I feel bad about my hair
“Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.”
― Nora Ephron
My hair and I finally came to an understanding when I was in high school and I got it cut in a short shag. Until my senior year, I’d had years of bad hair days, starting when I was 1 and had not a single hair on my head.
Maybe I was cute when I was four (not a lot of pictures exist, so there is no telling), but when I was five, the daughter of my mother’s hairdresser — in beauty school at the time— practiced her perming skills on me. My otherwise short, tow-headed sleek ‘do’ was now a nest of curls more suitable for a bluebird than me.
When I did choose my own style — despite every reason to the contrary — I chose a long Patty Duke flipped-up style that drew my chin down to my chest and widened the gap in my teeth. This was the same year I got acne and breasts and everything about me seemed to grow so awkwardly that I wanted to keep myself hidden in my room until the ugly duckling gave way to the promised beautiful swan.
Only that part didn’t happen either. Oh I grew out of the Patty Duke and cut my hair shorter and managed to be if not a beautiful swan, then an ok looking duck.
But my hair.
My sister had long locks in high school (she was dubbed the pretty one and I the baby) and I longed for those. But some hair just isn’t gonna go there, and when mine tried, the ends split and dried out and frayed until when I finally got the nerve to ask that same daughter of the hairdresser — who by now was doing my hair regularly — to give me that short shag. My mother said then, and often, “You always look better with your hair on the short side.”
She’s raised me on bobby-pin curls done up Saturday nights for Sunday church, so I knew nothing of curlers. My sister must have had some instruction — maybe from Molly, her friend’s sister who was in beauty school — because she rolled her hair with giant curlers, frosted it just so, and it came out looking beautiful, her hair draping across her shoulders like a soft blanket.
But I always felt bad about my hair.
That shag, though, took me through the 70s until Dorothy Hamill came along and showed us how to think about hair as geometry. Her hair molded to her every move, forming exact angles no matter how many “Hamill camels” she performed. This, somehow, was a language I thought my hair might understand. I wanted my hair to move like that. I still remember the day I sat bravely in a new Raleigh stylist’s chair at Crabtree and asked for it. From that day forward, my hair and I began a new relationship with each other, me and my Hamill cut— though I would later abandon it from time to time, depending on Princess Diana’s chosen style.
Then came the 80s, and talk about geometric hair! I got another perm and my new curls formed the perfect triangle. (Every time I see “Sleepless in Seattle” I’m reminded of this.) But now I had not only my head to care for but my daughter’s, so the hair, eventually, had to go. (Hers was so much prettier and thicker than mine.) So I cut mine short, where it stayed, and for the next 30 years, I felt good and bad about my hair, depending on my stylist.
I found myself been feeling bad again, after staying with the same stylist for too many years, and in the past year I left him. It was truly like a divorce, leaving the man who’d given me massages on my head and neck for at least 10 years, who’d styled my hair for my children’s weddings — letting go of that, and of our friendship, was hard.
But from the first time in her chair, I knew Carla would make me feel better, if not great, about my hair again.
And she did, painting it the color my sister said I was born with. And using her own geometric skills to shape my locks so no matter how many weeks passed, the shape stayed the same and in place. I didn’t feel bad about my hair for the first time in a very long time.
And then, well, chemo happened.
When I entered the Rex Cancer Center doors for my first appointment, a beautiful, tan and bald woman passed by me, her colorful skirts swaying as she walked. Her head, shiny as a bowling ball, glowed as she walked. No way could I sport that look. My head, though fully covered with hair at the time, was covered not in shine beneath my hair, but eczema. Not a good look on its surface, I could well imagine.
We met with our chemo educator a week later, and she looked at my hair and said: “You’ve got a really cute cut.” As in: too bad! And then went on the explain that if I kept my hair, I’d be the first in history. The drugs I’m taking target all the healthy, growing cells in my body as well as the bad, so the healthy, growing hair follicles are the first — at least the most noticeable — to go.
