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Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow
I was born with a full head of hair, thanks to my Italian father’s side of the family. Every one of his seven older sisters had what could only be described as horse’s hair and I was cursed and blessed to inherit it. Before I was even one year old, my mother was able to work my curls into an elaborate bouffant that wasn’t suitable for any baby. But it was the 1970s, after all. Need I say more? My mother grew away from that bouffant as my hair grew longer. She decided that braids were a hairstyle with more staying power.
Every school picture until the 7th grade displayed the two thick braids that I wore on either side of my head every day. In my 1st grade school picture the braids were looped back up to my head, loosely fashioned in what could only be considered a Princess Leia sort of way. That was a popular hairstyle for me that year. It made many appearances at church and family functions that required dressing up. Since I was six years old, I didn’t realize the potential this hairstyle had for ridicule, but thankfully it was retired by the time I reached the 2nd grade. After that, it was strictly the two long braids, and every once in a while one single braid that ran down the length of my back. Each morning was a battle as my mother worked the brush through my tangled curls to make those braids.
By the time I was 12 years old, my preteen self felt I was too old to wear such childish things as braids. And that’s when I discovered that my hair wasn’t like any of my friends’. While Tiffni, Heather and Kellie all used Aqua Net hairspray to help their teased out bangs reach new heights, I was fighting a losing battle for my own newly acquired bangs not to curl the wrong way. My hair clearly had a mind of its own and countless tubs of Dippity Do hair gel weren’t going to change that.
By high school, my inability to manage my hair or maintain an acceptable hairstyle earned myself the status of a social pariah. As Jennifer, Amanda and all of their friends were modeling their short, shiny bob haircuts in the hallways, I was left standing by my locker, just trying to make my own sad attempt at a bob lay flat, all the while wishing I could shave all of my hair off. I acquired nicknames like “Fro Girl”, “Mushroom Head”, and probably the most memorable for me, “Peppermint Patty”. After all of these years, that is the nickname that, while I still don’t understand why it was given to me, I remember exactly when I got it.
I was in the 9th grade and as a new freshman; I was already feeling insecure about so much more than my hair. The school was bigger, the kids were cooler, and I was just wondering how I was going to survive, let alone fit in.
I was walking across campus with my friends, Diana and Delena, when we had to walk through a group of upperclassmen. Usually this wasn’t an issue. We knew our place as freshmen and as long as we kept to ourselves, no one bothered us. Unfortunately, a rather bullish senior named Pat was in this group of upperclassmen and apparently he was feeling a little puckish that day.
While up until then, I’d never had to deal with Pat, I knew of him. He was loud, he was a weight lifter, he wore a bandana over what I still believe was a bald head, and it was rumored that he was on steroids. He was a bully in every sense of the word. You were better off just keeping out of his line of vision, but my helmet of frizzy hair must have been a beacon of light for him because at that moment, he set his sights on me.
When he walked into our path, it was like he was a giant, looming over us, when in all actuality he was probably only 5’5”.
“Where do you think you’re going Peppermint Patty?” he demanded with his hands on his hips. I realized then that he was looking directly at me and not at my friends. It dawned on me that this muscle bound creep was calling me a very unfeminine “Peanuts” character and I had no idea why. The only reason I could think of was because of my hair. At that stage in my life, anything wrong that happened to me was because of my hair.
I never answered his question and simply turned around and walked in the same direction I had come from, determined to find an alternate route rather than be subjected to more abuse. But I could still hear his voice as I walked away, chanting my new nickname, over and over.
Through the rest of my high school years I developed a deep hatred for that “Peanuts” character and would ridicule her any chance that I could. I believed that if she hadn’t had the same hairstyle as me, maybe Pat would’ve left me alone. Maybe I would’ve been spared that taunting nickname. But in the years after high school, I overcame my vendetta against a girl who might have had the same hair misfortune that I had suffered from. And maybe Charles Schultz just didn’t know how to deal with her hair, either.
After high school, thanks to various fashion and beauty sources, I made some incredible discoveries. Always believing that I was destined to forever have hair that rivaled “Saturday Night Live’s” Rosanne Roseannadanna, it came as a complete shock to me when I read in a fashion magazine that I was in fact not supposed to comb or brush my hair when it was dry because that’s what made it frizz.
