house, and I stored boxes above a garage. I wanted to go to the baseball field that night. Not for the game, but for the boys. If they glanced up at the bleachers, I wanted my hair to be fabulously curly!
I'd packed my curlers in storage. To the garage I go. Up and over the ladder, I'm looking for the box. Les voila, a scribbled, "hair stuff," on a box.
I bend down to start to open the flaps, and … "SCREECH, SHRIEK, SWEAR WORDS, SHRIEK, MORE SWEAR WORDS!"
Thirty baby mice came flying out of the box at my face. It was like being swarmed by mosquitos. That is, if mosquitos were big and hairy. I tried to keep them away from my face and not to get tangled in my hair. I freaked.
Flight or fight. In my case, pee my pants or jump to the ground. I don't know what happened next. I do remember walking my poker straight hair to the ball field that night in Pakenham, Ont. I always wonder, were those mice in pink foam curlers?
The struggle is real. Out out, damn straight hair. I try all my tricks to lasso my four cowlicks into surrender.
I wet and tape them, bobby pin and barrette them, stick them down with hair gel. Trying to subdue my cowlicks is like playing Whack-A-Mole. One settles and another one springs up.
Guess what? Cowlicks on straight haired people are more noticeable. Thank you, Sherlock Combs! The old story about cutting the curl out of baby hair is fake news. Curls start in the follicle, at the root, so cutting baby hair will not make it grow straight hair.
I've had it. I am sick and tired, and I'm not going to take straight hair and cowlicks anymore. It's over. I refuse to play this game. You gotta go! No, really, cowlicks, "Buzz off!"
What else could I do but get a buzzcut.
It felt so powerful. I went home, stared in the mirror at my quarter-inch-long hair, "I warned you about acting up. But you wouldn't listen! Are you happy now?"
I don't care what my hair says anymore. I'm ecstatic with my decision. It seems like my problems have vanished into, well, thin hair.
Anyone need hot rollers, a curling iron or a couple of cowlicks?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
