Thoughts On Hair

Not a nothing.

Curly hair. Wavy hair. Straight hair. Short. Long. Crazy colors. Chic colors. Natural colors. Real hair and fake. My fascination with hair in general and reflections about my own hair arrived at a new place when cancer entered my life. My hair is the part of me that I came to accept as beautiful, even while critical of the rest of myself.

But my hair wasn’t always my redeeming glory. I was a gawky kid with bad hair. My mother thought spending money on children’s haircuts was a waste when you could pay once for a cheap pair of shears, do the deed at home, and spend haircut money on a bottle of bourbon. I had some horrible haircuts. She had some horrible hangovers.

“She tied you to a kitchen chair/
She broke your throne / and she cut your hair /
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah.”[1]

I was overcome the first time I heard k.d. lang sing that sorrowful phrase. It wasn’t the nuanced references; much bigger than a series of poetic lines, those lyrics spoke directly to me. Kitchen chair. Haircuts. Anguish. All of it had happened to me!

One day, when I was about eight or so, I sat looking at myself in the tri-fold mirror on the table next to my bed. That mirror was very old, with flowers etched across the panel tops and discoloration seeping under the glass around the rusted hinges. It was once the focal point of my grandmother’s dressing table. In that mirror, used by a long line of women in the family, I was considering my ugliness.

I wanted to be beautiful like the new girl in my class, Erin Finn. Beautiful girls got nice things, like lots of Barbies and lovely clothes and a mother who likes you because you are pretty.

Erin had bangs, and since I wanted to be her, I wanted bangs too. With my blunt-ended craft scissors, I cut. But the line was all wonky. I cut again, not realizing that the cowlick swirl just above my right brow was fighting every snip. Shorter on this side, then even up the other. Again, shorter in another attempt to even it up. Still no success.

I stared in frustration at a fringe of hair now far too short to be proper bangs. With the logic of a child, I gave up and cut off the remaining botched hair at the scalp, hoping nobody would notice. Mother noticed. That did not go well for me.

As I became a teenager, I was surprised that my once towhead-turned-dishwater-blonde hair began transforming into a lovely shade of chestnut brown with an extra helping of red undertones suggestive of my predominant Irish heritage. My hair was thick and luscious. I grew it long by the time the Summer of Love came around, though I was still too young to join the Flower Power tribe.

Since my hair did not dry straight very well, I took to sleeping on brush rollers every night. This created a cascade of curls that bounced on my shoulders and down my back. I started being complimented on my hair. Well, that was novel! My hope was that my peers would be so distracted by my hair that they would not focus on the fact that I was the biggest, boobiest, brainiest girl in the class.

A couple of years and a baby later, my infant daughter kept catching my hair in her tiny little fists. Waist-length hair was also more work than I could manage. It was time for a change. I set off for the salon, my hair woven into one long braid that draped over the back of the chair as I sat down. The length of my hair intimidated the stylist.

“Are you sure you want to do this? We could just trim it up a bit. Take some length off. Give you a chance to think about it some more.”

I asked for a rubber band and scissors. I positioned both just below the nape of my neck and without hesitation, I lopped off the braid. I deposited the lot of it into a brown paper sack and said, “Now let’s get some style happening here, please.”

My daughter’s father was not pleased with the haircut. I had anticipated this.

He said, “What the hell have you done? You look like shit. I can’t be seen with you like that.”

I handed him the brown sack and said, “If you married me for my hair, here it is.”

That marriage ended when I was only 21. I was liberated to be more spontaneous and to have some fun. One night a girlfriend and I took turns at “frosting” each other’s hair. A lot of box wine enhanced our levity and helped us endure the pain of using a crochet hook to pull chunks of thick hair through tiny little holes in a very tight rubber cap. My friend’s hair shined with glints of gold peeking through her dark black tresses. I, on the other hand, was now a blonde.  Too much wine; too much hair through the holes in the cap.

Initially, I embraced being blonde. Part of the delight was how it made me feel cheeky and free.

My mother’s reaction was predictable. “It makes you look like a two-bit whore!” That cruelty helped give me the strength to pull my narcissistic mother out of the holes she’d been poking in my soul since my birth. Never again did she get to comment on my hair or my parenting or my life. No contact.

The reality was that, just as I was not a bangs girl, I was also not a blonde. I found a beauty school student to blend in deep browns to ease the look of the regrowth of my natural color.

