A Life in Tresses (Part I)
Personal Memoir
My mother cut my hair for the first dozen years of my life. I cringe when I look at family photographs from the ‘70s and ‘80s, even though I understand the practical and economic reasons behind our awful haircuts. She never had formal training, other than knowing how to use a pair of scissors. She despised hair stylists due to her own horrible experiences with an unruly cowlick. After her hair was trimmed wet, it stuck out in weird directions as it dried. At some point, before I was born, she gave up and determined to hack her own hair—a hideous hairdo with bangs cut straight across her forehead with the rest chopped off just below her ears, an inferior facsimile of the style relegated to Vulcans on Star Trek. Even as a child, I understood how unattractive she looked. Was it indifference or ignorance? I will never know. My mother was oblivious to a lot of things, including anything related to fashion.
My hair reflected her lack of aesthetic. For most of my pre-pubescent years, I sported bangs with ends that hovered between my chin and shoulders. I grew out the bangs during sixth grade, thereby taking ownership of my hair. Ribbon barrettes were all the rage. I spent hours weaving thin satin polyester ribbons around cheap metal barrettes—purchased at the CVS next to my elementary school—in an attempt to conform to the fashion trends of my peers. The ends of the ribbon were knotted and cut long to trail through the hair. Some girls added beads to their ribbon tails, but I never did. I coordinated the colored ribbons on my barrettes with my various outfits. In the fall of 1980, I began junior high with my long straight dirty-blond hair parted down the middle and held back with homemade barrettes, clipped at a precise distance behind my ears. My hair continued to grow, and by the end of seventh grade, it reached my waist for the first time.
Junior high and the advent of puberty is an awkward time for pre-teens. As a shy and scrawny introvert, my confinement in junior high was compounded by a clueless mother, an unpro-nounceable last name, and being, in general, an outsider. I grew up in an era when your social network was influenced by your religious affiliation. For the most part, my classmates were Jewish or Catholic. I was Methodist. No one at my school belonged to my congregation. After school, everyone else either attended Hebrew school or Catechism classes with someone they knew, with few exceptions. We had no close family in Worcester. Many of my Catholic peers came from large extended families and shared classes with cousins or relations by marriage. My mother was divorced—a social taboo amongst our conservative Catholic and Jewish neighbors. We didn’t participate in sports, although my brother played on a local little league team for a few years. Our social life revolved around our church.
I was teased for my differences and kept at arm’s length. One particular bully, a boy who I had known from elementary school, made my life miserable. I avoided him for the majority of junior high because our core classes were different. But not always.
Most days I walked home with a few other kids who lived around my subdivision.
“Hey ‘Eggy!” Chris said, his voice thundering from behind as he caught up to us on his bicycle.
On our route, we traversed along an isolated section of Chandler Street, where trees towered over the road, held back by a grey stone retaining wall. I ignored the insult and continued to make my way along the worn dirt path. The blow came fast and hard to the back of my head. He shouted more abuse as I escaped to the other side of the street and down the wooded lane to my house.
“He does it because he likes you,” the adults said, but I knew they were wrong.
I gained some agency over my anxiety-ridden life as I drove off the cliff of puberty. My hair became an outward sign of how messed up I was, not that anyone paid attention. Anxiety manifests itself in many ways. Two of the symptoms of Trichotillomania are hair-pulling and nail biting. I gnawed my fingernails throughout elementary school and advanced to the next level in junior high. Although I never received an official diagnosis, in retrospect, I believe that I suffered from a mild case of the disease.
Mr. Rawson wrote a list of French verbs on the board with a piece of chalk. I nibbled on a fingernail as I stared at the words while trying to comprehend their conjugations. My focus shifted back to the assigned textbook exercises and I picked up my pencil. While I leaned my elbow on the desk and propped my head against my left hand, I wiggled my fingers through strands of hair, stopped at the crown, and plucked out a single strand. The bulbous root squished a little as I tapped it with my fingertip. The bell rang, rousing the class from its stupor. We rose to pack our bags and then moved onto the next period. I dropped the strand on the floor as I left.
I created a quarter-sized bald patch before I quelled my compulsion. Anxiety forced me to stop. Creative hair-styling disguised the area during the months it took my hair to grow back. In the beginning, grass-like tufts sprouted on my crown, sticking up like Alfalfa’s cowlick in The Little Rascals, but over time, the strands lengthened and disappeared into the rest of my tresses.
In the fall of 1982, I wanted wispy fringe bangs, the latest fashion style. My hormone-addled, adolescent brain decided that I was competent enough to tackle the job myself. Behind my closed bedroom door, I stood before the dark walnut mirrored dresser that I had inherited from Grandma Sandwen and studied my reflection. I combed out a thin portion of hair along my front hairline, then grasped the scissors and cut an inch wide chunk between my eyes. It looked good, but it wasn’t short enough. The blades crunched as I trimmed the section shorter. Still not satisfied, more hair drifted down onto the dresser’s surface. The pile of clippings increased. I put the scissors down and gaped in horror at the jagged remnants of my widow’s peak in the mirror. There would be no way to cover or disguise this colossal error in judgement. I survived months of embarrassment, and by my ninth grade promotion in June, the coveted bangs were mine at last. Yet, my mistake lives on, immortalized in my junior high yearbook in a pathetic attempt to camouflage the shorter stumps with a longer lock.
(To be continued)
