Saturday, October 27, 2007

This simply must be done


So here's the hair story for tonight:


Last November, I went into my bathroom armed only with a dull hair scissors and a box of brown hairdye. Medium Chestnut Brown it was called. I went in with a scraggly blond-with-overgrown roots all one length bob and came out with a deep auburn new hairdo: heavy straight bangs, my home attempt for a Bettie Page kind of bangs, and two little spoinky pig tails. I decided then and there to never be a frump random 30-something Mom-lookin person again, and me and my good friend Amanda worked on little "Paint" program drawings of how I envisioned my cool new self to be. When I thought she would maybe laugh at me, she said in all honesty, "This is how I think of you anyways". I was touched and encouraged to be on the outside the way that I felt on the inside. Strange, eclectic, colorful, artistic, kooky, different, perhaps more Icelandic than Michigan suburbanite, more Martian than Earthling, and within a couple of months, Christmas and little purchases here and there found me with a small pile of new fun socks, a new pair of green buckle shoes, ridiculously great red sunglasses from Target, and bright blue hair that as you all know, made me feel as happy as a lark. The kids were so proud of me and my visionary bravado and they just adored my blue hair, and super importantly, Steve just ADORED my new level of confidence and comfort in my own skin, so to speak. Mama's bright blue hair was just a real positive family event, thats all I remember. I love our family.

I got it in my head that growing this new blue hair long was the next quest. For those of you who have been following this blog for some time, you will recall the pictures I posted of fairies and models with long blue locks. I was convinced that at age 32, it was now or never as far as getting very long hair. I felt like if I grew it long now, I could still be that girl with long blue hair, versus growing it long at say, age 50, and risking looking like some kind of embarrassing midlife crisis person. Ridiculous premise, but I felt so sure that this time, my long hair attempt would not fail, and I would not give up, as it had so many other times, because this time I had the cool color and the darling bangs and the attitude and the wardrobe. I was gonna be a living anime poster, yessiree.

Well, I had to bleach out all the blue in a show of faith that I was job hunting, and that along with some toehr stuff did alot of damage in the meantime. Then the blonde looked brassy and whore-ish and so I colored it brown. Then the brown was too muddy and so I threw in some highlights. Then summer sun and chlorine and constant ponytail holders had gotten my hair in such a state that in my heart, I was beginning to really realize that by the time it was "long", it was gonna look like a haystack. Women's smooth, soft bobbed haircuts began to entice me. I remembered the nice fresh feeling of having newly cut hair, and even started liking the gross and gorrilla-transvesite beast-looking Posh Spice's hair, just because her choppy angled bob looked so much like my old haircuts I used to have. But I thought surely I would regret it, surely I haven't grown this head of hair for a year just to whack it all off, right? Remember my post about loving braids? I gotta have long braids for when I'm a midwife, right? For when I am living on a houseboat in Oregon, right? Long rainbow colored braids were gonna be my thang.


Then Steve called me from work one day and talked to me about getting my hair cut short again. I was so surprised! I wanted to and yet whoa, would I be all sad? I wasn't sure. It seems that the 3 other major times in my life that I grew my hair past my shoulders (age 19, age 25, age 29) I freaked out, cut it short, and then pined away for how long it "almost was".


BUT

I really look pretty bad. I CERTAINLY do not look how I feel inside anymore. I look weird and I don't want to have this dry yellow and brown ponytail anymore. I want soft hair, and I want to look like, I dunno, like I have a look, not just some dangling rug lopped on top of my head.

SO I am gonna cut my hair. Right now, at 10:40 pm in th bathroom, with our friends over and everything. If it turns out bad then by this Friday I can afford to get it fixed, but with my intense distrust of terrible haircutters ignoring me, I need to do what I need to do first, at home, with the dullish hair scissors that are hidden so high away from the kids.

Wish me luck!

2 comments:

Trish said...

Okay, where are the pictures?

Rixa said...

I am such a hair wimp. I did chop off my long locks (getting close to my waist) in 9th grade, up to a short bob, and that's about the most drastic thing I've ever done. (Sounds nicer than it really was, since my long hair had left-over half grown out perms. Uhg)