By my early thirties, my rich ginger chestnut color began fading. Gray hairs were showing up in alarming numbers. In a box at the back of my closet, I found that old paper sack of braided hair I’d once cut off and I took it to the colorist. “There. That’s the color I want. That is my color.” That ginger spiced Goldwell formula remained my trademark for decades.

In my early forties, shortly after realizing that my sexuality crossed more lines than I’d imagined, I got a “spikey-dikey” cut on a whim one day. That short, cropped, gelled, sticking straight up hair looked silly on me. It was a trite lesbian cliché, so I grew my hair back to a length I could pile efficiently on my head held with a fashionable clip while I was busy developing my budding production company in the fast-paced, failure-is-not-an-option world of Silicon Valley.

Shortly after turning sixty, I layered my hair with swaths of deep purple because, well because I could. It seemed daring at the time, a statement of some sort for a female CEO of a video production company catering to senior executives at Fortune 50 companies. I have always tried to be a little bit surprising.

Greg was once my client, then my colleague, then my mentor, then my dearest friend. I regularly stayed with him overnight at the hospital during his cancer treatment. One night he sat up and suddenly said, “You do not need more earnings to maintain your lifestyle until 90. Why are you still working? Let it go. Spend your days loving your beautiful wife and find a way to put your creativity to better use.”

Three months later, shortly after Greg died too soon, I took his advice. As I was sorting through the spoils of the business I’d developed and run for almost 30 years, I realized that I’d happily reached a point where it no longer mattered that my former colleagues, clients, and employees might think me too old and not cool enough for the tech industry that I’d helped usher in. At my bi-weekly root touch-up appointment, I asked my colorist, “So how much of my roots are silver?” She ran her fingers through my hair, parting off sections and examining each carefully. “I’d say all of them.”

I decided to forego my usual touch-up and go for an ombré effect of silver to red to soften the “skunk line” that formed at my part. It was the perfect way to let my naturally burgeoning silver show itself in glorious fashion. Bit by bit I cut my long hair to a shoulder length A-line. What a glorious day it was when that last vestige of dyed hair hit the floor! Now my trademark was stylish, practical, shimmering silver hair.

Cancer treatment provided a new hair adventure. It might have been a bit of a power play — me against the cancer beast — that made me decide to beat chemo at removing my hair.

“A woman who cuts her hair is about to change her life.” — Coco Chanel

I’m pretty sure Coco Chanel did not have in mind what was on my mind, or did she? I located Kurt in a nearby town, a kind, compassionate, and talented man who makes custom wigs for cancer patients using the patient’s own hair.

When I was ready, my wife Jackie and I set off to meet Kurt and to “harvest” my silver tresses. Kurt painstakingly removed my hair at the scalp in small sections. He placed each bundle on boards that had rows of narrow spikes holding the locks secure as he tagged each to reference for later positioning when making my wig. Next, Kurt covered my skull with plastic wrap, and using dozens of pieces of tape to lock in the shape, created a mold of my head. From those puzzle pieces of hair and custom-made cap, Kurt would create what he called a “Mary wig” — my hair perfectly recreated on a wig cap made from the mold of my head.

There is an analogy between this latest hair episode and my stem cell transplant. Hair removed and carefully set aside; stem cells removed, preserved, and frozen. Scalp cleaned up, the last bits of hair shaved into shape; cancer driven from my bone marrow with high dose chemo leaving my immune system naked and vulnerable; my hair refashioned into a “Mary wig” and placed on my head; stem cells thawed and transplanted into my body to refresh my cancer-liberated and completely wiped-out immune system.

What I did not count on but hoped for, is that my skull is wonderfully symmetrical. My buzzed head induced smiles, enthusiasm, and praise from everyone I met.

“Dang girl! You’re lookin’ hot and sassy!”

“Oh, you should have done this years ago! It’s over-the-top gorgeous!”

“I could not have imagined how it could happen, but this haircut makes you look even more powerful.”

That last comment moved me the most. It helped me stop questioning whether everyone was being supportive and kind or if this was really a good look for me.

My wife regularly says, “Find the joy.” I mourned my hair loss when its inevitability became apparent, and on grief’s heels (heals), I found the joy. I handled my hair in my way, in my time, while I still had the energy and capacity for frivolity before the stem cell transplant. There was untold fun to be had with my naked head, with a pink Barbie wig, knit beanies, the ever-so-deceptive silver wig, and wild and imaginative wraps to keep my head warm.

Hair and no hair, life is beautiful and often fun.

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[1] “Hallelujah,” Song by Leonard Cohen

[2] Anton’s Hair Company. Kirkland, WA