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Super Secret Agent Spy

I am a writer. And a doodler. And an eater of Twizzlers. And the mother of MuShu, the wonder puppy. I love long walks on the beach, fast cars, fine din. . .whoops. Wrong website. . ....

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The Long and Short of it

Amy Fagan

Hair is such a strange and powerful thing. . .we grow it, we cut it. We hate it, we love it. We wait years for it to grow in certain places, then spend thousands paying someone to rip it out. We endure hours (some of us) at salons getting plucked, waxed, dyed, cut, trimmed, bleached, hi-lighted, conditioned, sealed, low-lighted, permed, straightened. . .need I go on?

Hair. There are songs about it, poems about it’s bewitching qualities, magazines dedicated to it’s style and care.

Hair.

I don’t think people realize, outside of the tale of Lady Godiva, exactly how powerful hair really is. To both men and women, hair can mean anything and everything – it can affect a relationship, a romance, an attraction (or lack of). People can use it to assume one’s sexuality, one’s station in life, one’s status. If it’s long and flowy, one assumes a certain sexual inclination. If one has a buzz-cut, people assume another. Sport a mullet and they assume you’re poor, don’t have a television and were not informed that the 80’s were over. . .like, 20 years ago.

My current (non)style is a mop of blond, mixed in with my natural dark brown. It’s in the “growing out stage” of what started with a Sharon Stone buzz-off a few years ago and what ended up as a very Keira Knightley a la “Domino” mop top. I’ve been wearing the “Domino” for a while. I’m bored. . .need to change things up. So, it’s a-growing. And all the vitamins in the world won’t make it grow any faster. But I don’t care. Not really. Not anymore.

Certainly, not as much as I used to.

It started when I was about 12. While my mother shopped the Harris Teeter, blissfully unaware, I scooted next door to a place called “Fantastic Sam’s”. ( It was not a “fantastic” place. . .and I never figured out exactly who “Sam” was.)  At my insistence and without parental supervision, I managed to talk one of the ladies into chopping off my Rapunzel length braid into the PAT BENETAR style. I loved Pat Benetar. Her songs were cool and she was so awesomely 80’s!!!

When the deed was done, I trotted right back over to the Harris Teeter and found my mother inspecting the eggs for cracks. I said “Hi mom!” She turned around, looked right through me and turned back to the eggs. A jolt, and she turned around to look at me again. “Amy???”

I will never, ever forget the look on her face – hurt. Her eyes welled up with tears as she tried to recover from the shock of her pretty little girl turning into a totally awesome punk rocker (at least, that’s what *I* thought I looked like). My poor mother. . .she gave birth to three girls and not one of them a ballerina. (I blame my father. Shrug.)

Anyway, being the good sport that she was, she managed to smile through the painful sight and made sure to purchase a little pot of “Dippity Do” with which to style my mangled mane. I was thrilled! I was high!

I was stupid.

See, the thing is, back then, while some parents were forward thinking enough to let their 12 year olds shave their legs, have pierced ears and wear make-up, I was not allowed to do *any* of those things. Throw a chest flatter than a chalk board into the mix and I was in for an ugly, ugly ride.

My “I’m SO Pat Benetar” fantasy came crashing to the ground the first time this little snot-nosed shit from down the street looked at me (knowing perfectly well who I was) and asked “Ewww. What ARE you? A boy or a girl?” After I kicked the crap out of him, I asked him the same thing. . .

Ummm. . .O.K. That last part isn’t true. It just sounded good. What I DID do was go home and cry to my mother. I did NOT look like a boy, I looked like PAT BENETAR!!!

Of course, I look at the pictures now and realize. . .I never looked like Pat Benetar. I looked like a twelve year old BOY who’d gotten his hair cut at FANTASTIC-FKNG-SAM’S. God. I was delusional even then. 

Thankfully, the short hair / gender confusion finally gave me enough leverage to get some other things I wanted. . .pierced ears and smooth legs. Thank God for the little things.

