For those of you who want political in this post, you’re not getting it. It's freakin' Sunday night, for crissakes. This is memory, a bit of "normal" musing, and a dash of meta. My odd notes before I began this post contained the following: black silk slip, mangler, old maple vanity with two high sides, a round mirror, and drawers with Bakelite circular pull handles. A picture, aged to sepia tones, of my Mother in 1947 with long curly hair. And normal.
When I was around seven or eight, I had a powerful desire to grow long hair. My mother at the age of fifty at that time, an older parent compared to the parents of my classmates, had a stronger need for me to maintain my short pixie cut "do”. She and my dad had a motel business, operated a couple of rentals elsewhere in the small coastal town we lived in, and Mother was also highly active in the community – school board, Soroptimist’s Club, Lion’s Auxiliary, Chamber of Commerce, etc. Long hair on an eight year old girl and the maintenance required (so thought my mom) were too much to contemplate in the midst of an eternally busy daily life.
Every so often, I’d sneak into my parent’s bedroom and dig around in Mother’s lingerie drawer for the magical black half-slip. This slip was a real silk slip; two-sided, it was black on one side and fire engine red on the other (or inside). I’d drape the thing on my head and pretend that it was my long hair. Perched at my mother’s older late forties style Maple vanity, a big round mirror in the middle, slightly higher sides and drawers mounted with amber Bakelite circular pulls, and a low table in between, I’d spend as long as I could with that "hair" on my head. I’d turn this way and that, flip it back, pull it up into a crazy silk wadded black bun in the back, or draw it to the side in a black-haired Veronica Lake sweep, diagonal across my forehead. I’d quietly turn Mother’s mangler on so that I could iron out the folds in the slip when it got too wrinkled. It’s amazing I didn’t start a fire or burn the silk material in the extreme heat of the iron.
In the late summer of that year, '67 or '68, Mother cleaned out her drawers when I was at a friend’s birthday party and the slip went to the local thrift store, along with a bag of other clothing she’d had since the forties and fifties and that she had determined she’d never wear again. An amazing original Pendleton jacket, a pair of wooden open-toed pumps with a raffia flower daisy decoration on top (early "Candies”! My Mother!), and a series of "Butte" knit dress suits also left the house. But the loss of the slip, for a time, for thirty-six odd years, destroyed my dream of long hair.
I think of that tiny loss and how it lingers in my memory, long after other, more painful losses have faded. Much of my yearning for long hair stemmed from the simple fact that it was the mid-to-late sixties and almost all of the girls had long, "hippie-like" hair by the time our second grade and third grade years rolled around, 1967-1968. I think I sought "normalcy", external normalcy, a need to look like others, an urge to fit in. I also know that such a simple desire of a child stemmed from other, less hair-related things – a need, early on, not to do what my mother wanted me to do (a conflict that I struggle with still, though she’s been gone nearly eight years), the need to appear feminine – so powerful for a girl who’s viewed as chubby and a tom-boy and a bit of an outsider. I had a very natural and elemental wish to design my own look. A look that had to be designed around long hair.
But the slip was gone, and I lost the desire to make-believe. I fought with my Mother over hair lengths through the pre-teen and teenage years, but the battles were verbally bitter, and ultimately not worth the shrill haranguing she’d deliver.
I grew my hair out in college a bit – slightly past shoulder length, and then I permed it into a weird "fro". When the perm started to grow out, my hair was so damaged, I simply cut it again to a short length. Mother was right. Hair was too difficult to take care of and those mid-lengths were a pain.
Three daughters were born, from my late twenties and into my early thirties. All three grew up with long hair – I quietly and stubbornly put paid to the fiction that a busy mom could still handle her daughters’ long hair. A silly internal battle ensued and I carried it on for several years. I never once mentioned to my Mother that I was choosing a different hair path or for what reason. Frankly, I don’t think I ever really consciously acknowledged my parental diversion to anyone, even myself. The amusing irony was that when the girls would go to Grandma’s house, she would spend a long time brushing their hair and fixing it up in ribbons, delighted to have granddaughters, delighted to have girls that she could fuss over and dress in charming outfits.
I’ve spent quite a few adult years seeking my own normalcy. Defining "normal" separate from what society views as normal, but scoping my own definition internally as much as I could. Surely, honestly, don’t we all do this? Maybe, maybe not.
I reached the age of forty-four, with one daughter graduating from high school and the youngest from eighth grade, and I started to grow my hair out. By the time I had reached fifty-one, I had nearly three feet of mostly dark hair. In seven years, in my forties, I recognized new attitudes in people and how they reacted to me differently. I have never been someone who’s caught the eye of the opposite sex, much. Sure, I’ve been married twice (and divorced twice), but, who knows? Maybe it was the "chubbiness”. Maybe, as my daughters seem to think, I’m intimidating. But, naw, it was indeed the hair. Men started to look at me differently. Women reacted differently, were more likely to bring up feminine topics of discussion. With longer hair, interestingly, I found that several people over the course of those years assumed I was "natural"– more new age, more "green", more "environmental" than those folks I’d crossed paths with before.
I added things to my own normal in those years – subtle little self things that had little to do with my hair, but that further shaped how I perceived myself to be. I can’t find enough coherency to define those newer layers, but some of them centered on connections with people. For instance, I think I identified more closely with my daughters. I was more comfortable with their femininity, their make-up sessions, their more "girl" behaviors – few of which I engaged in when I was their age. How absurd that simply growing my hair longer would produce that kind of impact on me, but it did.
And then this.
It was folly for me to think I had finally developed a nearly finished, well-crafted new normal for myself. Perhaps it’s presumptuous of me to say that it’s folly for anyone to think that normal is forever, whether it’s an internal normal, or whether you define it as an external measurement. I’m really struggling to express that normal; the normal I’m talking about here isn’t a normal of biblical judgment or a necessarily social alignment. This normal is more a sense of being and reacting, not of definition. It’s a less substantial, emotional guideline to a daily existence that can be chaotic or anxiety producing, or depressing or enlightening. Normal is the barometer in our brains, what we measure ourselves against constantly. Consciously or unconsciously.
Small things, like my Mother’s magical silk half-slip, can lurk in corners of the mind and shape how we react to things, to people, to actions, and to events. Such things can shape how we think people are reacting to us. My own personal meta turns on this rather ingenuous realization – that too often folks say and do shit based on stuff you’re never gonna know about and that they would not be able to explain if they had to. Benefit of a doubt. Rationalization? Yes. True? Yes.
I’ve spent the past eight months cherishing that I still have a life. Forget the hair, it was never really a part of normal for me, not completely. For awhile, hair was delightful. Having long hair gave me sense of chimeric youth, with a dose of a femininity I’ve never been fully invested in. Having no hair at all has had little impact on my sense of self. But. Bald is still not "normal" to me.
Maybe all of normal is a nuance. Maybe it’s a nervous system temperature reading we instinctively take as we proceed through a day. Could be that it’s more or less, depending on how conscious we are of our own actions and thoughts. Normal is not something you can see in a mirror.
Nonetheless, I bought a wig a few days ago.
See you in Vegas!