Hair

Hair—a good many of us have (or have had) at least some on top of our heads.   Mine has always been straight.  I don’t mean “kind of” straight—I mean wet spaghetti straight.  (Maybe wet angel hair pasta would be more accurate—those strands are pretty fine.)  I mean looks-like-you-laid-a-piece-of-silk-on-your-head straight.  Yeah, you may think you’d like that, but believe me—it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.  Marsha Brady hair isn’t always in style.  When some girls get hot, their hair curls into cute little ringlets around their face—you’ve seen that, right?  Well not this hair.  It gets even straighter and the little pieces around my face just stick to the sweat in the most unattractive manner imaginable.  When I see a woman with full hair that comes up off her head and fluffs around before falling gently down around her shoulders, I am amazed.  How does she make her hair do that? Like a gaggle of shy girls at a party, all the little pieces of my fine hair crowd together and take up as little room on my pate as they possibly can. 

Always the optimist, I have made attempts over the years to correct the problem.  Let’s see—there was the perm.  "Disaster" is the word that comes to mind.  It’s thrilling at first to see all the curls (if you can overlook the inevitable perm-induced breakage), but as soon as it starts to grow out---the look becomes exceedingly strange.  Stick straight hair on top, leading into crazy curls down below.  Yeah, that’s a real natural look!  Actually, now that I’m thinking about it, I think it was a style for about 10 minutes, 30 years ago.  They may have called it a stacked perm….anyway—it wasn’t for me.  Then there was the “product” route.  There was mousse, root boost, gel, and wax.  OK—let’s go back to the angel hair pasta comparison, except now let’s pour some olive oil over it! The extra weight of the products just weighed my hair down into separate greasy looking pieces.   Not the look I was going for.  Then there were the mechanical methods.  Pull the top of the hair up and let it pouf a little and slap a barrette in to hold it in place.  Hey—not bad—there’s actually some height up there!  Oh, but imagine the disappointment of noticing when passing a mirror that the barrette had slid right down the shafts of that fine hair and was now dangling somewhere at the back of the neck.  And the pouf had become, of course, a malshapen mess.  Again—not the look I had hoped for.   Layers have also been tried.  The hair in the shorter layers is so light that it can be curled and made somewhat fluffy.  That works as long as there is not even one molecule of moisture in the air.   Moisture (or) humidity + my hair = flatness that rivals the great plains or a pancake (or maybe a crepe—before it’s rolled up, of course). 

So where are we today?  Surprisingly, I think I’ve come to accept and even like my hair to some degree.  When you hear that thinning hair is a problem for some women as they age, I’m just glad to have some—straight, curly, whatever.  Even though it was the target of so many rebellious acts, it's stuck by me through (sorry, I have to do it) thick and "thin," so the least I can do is be thankful for it.