By Susan Anspach • Illustration by Matt Mignanelli
My hair is medium-length, very straight, and dark blond. I’m told it’s good hair, by people always a little surprised to realize it. If they comment on it out loud, their voices give them away, with a telltale lift. You have good hair? I.e., that is an unexpected fact about you.
This is because I do not take care of my hair. I do not have the resources or patience to take care of it, though I could scare up the first if I had more of the second.
Sometimes I remember that I am a 30-year-old woman and that, with rare exception, 30-year-old women take care of their hair. I’ll experience a burst of shame and renewed commitment driven by shame, which ultimately only makes things much worse. If you want red hair, for example, you cannot color your hair red and be done with it. You must maintain the decision to have colored it. There are consequences to the choices we make for our hair, and in my case those consequences are a series of unfortunate photos from the first half of 2007.
Hair is expensive. You can do it yourself, of course, though once again only if you’re willing to do it forever. If not, you’ll end up back at the salon, where they will condemn you for cutting and dying your own hair, if not with words, then with snaky eyes and thin lips. Recently, I tried to lighten my hair with box dye for my birthday. It did not come out great. After an embarrassing two months, I finally paid $200 to switch it back to the color I originally had.
Again: $200 for the color that was already growing out of my head.
That wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was the way my soul seemed to shrivel, drawing smaller and further into my body, the longer I sat there. The stylist spoke to me like a small child who should have known better. On top of the $200, I left him a tip, and in hindsight I’m wondering whether what I underwent there couldn’t be diagnosed as a mild bout of Stockholm syndrome.
For “good” hair, dealing with it has been a struggle my whole life. When I was very young, my parents did battle for me. Until age 3, I had white hair that stuck up all over my head; if you’d plopped me in a field of dandelions I would have vanished into thin air. Eventually it settled down into something they could shape into a bowl cut, though legend has it the hair was so fine, only one woman in all of Northern Virginia could cut it appropriately, allowing it to fall the right away. My parents followed her all over the region, until out of exhaustion they stopped, and you can tell from school pictures the year that they did. I entered kindergarten a relatively presentable 5-year-old, then reappear the next year as a tumbleweed of bad bangs and split ends.
In a cruel twist, my best friend has effortless hair. It is red, flowing, fast-growing, wavy. With it, she can do no wrong. By her own hands, she has cropped it in a pixie cut; she has grown it near to the length of her waist. She has permed her hair, after six months’ work coaxing her stylist to do it. (She’s seen the same one for a decade because, naturally, they get on fabulously.) Afterwards, he took a picture of her for his portfolio.
I, too, have cut my own hair—once, at age 8, with a pair of trembling kitchen shears, held over a walnut-sized wad of bubblegum lodged above my left ear. I stood in my parents’ bathroom for half an hour, weighing my options, which seemed few. It appeared that yes, a part of my hair would be quite short, but that it would probably lie flat and simply blend into the longer bits, which is how I spent the better part of the third grade with a side part to cover my bald patch. (With exacting instructions, I can cut my husband’s hair. He’s in the military and has to wear it quite short—paying $3 for a buzz cut in boot camp is still a rite of passage, even for my husband, whose hair, long before I knew him, had hung to his waist. I think he expected me to be shocked by this, and I was. Three dollars! The women don’t have to pay anything and can slick it back in a bun. The military would do well to hit this a little harder in their promotional materials.)
As a girl, a special treat was a visit to my aunt, who always French-braided my hair. French-braiding requires tugging, and it can hurt, but it’s worth it to have your hair out of your face and look like you ride horses. At home, I begged my mother to French-braid my hair, and never understood why she wouldn’t. I have many times thought my life would be simpler—more equestrian?—if I could wear a French braid every day and, at 30, am still unable to master it. When I got pregnant and found out it was a boy, an unguarded thought that popped into my head was, Thank God I won’t have to do hair.
We’ve made it 14 months without a haircut for my son, an appropriately hairy young child, though a woman I met in an airport once warned me that girl hair is trickier. Her girl hates having her hair done and used to pitch fits while trying to tug it all out, until the mother conceded to styling it into short spikes stuck up all her head, with a bow. To that little girl: Brava, madame. May you someday grow up to rule the world.
Your hair does get nicer when you’re pregnant, which may not be something you realize at the time because the transformation is slow. You do become very much aware of it later, when all the lush extra stuff falls out of your head after you’ve had the baby and you’re in the throes of some breathtaking hormone swings. Disappointingly, people interested in the name and birth weight of your baby want to talk less about this.
Of tamed hair, I have had instances, few but significant. My wedding, for example, and the day after my wedding, when the helmet of applied hairspray wouldn’t come loose in a hot shower. Once, for a magazine story about hair, I interviewed a salon owner who invited me to come in for a treatment, one that was supposed to rejuvenate hair by somehow plugging up the tiny pores that allegedly developed in the strands of anyone not regularly receiving it. It typically ran $300, but for me would be free. (An ethical journalist, by the way, would never accept gifts, but I wasn’t an ethical journalist. I was a 23-year-old writing about hair.) The treatment did make my hair very beautiful, and I was told it would continue to do so, for a mere $2,600 a year, or $300 every six weeks. Indeed, nothing in life is free: not paying for the treatment cost me the worry of forever knowing I have infinite tiny pockets of untreated hair raining in a steady trickle from my head.
Next week, I visit my parents in Manassas. There’s a salon close to their house that charges $30 for a cut I don’t have to blow dry. Products line their walls, but they don’t nag me to buy them. In fact, they don’t say much of anything to me because they don’t speak English, and if there’s a telltale lift—You have good hair?—I can’t detect it in Korean.
I haven’t asked them yet for a French braid, but if any of you know how, I’ll happily trade you the name of the salon—something an ethical journalist would never do.
(December 2014)