“A diffuser? What the heck is a diffuser?” I asked as I watched an old rerun of “Who’s The Boss?” where Alyssa Milano’s character was extolling the virtues of hers as she modeled her own curly hair. After buying my own diffuser attachment for my blow dryer, I realized that I too could look like “Felicity’s” Keri Russell, and I didn’t look half bad. I still hated the unmanageability of those curls, but at least I finally knew how to deal with them.
Then the news came. “You have cancer,” my doctor told me as I stared at the X-rays of my humerus without blinking. I was 21 years old and there was a tumor growing in my freaking funny bone. I heard the words, “surgery,” “bone graft,” “transplant,” and finally “chemotherapy.” Chemotherapy? Underneath the fear of the journey I was about to take, there was a sort of sick pleasure at the thought of losing all of my hair. This was it. It was what I had been waiting for. It was my chance to start over.
I remember the day I decided it was time to shave it all off. It was May in the desolate Texas panhandle and my cosmetologist friend, Tanya and I were eating ice cream at our local Braum’s fast food restaurant because summer was starting and it was the only way to beat the heat. A few weeks earlier, she had already cut my unruly and multicolored mop in a cute boy cut in anticipation of my future hairlessness so I could start to ease into what lay ahead for me and my locks. Never having my hair that short, except for at birth, I had been apprehensive about the cut at first.
“I’m going to look like a boy!” I moaned, clearly thinking about the various boys I was casually dating at the time and how they would react to my loss of femininity.
“No you won’t, you goof,” Tanya reassured me, “It’s going to be really cute.”
And as much as I didn’t want to admit to it, she was right. The shorter my hair got, the curlier it got, and the closer to my roots, the more of my many dye jobs became noticeable. By the time Tanya was finished, I was a disheveled pixie punk with a head full of blondes and blacks and reds. And I was definitely cute.
A few weeks later, we sat at the crowded Braum’s and the unusual shortness of my hair helped keep me cool against those warm temperatures. I ignored the stares of the small-minded townspeople that didn’t quite approve of the girl with the weird haircut and crazy colors. Little did I know that the same day I would be receiving a haircut that would give me even more air conditioning and stares.
My scalp had been itching uncontrollably for the past few days and even though I was a month into my chemotherapy treatments, I didn’t think that the itch could be a precursor for what was to come. I didn’t know what dying hair follicles felt like. I was a newbie to this whole “cancer thing.” Sometimes I wish I could go back to being that young woman who, in the early stages of her treatment, hadn’t really come to terms with how real this whole thing had become.
I gave my head a good scratch right before I stood up from the table to throw the contents of my tray away when a lock of my hair fell onto the floor. Tanya and I both looked down at it in shock. I had expected my hair to fall out, obviously, but for some reason I thought it would just magically end up on my pillow while I was sleeping. I didn’t think it would randomly fall out wherever I was!
“Um, what the hell?” Tanya whispered, as she stared down at the floor with wide eyes.
“I think,” I began slowly, “My hair just fell out.” I sat back down and continued to stare at it.
“Did you know this was going to happen?” Tanya asked, the surprise still evident in her voice.
“Do you think I would’ve been scratching all of this time if I had known it would make my damn hair fall out?” I frantically whispered back to her, trying not to draw attention to our corner of the restaurant. The last thing I needed was someone I knew witnessing what was going on and the gossip beginning.
“What are you going to do?” Tanya asked, as it became evident that we couldn’t sit there all day, staring at my hair on the floor.
So I did the only thing I could think to do. I reached down and picked up that lone lock of hair and put it on my tray to throw in the garbage bin.
“We have to shave it off,” I told Tanya as we walked out of Braum’s and headed to her car, “I can’t have pieces of my hair just randomly fall out of my head whenever it wants to.” And it was in that moment that I realized that maybe I didn’t want to lose my hair after all. But it was inevitable now.
As we drove to my apartment so Tanya could give me my final haircut for a very long time, I realized that all of that talk I did over the years about shaving my head was exactly that. Just talk. When the opportunity finally presented itself and it wasn’t voluntary, I suddenly wasn’t so adamant about going bald anymore. When I had no other choice, the choice I wanted wasn’t available to me.
