The Adventures Of My Hair And My Husband

A long time ago, when I was first married, I had 32 inch long hair. It was light brown , a little reddish with some blond streaks in there. The only thing it wasn't was black.

I liked my hair but it was very thick and heavy.  I could be dragged by my ponytail without it hurting hardly at all. It took forever to dry when you washed it. Forget blow drying it, it took way too long. Mostly I kept it in a braid that started at the top of my head and ran down to the middle of my back. I don't know why I kept growing it. To see where it would go, I guess. My husband said it was a rite of passage in our house to pull my freakishly long hair from places that it shouldn't be. When I was pregnant and my hair went through a phase of thinning as hormones are wont to cause, I would walk through our house and find a wad of my very long hair wrapped around my feet.

Long hair wasn't really stylish yet. I identified myself with my hair. It probably lost me acting work. I wanted it to go away but was too stubborn to do anything about it. So it was sort of a relief to have brain surgery.

They shaved a huge piece of my hair along the right side of my head in the MRI room the day before surgery in preparation of one last look see and to set the "carve here" stickers with dots marking the surgeon's pattern of attack. It looked like a half-ass-ed demented mohawk. I said, "Hey, aren't you going to take off the rest?" The surgeon's p.a. said that a lot of people only wanted part off it removed so they could grow less back. I told him that three feet of hair will take awhile to catch up with so keeping the rest may not be a great idea.

So while he shaved away the rest, I watched years of my thick hair fall to the ground and felt my head get lighter and lighter. I walked around Park Slope with my new shining head with its peculiar ornamentation feeling a little beautiful even, despite the fact that someone was going to mar it permanently the next day. I went out for dinner...possibly my last supper in my mind....with my friends and then, when my husband came over from Sunset Park with our big old station wagon to pick me up, he arrived bald. In solidarity he shaved his lovely thick dark hair too. We got in our boat of a car with our little girl in the back seat, two shining beautiful best friends driving off to get ready for the scary future together, as bald as two cue balls.

Even now, all these years later, when I think of this man doing this for me, I remember what a tremendous selfless act that was, think of all of the trials life has put us through together and survived and how much I love him. How could you not?

Afterward, when the surgery was past and the staples were taken out of the scar that went from the top of my right forehead to behind my ear, I bleached the short growth so that the bright red line didn't pop out as much. It is long again, now unnaturally white. I wish that I could just let it go back to my real color but I am afraid almost a decade after surgery, just what that real color may be. And once again, I am enslaved to my hair, bleaching it whenever the roots show themselves, getting longer and longer until I must stop it from going further. I'd shave it for him, I think. I'd do it for him too. Still. You never know where your hair is going to take you.