Because of that episode, I spent the remainder of my teenage years cutting MY OWN hair and cutting very little of it. I wore it in a chestnut curtain that fell to my bra strap and hid my friends while they were cheating off of my test papers. I was lovely. I finally got mahbewbs, too. After that, no one was confused as to whether or not I was a girl. It was obvious that I was ALL GIRL.

In my early twenties, I started experimenting with color. It started with high lights, then the color red. Then black. Then brown again. I felt sexy and powerful to be in control of such drastic changes. It was tons of fun, but I wasn’t quite able to muster the courage to get a REAL hair cut. I was always hissing “Keep it at the bra strap! Keep it at the bra strap!”

The man I married (and later divorced) loved it, too. He’d wind his fingers through it, play with it, brush it, pull on it. . .and because of it, would one night in our future, scream at me and lock me in the V-berth of our sailboat because I’d finally dared to cut it off to my shoulders. Because of my hair (or lack of), I was locked up, quivering and scared to death in the castle. . .but there was no prince to save me and I didn’t have enough hair left to twist into a rope to save myself (or hang myself). So, I spent the night wondering if I was going to have to break out in the morning and wondering how I was going to save myself. (By MARRYING him, of course! AhhhhhAhhhhh. . .stupid girl. Silly girl.)

After that episode, I behaved. I grew my hair out and went back to expressing my desire for change through color and left the length alone.

Fast forward a handful of years, to when *I* was the one wielding the power. . .to when the tables were turned and I was angry. In what felt like the greatest act of defiance I have ever been party to, I punctuated my desire for a divorce by whacking eight inches off of my brown hair and creating for myself a blond, asymmetrical bob of the sort Posh Spice sports around these days. My hair (or lack of) gave me the strength and bravery I needed in order to make changes that should’ve happened long before the cut. 

That act exorcised demons of hair issues that have plagued me for a lifetime. These days, I’m the kind of woman who will jump into her stylist’s chair (Jade Young at Elysium Salon, Charleston, SC. . .giggle) and say “Do whatever you want.”  And for the record – my current, darling of a husband, loves my hair all short and mopish. He says I remind him of someone named “Joey Heatherton.” (I don’t know who she is either. You’ll have to ask someone. . .older. Ha ha ha.)

When I think of what we deal with in regards to our hair (or lack of), I can’t help but think of my third-grade “best friend”, Elizabeth Hatfield. She was very soft-spoken and very kind. I was jealous of her (but happy for her) that she had a piano and took lessons twice a week. But because of her hair (or lack of), she just. . .disappeared.

She had alopecia, a condition that made her head look like an uncared for baby-doll. It was awful for her. It wasn’t physically painful, and she didn’t talk about it much except to very matter-of-factly tell me what it was. It got so bad, that she started wearing a wig to school. Can you imagine? Being in the third grade and having to wear an itchy-ass wig?

Well, if you can imagine that, imagine how you felt when as you sat in the lunch room and some mean little person (Lebby Something.) snuck up behind you and jerked your wig right off of your head, said “eww” and dropped it to the floor. An entire lunch room of third graders, laughed at you while your hair sat on the floor. Fabulous, yes? In reliving this moment, I can’t recall another in which I was so painfully mortified.

Elizabeth didn’t come to school the next day, or the next. My mother told me that her family was moving. And that was that. That was the power of hair. . .or lack of it.

We are all so vulnerable, it seems, when it comes to our hair. I know that when faced with the tiniest possibility of a cancer diagnosis, the first thing that pops into my head are the damn HAIR questions. Screw the living or dying thing. . .what’s going to happen to MY HAIR? And it’s really so silly. Because, as my grandma Jean said when chemo took HER hair (and she refused to wear a wig) “Oh, fuh gawd’s say-yuk, it’s just hay-yah, it’ll grow back, girls!”

And it did grow back. As beautiful as ever, it grew back.

And it always does. That’s the power of hair. Do what you want to it: bleach it, cut it, curl it, rat it, comb it, destroy it, have it fall out because you’re radiated/chemo-ed to oblivion. . .it will grow back. It will grow back. It will survive and renew so you can do allllll that stuff to it all over again.

(Maybe just not as *quickly* as you want it to. . .xoxo)