Toujours Tresses

In third grade I placed in the school-wide poetry contest with a haiku about how annoying hair is.

Long and difficult
Curly, messy and knotted
Hair makes me angry

Little has changed. As I tumble toward dilapidation, there is really only one thing that bothers me about aging, and that is my hair. But mine is a long history of hirsute frustration. At the time of my lyrical triumph, my locks were long and worn in pigtails that felt loose halfway through the day, so I would tighten them, ruin their look, and forever irritate my mother. A couple of years later, my mother hacked off my hair because she had short hair that always looked great. Can't say the same was true for me, but she cut it anyway.

For years I had issues with the waves, the mild frizz, the cowlicks. It never lay smoothly and calmly, and back in the dark ages of my youth, we didn't even have product. In fact, blow dryers as we know them today did not creep into the market until junior high, when we all had overloaded red guns that screeched enormous, early morning rackets on a daily basis. Naturally, there were always the girls who had the perfect Farrah Fawcett wings in their hair – as well as the requisite handle combs in the back pockets of their jeans -- but mine, alas, just curled and never behaved properly. Plus, I kept losing the comb.

By high school, hairstyles got completely out of control (think John Hughes films). The huge, rectangular beehives required a lot of equipment and hairspray and I never had the forbearance and aptitude to achieve them. So I gave up -- I cut all my hair off and left it that way until I was nearly 40. Over those two decades I would change it up a bit -- shave the back, shave the front, cutting it shorter and shorter until I looked like an exhausted, unmotivated cross-dresser. But once in brisk middle age, I figured I faced my last opportunity to grow it out. That's right, I took my destiny into my hands and peered at my hair after 20 years. And you know what I found? More curls. More frizz. More despondency.

So what did I do? I colored it, to make it all the more frizzy and dry. Having grown up with a perfectly coiffed mother who never had to watch her weight and whose hair always worked, I matured under the mistaken impression that my hair would gracefully turn gray as hers did – in an elegant and classy way (Why I have no idea as we share virtually no physical characteristics). Alas no. My hair didn’t turn gray, it simply lost all its highlights, got darker (as I got old and pale) and abandoned its luster. In other words, it got ugly. Really ugly.

So here I am, frizzy, colored and curly in midlife. The highlights that start out as subtle shadings quickly turn fluorescent and showy. Is this how I pictured aging -- pondering potentially life-threatening Brazilian relaxers and shaving my head? Not exactly, as relaxers weren’t well developed in my youth and I don’t think Sinead O’Connor produced her perfectly smooth cranium until I was in college.

I am going to try to skip the coloring for a few months and see what happens, but it will likely just lead to horror and fear (from both me and those around me). Then, in all probability, I will get fed up and hack it off again. But since I have a daughter with perfectly behaving hair that dries by itself into a stylish, graduated bob, I am apt to hear unending commentary from her as she embarks on adolescence. (And I can only imagine the fashion and makeup reviews I shall receive as well).

The question is, now that I have lived half my life, how do I see the future? Do I see myself as a lovely white-haired old lady, or will I simply be another wrinkled hag with a burnt-orange shag? I shudder as I admit, the latter is looking far more likely.