Losing It

Somewhere I have a photograph of my father's mother. She was a redhead, an imposing woman almost six feet tall, with hair that went down past her knees. In the picture I have, she is standing in front of a mirror, brushing it. I don't envy her the task: when I first saw the photograph, I thought she had on a veil that rippled and flowed over both sides of her body. Brushing that lot must have taken her ages every day.

The story is that my grandmother's parents met over hair. Her father was a Civil War veteran and short on cash. Possessing a good, thick head of red hair, he decided to sell it and make some money, so he went into a pharmacy and approached the young woman at the counter -- my great grandmother. I don't know if he ended up getting shorn on that occasion, but by all accounts, the meeting must have gone pretty well.

Everyone in my family has thick hair. If you've seen Hagrid in the Harry Potter movies, then you have a pretty good idea what I'm talking about. Both of my parents had great, thick manes, and my sisters and I were cursed with bushy, unruly hair in an age when straight, thin hair was in fashion. It was also an age before hair straighteners could be purchased by regular people, and we sometimes took turns ironing each other's hair -- and ruining it, too -- on the ironing board. It looked awful. It never stayed straight, either.

At some point, I made peace with my hair and stopped getting it cut short and periodically thinned. I let it grow.

And boy, does it grow.

Ten years ago, a friend told me about the charity Locks of Love. The good people at Locks of Love supply needy children who suffer from hair loss with wigs, either free, or at very low cost. She commented that with my thick, fast-growing hair, I could supply a good quantity of hair. I remembered my great grandparents and their felicitous hair meeting, and decided to give it a go.

For the past ten years, I have grown out my hair and periodically harvested it. I've sent quite a few ponytails and braids to Locks of Love in that time, but this Saturday, I really sent them a whopper. I did it in style, too: I invited the town to come and watch me get a haircut -- for a price. And I donated the money to another worthy charity, Action Aid. The hair went to Locks of Love, and I honestly don't know when I've been happier to get rid of anything in all my life. I have no idea how my grandmother could stand having hair down to her knees; I only know that since Saturday I've been shaking my head about and crying "Free at last! Free at last!"

Here are the photographs. I live in a small town, and believe it or not, this made front page of the local newspaper:

I don't know whether you can see it or not, but I am clapping.

"I bet this is a sad day for you!" the photographer said. (Au contraire!) Some people seemed to believe that I wanted hair that length; that I was growing my hair because I liked the look of it. You'd think all the whining I've been doing might have convinced them otherwise, but no.

Once the hair was off my head, I was struck by what a creepy thing it was -- like a living entity. For the past couple of years, I've been dragging this thing around with me, gardening, hiking, sleeping, swimming. Swimming! I cannot wait to go swimming!


"You're doing a very brave thing, my dear," several people commented, and I was touched by this, but also mystified. Offering to have my head cut off in public -- now that would have been brave. Getting my hair cut off in public was merely a little weird, and it was also very much a win/win deal: I got to be the center of attention for a couple of hours, I sent £305 to a good cause, and my hair gets a permanent holiday in Florida, home of Locks of Love. And now I get to blog about it.

I'm working on my next ponytail even as I write this.

Blue Hair

My daughter has blue hair. I blame myself.

She was born a brunette, in Wales. From day one, she had a full, thick head of dark hair that made the other mothers on the ward exclaim in amazement. For some reason, almost all the other babies were as bald as eagles; the only other babies born with hair were either Indian or Pakistani. "How come yours has all that hair?" one mother asked me. "That's rare, isn't it?" All I could do was shrug. "I'm American," I told her, and she gave me a look that said Well, that explains it.

When she was four months old, my daughter's hair began to change color. One day I looked at her and got the shock of my life: her hair seemed to be turning grey. Grey hair at four months! I asked her pediatrician about this and he laughed. "Can't you tell? She's a blonde. Her hair color is changing, that's all." Looking closely, I saw that he was right. I have brown hair; my husband's hair used to be black. His father was a blonde and so were most of the members of my family, but they weren't with us to explain to people who inquired "Where does that blonde hair come from?" I never got up the courage to joke about the milkman, but I was often tempted.

When our daughter was nine months old, we moved back to Japan, by which time her hair was completely blonde. One of the things I learned to say upon arriving back was recessive trait -- kakusei iden in Japanese. Whenever a conversation started about my daughter's blonde hair, I trotted out kakusei iden and hoped that would explain it. I'm not sure whether anyone believed me, but I felt I'd done my bit. I can't tell you how many times I heard strangers remarking on my daughter's hair and mine and how different we were from each other. Few people realized I would understand.

People make a big fuss over blondes. I ought to know: I'm the only brunette child in a family of blondes. Just look at your beautiful blonde daughters! people would exclaim to my mother. I knew from her frozen smile that she was aware of the subtext I was getting: Brunettes aren't exciting.

If I'd had my way, though, I'd have had black hair. Hair the color of a crow's wing, coal black, India ink. Brown is blah, and blondes may have more fun, but black hair always seemed to me to be the epitome of style and crispness, a whole rainbow of colors in one. So on that fateful day when my daughter was five and asked me what color of hair I preferred, she caught me off guard. Stupidly I did not realize that what she asked me was the child's equivalent of Does my butt look big in these trousers? I blew it.

"Mommy," she began, "which do you want, blonde hair or black hair?" I was cooking dinner and absorbed in what I was doing, and I didn't stop to think about her underlying question. Do you love me the way I am, or do you want me to look like everyone else? "Personally, I'd like black," I said, testing the soup. She ran crying from the room.

I tried to make it up to her. I told her how beautiful her hair was, how good it looked on her. How I'd grown up the odd one out in my family, how I'd always wished my hair was a different color, and wasn't that silly? No dice. Everyone else in her class had black hair, and I'd just confirmed my own preference.

For the past ten-plus years, my daughter has been longing to dye her hair. Not black, but blue. The other day she went into the bathroom and did this. When she came out, her hair was blue all right, but not a pretty blue. It was more the blue of a crayon that has spent a lot of time rattling around in the box with its fellow crayons. A rather dirty, dingy blue. I could weep.

She says she's thrilled. She swears that the only reason she has blue hair is because she wanted to see what it would look like.

I blame myself.