Hairvolution

It’s been an insane summer. Late nights down at the state capitol, testifying, waiting, screaming, waiting, marching, waiting, crying. Helping my daughter film a movie on the evenings and weekends. Falling asleep over spreadsheets, getting up four hours later to do it all again. And in the middle, losing my faithful and beloved German Shepherd, who finally gave up her fight with time and slipped away from us. My friends say, you were there, you were the “unruly mob,” you’ve got to write about that. But it’s so raw and yet already over-analyzed and over-debated.  Every day I get emails asking me to “stand with Wendy” by donating money, and every day some Republican or another posts something that again betrays an absolute and carefully crafted ignorance of the issue and the people it affects.

So I’m going to leave all that alone for now, and write about a very quiet and personal revolution. A hair revolution.

You see, most of my life, I’ve had long hair. Growing up in the70s with all those long-haired female movie stars, I decided to stop cutting my hair, and soon it was long enough to sit on, a thick, wavy, hot blonde mass of hair. My mom put it up in tight braids. I took it down again. I rode my horse and let it blow loose in the wind, then cried for an hour as the tangles were brushed out. Oh, it was heavy and sweaty in the summer, caught on my sweaters and coat in the winter, and drove me crazy in every season, but I loved it. I would stand in front of the mirror and see a goddess in my reflection. For a while when I was a teenager I cut it short, but when I met my husband, he begged me to grow it long again, so I did.

Then I moved to Texas in the middle of a terrible heat-wave, and one day I just drove over the Floyd’s barbershop and told the stylist, “cut it all off.” She was a bit tentative, afraid perhaps that I would hate it, but I reassured her that I really wanted it short. Of course my normally unruly hair was particularly wavy, smooth, and gorgeous that day, but I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

When she was done, I looked in the mirror. I knew that I would look weird to myself, that it would take some time to get used to. I hadn’t expected how short hair exposed all of my physical realities, uneven ears, the middle-aged softening of the skin on my jaw and neck. For days, I walked around feeling naked, exposed, vulnerable. When I went to bed at night, I missed the hair curling around my neck and warming me. When I looked in the mirror, a stranger looked back at me. But when I went for a jog, or rode in the convertible, or jumped in the local pool with my kids, I reveled in the freedom. My hair had been so thick and heavy that it gave me headaches. If I parted it on the side it would actually pull my head into a slight tilt. If I left it loose, it shielded my eyes from the world like a veil.

Without it, slowly I stopped thinking about my hair any more.  I stopped buying conditioner and hair bands. I stopped carrying a hair brush in my bag. But something else, something unexpected happened. For the first time in my life, I realized just how important my physical looks had always been to me, and in a strange way, I began to understand men just a little bit better. Without my long hair to camouflage  me, my face just is what it is. And I stopped worrying about it. I didn’t realize it, but the time I spent thinking about how other people perceive my looks dwindled. As did mental comparisons between myself and other women.

Backpacking a few weeks ago with my family, when I was overheated, I just scooped a handful of water  out of the river and dropped it on my head, ran my fingers through my hair, and my primping was done. I had to sunscreen the back of my neck, but otherwise my short hair was completely liberating.

As the weather gets cooler, I am entertaining the thought of growing my hair out again. But if I do, my relationship with this stuff that grows on my head has permanently changed.