When Carla heard my diagnosis, we both cried. Then she trimmed my hair and said she’d be taking care of me for the next nine months, whether I had hair or not.
A few days after my second treatment, my husband, who had never even met any of the stylists who’ve cared for my hair in almost 38 years of marriage, drove with me to Carla’s, sitting on her bench as she gave me a buzz cut. (She’d cut it in a perky pixie only a week before, to prepare me. At the same time, she styled my wig so well my husband couldn’t tell I was wearing it for 20 minutes.)
Carla took her time, sliding her shears through my head until I said stop. I’d not seen my head so bald in my life, and to say it was hard doesn’t cover it.
A friend who had breast cancer years ago had given me bandanas to hide my head, and I tied one in a cute bow and went to supper with friends. The next day, we packed up for a week at the beach, and all seemed right.
Until the next day, when in the shower, my hair came out in sheets.
Long gone was the short shag and the Hamill and the wedge and all the other “dos” I’d sported in all these years of having “the best hair in the family,” so my mother said. But there it was.
My sister came over, wanting, she said, to see my wig. I warned her about what my balding head would look like as I changed from the bandana to the wig, and she held me and cried with me, hard. It was the first of many kindnesses she’d give me during that time.
I have never had long, luxurious locks, but they were my locks, no matter how often I’d felt bad about them. Ever the crybaby, I deserved a moment or two to grieve them. And my sister made space for that.
I hated for my children to see me this way. I prayed that my 15-month-old grandson Henry would know me by my eyes and not my hair. The next morning, I was up early, as I am every day during this kidnapping, and he greeted me with bright eyes and a smile. And all was right.
I’m getting used to it. My husband says he can see my eyes, brighter than they were before. I honestly don’t know why. Because I am tired, and sometime sad, though showering is quick and getting dressed for the day is far easier than it was a month ago.
As for the Nora Ephron quote at the top of this story: I’m not the victim in my story, nor am I the heroine. (those are my docs, and God) I am, in fact, myself, and I just happened to have been taken aside from my life for a little while while my kidnappers — my care team — whom I am growing to love as hostages do, make me well. The victim, we all hope and pray, is actually the cancer, and that with each sometimes grueling treatment, it is fading, fading so that in a year’s time, it will be the dimmest memory for us all. Most especially for the tips of my hair.
+++
If you are facing a cancer diagnosis that promises hair loss, think about these tips:
Take pictures of your hair as you love it.
Shop for a wig while you still have hair, so those fitting you can see how you wear it.
Wigs can be expensive and are not necessarily covered by insurance. Some cancer centers (like Rex) offer cancer patients a free wig, hat or hair covering. Take advantage of that.
Have your own stylist trim it to suit you(make sure they are trained in cutting wigs, as of course the wig hair will not grow back)
Your scalp will signal you when it’s time. It will become sensitive, even a bit painful, as your hair is about to go.
Allow yourself to grieve. You’ve had your hair a long time.
Don’t shield your family from the reality of what you’ll look like for the next almost year.
Consider your beauty. It’s way more than hair deep.
coming around again
small babies. husband who worked all the time and came home a bit rattled from the traffic outside and all the baby noises inside and i was just tired, all the time and if i am honest just a little bit angry that i wasn't writing and i wanted to throw something at somebody, maybe even a pie like Meryl eventually did but that would not have been ladylike. and i didn't happen to make pies very often in those days.
and though i knew my husband was not carrying on like Jack Nicholson (he was just trying to pay the bills), he had been a pretty good reporter like Carl Bernstein and that fact was one of the reasons i had fallen in love with him in the first place. and we were both writers as Carl and Nora Ephron were and so there was that, too. i just identified with Meryl's and just watching the film somehow i knew deep where it matters that there would be a good day or two ahead of me even though i was spending more than a few of my current days crying on the back porch because the baby inside the house wouldn't stop. crying. either of us.
