Hair: Something Different

This postsecret reminded me of an essay I wrote last year.






I hacked off my hair with Barbie scissors. They were meant to cut paper, so it took a few snips before the clump of hair from the back of my head fell to the floor. I hid the hair at the bottom of the garbage can, pulled the remaining hair back into a ponytail to cover the damage, and went downstairs to eat dinner.

This was the latest debacle in a series of hair woes. The unruly, curly mass of hair that sprouted from my head was the bane of my existence, eating hair brushes and snapping their plastic skeletons in half. It sheered combs of their tines without mercy. It was a malignant, seething life, and I was just an attachment providing it with protein.

After being born bald, I had morphed into a Chia Pet. The hair sprang up and out. When it grew long enough, my mother braided it. When more of it grew, she braided it into pigtails. And when I had too much hair for that, in the months before my First Communion, I trapped it in a ponytail.

For my First Communion, my mother had taken me to get my hair straightened. I emerged from the salon triumphant, admiring myself in store windows and flinging my head to feel the hair flow. When I woke up on the morning of the event, the hair was a ball of wavy frizz. My mother’s attempts to straighten it before Mass were futile. I watched in the bathroom mirror. Her hands flitted around my head, patting the hair down as she reminded me to keep my head firm against the pulls of the hot iron. When she finished, the frizz was just as large. In the few moments I had alone before church, I cried on my bed and wrenched the poof of frizz in frustration. During Mass, I sat in a pew in the front of the church staring at Christ nailed to the cross, thinking about what a luxurious head of hair he had.

It was a life-size, wooden statue, frozen mid-sacrifice, that hung behind the altar. Christ’s head was bowed, his eyes searching the sky. The blood dribbling down his face from the crown of thorns stopped before his eyebrows and welled up in the creases of his wrinkled forehead. His feet were crossed, a single spike driven through both of them; his palms, too, were fixed with nails, the fingers curling slightly around them. But despite his obvious distress, his pain, and his emaciation, his hair remained immaculate, unmatted by blood.

Jesus was virtuous, white, and straight haired. And as a good Catholic girl, he was my ideal. The statue floated behind the altar as a reminder. Hair was the only of Christ’s three qualities the church had not addressed. I had reconciled myself to the fact that I was a sinner. I could receive forgiveness for that. Being white had never been of particular interest to me; the priest had said that souls have no color. But if I was going to go 0 for 2, was it too much to ask that I have shiny, straight hair?

My mother and I had a weekly ritual to subdue the beast. I would have been happy to leave the hair as a single, gravity-defying dredlock and avoid the process, but she had other ideas. Every Sunday night, after church, she sat me down in the bathtub and untangled the hair. She moved around my scalp, methodically yanking apart tangles, section by section; each tug felt like she was pulling it out by the roots. My father made up excuses to leave and avoid the screams that suffused the entire house. He would remark that the car sure could use a wash or remember that a library book needed returning before making an exit.

It was on an afternoon just before the ritual, almost a year after the First Communion disaster, when I took matters into my own hands and cut out a hideous tangle. My neighbor, Hannah, had tried to French braid my hair at a sleepover the night before. By the time she had pulled her hands away, a third of the hair in the middle of my head had conspired to bind together. Putting my hand to it, I could already feel the tug of my mother’s hands, could hear the sound of hair tearing.

When I got home the next morning, the mutant braid hidden in a bun, all I could think of was the impending pain. But until I saw the scissors, I did not know what I was going to do. It was a moment of clarity: the hair would resist being pulled apart, it would hurt, and the obvious solution was to sever it from my body.

When my mother came across the missing patch of hair that evening, she paused. “What happened?” she gasped.

“What? What’s wrong?”

“Your hair’s been breaking off in the back. Almost a third of it is gone! Must be the scrunchies.”

The ponytails that I then used to strangle the beast broke off hairs. It was a reasonable assumption on her part that they were to blame. She did not suspect that my hate of the hair was so powerful as to intentionally destroy it.

I longed for the control that my straight-haired friends seemed to take for granted. They were oblivious to the tortures I endured because of the hair. “It doesn’t get all limp and stringy when it’s wet!” or “It’s just so much more interesting than my hair,” they said. Living with the hair was interesting in the way that living in a cage with a silverback gorilla is interesting. One is always waiting for an ugly end.

I did not have to wait long for it. There was a gruesome resolution, but I was the aggressor. I always had been. The hair was inanimate, a victim of my frustration. It was silent and without intent. My obsession was what had a voice, what had chipped away at my grasp of reality. I had not seen that it was grotesque, to cut off a third of the hair with blunt scissors. But acts of desperation are always ugly. The hair suffered so that I could know that.

My perception of beauty had been tied entirely to hair and my interactions with hair tied to pain. I had amputated the hair partly to save myself from the pain, but also because it felt like carving out the ugliness. I finally had control. But too much hair was gone, and what remained had to be cut short. I came to church the next week with an afro. The hair was back down to its early state, strands only able to curl twice before ending.

I sat in the first pew and tried to stare down Jesus, but he kept his eyes stubbornly skyward. Defeated, I slouched against the hard wood. And for the first time in years, I listened to the homily. The priest paced back and forth in the aisle, waving his hands and evoking the Bible. He said something about welcoming neighbors.

In the end, the hair was not conquered; it grew back and resumed its old ways. It still snapped and spit out the skeletons of brushes. It still tangled. But in the five years the hair took to return, we began to coexist. I could go for whole days without thinking about hair. And set loose from the scrunchies’ stranglehold, the curls exploded in all directions. We were released.