HerKind.com

“She loosed her hair and let down her tresses, which covered the whole of her body like a veil…”

Lenny Kravitz tells a story about how a year after his mom died, he took an entire year off and went to Barbados with his daughter and father to grieve and heal and just be. The first order of business when he got back, he said, was to cut off his dread locks. He said that the last ten years of his life—good and bad—were invested in his hair. The moment his friend began cutting, he started to hyperventilate with the palpable loss of a part of his past, most of which was okay with him, he was done with it.

I did the same thing today. I did it quite unceremoniously and if anything, it is the lack of ceremony about it that is bothering me now.

I never thought I’d be a girl who would cry over a haircut. And on the surface of it I am not. After all, I have had short hair most of my life. I only started growing it after mom died. It became a freedom thing, and then it became a writing thing. When I began writing my book about my dead sister I vowed to never cut my hair (trims not included) until it was written. Why? I’m not sure, but if I had to approximate my best guess to my own motivation it would be that when my hair is long, I can kinda see the resemblance everyone loves to talk about. Especially when braided, though I have no living memory of her with woven hair. And I guess I figured the more I conjure her to life, the truer the writing will be. Or something.

Today, I cut three inches off my hair, a substantial amount. Enough to feel like I broke the vow since the book is nowhere near finished. My hair was half way down my back, completely covered my breasts in the front (a visual I was becoming fond of), and it was longer than I ever knew I could grow it. My last trim was in April, so my hair had the energy of a long, hard spring / summer of sadness, loneliness, fear, joy and forward movement inside its strands.

Ever since I wrote in these pages about being the blond baby my mother spent years praying for, the undue and misdirected attention I garnered because of that accidental infamy, the problems it has unnecessarily caused in my family, and the way it dictated the me I became instead of the me I am—ever since then, I have been itching to do something with my hair. A clean break. I thought about cutting it completely off, or becoming brunette, or cutting it completely off and becoming brunette. Something, anything to signify a shift out of the past, a change of focus. An initiation of sorts some new, uncharted pathways. Also, suddenly all former boyfriends, paramours, lovers and crushes were interested in or carrying on with brunettes. The hair dilemma was started to talk on mythic proportions. And maybe I was looking for a quick fix.

So, on a whim, and not wanting to spend a lot of money, I took myself off to Great Clips hair cutters over on Davie Street, sat in the chair and said, "a trim please." Well, if you know my hair, you know it is so thick that it needs to be completely saturated to be wet enough to cut, and having no prior discounted haircut experience, I did not know that they do not even shampoo your hair for $14, just sprits it with a spray bottle. So the hair ended up being cut, not trimmed due to the fact that some was wet, some was dry, further complicated by the fact that I had worn it in braids the day before so it was kinkier than usual and the very nice lady had to keep cutting to get any semblance of evenness. 

(I might add at this point that my mother was once a hairdresser and I felt slightly like I was sitting for her while the very nice lady sprayed strands of hair and cut them, knowing that later I would look at the wonky cut and say, why didn’t I spend some money on my hair??)

Sure enough, I walked out with too short, semi-wet hair and came home to wash and style and cry.

In actual fact, it is still quite long, but for purposes of my unprecedented hair trauma I might just as well have shaved my head bald! In the end, it’s as Marcel Proust says, "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." And I guess this applies to hair too. I’ll have to find another way of launching myself into newness, ‘cause obviously I still have way too much invested in my mane of golden locks!

November 2001