I brought the chair into the tiny bathroom of my one bedroom apartment, and I sat down without turning the lights on. There was enough sunlight coming through my bedroom window that we could still see. Besides, this was a funeral. Who has fluorescent lights blazing at a funeral?
“You don’t want to face the mirror?” Tanya asked when she noticed I was sitting with my back to it.
I didn’t answer her question. Instead I clutched the towel around my shoulders and closed my eyes.
“Let’s just get this over with,” I said behind clenched teeth, trying not to reveal any of the fear that was brewing inside of me. It had finally set in that I was going to be bald and I was having a hard time keeping my cool. I remember thinking that I was being punished for the often wild lifestyle I was leading. Or, now that I had finally come to enjoy my life, it was being taken away like some cruel joke because I was never allowed to actually be happy. I remember so many thoughts that were running through my head, but the one thought that was the loudest was that I was going to be bald.
I heard the buzz of Tanya’s hair clippers cut through the silence and suddenly they were the loudest thing I had ever heard. I jumped a little when I felt the vibrating blades make their first pass over my head, easily dislodging the hair from my scalp since it was already dead at the roots. I could feel strands land on my nose and cheeks as she tried to work quickly.
Before I knew it, the buzzing had stopped and the towel she was using to clean my head felt strangely too close to my scalp. I finally opened my eyes and the look on her face read somewhere between pity and fake positivity.
“I think you look really cool,” she said, trying to keep her voice upbeat, “Edgy, even.”
Getting up, I slowly turned around to meet my new reflection. Even in the half-darkness of that tiny bathroom, I could make out everything perfectly. I could see the patches of dark brown stubble that were still caught in the roots. They would eventually fall out, too. I could see exactly how my head was shaped. At the time, I didn’t give much importance to the fact that it was perfectly round and without dents. Looking back on a year without hair, I’m thankful for that little gift.
What I mainly saw was a bald stranger staring back at me. And the terrified look in her wide eyes mirrored the panic I was feeling. Up until that point, the severity of my situation hadn’t really sunk in. I was still working. I was still having a good time with my friends. I was still acting like everything was normal. Not until I was staring at my pale, hairless head did I realize that my life was changing for the worse.
I started to cry then. I cried for the first time since I’d been diagnosed. I cried for my ill-health. I cried for the loss of my normal life. But mainly, I cried for the death of that frizzy mop that I had despised for so many years. Right in that moment, I would have taken it back in any way I could’ve had it.
I look back on that year spent under hats, scarves, and itchy wigs and I realize that the girl who had wished to shave her head out of frustration with her hair was naïve and misguided. When I was in the hospital for a treatment and someone mistakenly thought my bald head meant I was a boy, I would’ve given anything for that boy haircut Tanya had given me. When the menopausal hot flashes brought on by chemotherapy caused me to stick my head in the freezer in the middle of winter, I longed for the puffball of frizz that had driven me insane during the summers.
When chemotherapy was over and I was finally in remission, that first feeling of stubble popped up on my scalp a month later and it was enough to make me weep for joy. I celebrated my 23rd birthday with hair. Not enough hair to be seen without a hat, but hair, nonetheless. As it kept growing and those unruly curls started to resurface, thicker this time, I welcomed them back in appreciation, even if I did look like a brunette Justin Timberlake.
Ten years later, there are days that I still curse my hair when it is particularly humid outside and it grows to be twice its normal size. When my hair product bill rivals that of my grocery bill, I don’t get angry. I accept it and am grateful that I have hair to style. When having it straightened for the rare special occasion means spending an arm and a leg at a salon and sitting in a chair for 2 hours, I thank my ancestors for blessing me with hair that a lot of women envy and very few actually have. I’ve embraced my nicknames of “Fro Girl” (said with fondness by friends this time around) or the oh-so-creative “Hair”. Through many hair products and styling methods I’ve finally mastered a way to make myself look more Bohemian Hippie than Crazy Bag Lady. But never again will anyone hear me say that I want to shave my head. Been there. Done that. And hope to never go back there again.