i know more than anything that i wanted to write a story like that one day, one that would be funny and sad at the same time and real, about the things that go on every day but you are too busy to miss their meaning.
like what makes you go out and cry on the back porch on a sweltering Georgia afternoon feeling quite sorry for yourself and homesick and then looking up at the wisteria growing over the top of porch then thinking you really need to get the hedge clippers out and trim it, not knowing one thing about wisteria except that it seemed to be wrapping your house with itself. and that thought leads to the fact that you didn't really like the house nor the 18 percent interest rate or the fact that it faced North Decatur Road and that leads to realizing that Scarlett O'Hara's mill was on N Decatur Rd and you are sure Scarlett didn't have to deal with all the traffic that you do just walking to the mailbox. and then you have to laugh at the absurdity of that picture, Scarlett walking to your mailbox in her pretty white taffeta with the green trim and asking the kind gentlemen in the buggy blocking your driveway to please step aside because she is late to lunch at Tara and so you pick yourself up and go back into the house and take the crying baby into your lap and rock yourselves into feeling better.
Nora Ephron had done that, taken a magnifying glass to her own life, poking around long enough to find the funny in the middle of all the pain.
then there was When Harry Met Sally, then Sleepless in Seattle, You've Got Mail — which I didn't love at first but can't stop watching whenever it comes on tv now — and i thought every single time, well, she has done it again, that Nora, lived right inside my head and put what i was thinking down on paper. who is brave enough to do that? go inside a woman's head and reveal what she is making those around her think she thinks, and then say, too, what she is really thinking?
certainly not me. i was too busy raising my kids and trying to write sweet about it at the same time and hiding what i was really feeling from pretty much everybody around.
because that was more ladylike than the alternative.
in the days since Nora died i have read a dozen articles about her, how she basically was the funniest friend you'd ever want to have, and that she was a real champion for women writers trying to make a go of it. to write the funny, sad truth about life.
there is that line in Sleepless in Seattle, when Rosie O'Donnell's character is talking to Meg Ryan and she says: you don't want to be in love, you want to be in love in a movie. don't we all? with the nice lighting and just the right soundtrack and the overstuffed sofas and the bookcases to the ceiling and the apartment that looks out over the streets of NYC but you don't hear any of the noise? who doesn't want to be in love like that, even at my age?
and the scene where Meg is standing on the side of the road watching at Tom Hanks greets his real life wife (who is not his wife in film) and Meg later says to Rosie that she looked like somebody they would want to be friends with. not that i ever could have been but watching her movies made me feel like Nora was someone i wish i had as a friend. because she was writing so much of what i was feeling, that somehow in the middle of a sweltering friday afternoon in the middle of the summer you could still believe you could fall the tiniest bit in love with your husband again even though the baby wouldn't stop crying and there were toys all over the floor.
maybe that's just me. but i know when i was that young mother, and as i got a little older, too, i remembered because Nora's words told me, how it felt to know something important about someone just by the way their hand felt holding yours. because of her i imagined how it would feel to every now and then to be that... in love in a movie. or to have someone describe you to someone else like Tom Hanks described his movie wife in Sleepless. just watching her peel an apple was enough for him.
truth be known, i have more than once daydreamed that once i finally finish my novel that dear Nora would read it and want to make a movie starring Meryl and Sissy Spacek and Holly Hunter with Tom Hanks as the aging love interest because i can so see them in it.
ok, so that's a pretty big daydream. besides, Tom and Meryl will likely be in a retirement home by the time i finish it.
but every single time i watch Julie & Julia and Julie falls exhausted on her bed after she punches the answering machine button and call after call is from agents and publishers all because she has a BLOG, well, i cry every time, buckets, because that is my
dream right there in living color.
never mind that i have absolutely nothing in common with Nora. raised in a jewish family in nyc and the daughter of screenwriters, she could not have lived a more different life than this little eastern nc episcopalian. but knowing that just shows me that when you get right down to it, we are all pretty much the same, at least on the inside.
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.