Until I was eleven, Mother always braided my hair into French braids. French braids start close to the temples and are woven more tightly than a regular braid. I hated them; they caused my eyes to pull back into little slits giving me the appearance of a migraine sufferer in a hurricane.
Small wonder that I loved short hair, dreamed of short hair, coveted short hair. I especially admired my friend Julie’s haircut. It fell in soft waves over her ears and swept back in tender swirls across the nape of her neck. I pulled out all my eleven-year-old stops, begging mom for such a haircut. But her answer was always the same. “No, you are not getting your lovely, long, shiny hair cut, Kathy!” End of discussion.
Mother suffered from migraines. They were a nearly daily part of her life. It pains me to report that when the headaches were really bad, I reveled in a guilty sort of happiness. You see, on those mornings mother would call down to dad, “John, braid Kathy’s hair before school.”
“Don’t worry, dear,” he would call back. “I’ll take care of it.”
Dad’s idea of taking care of it meant wetting his big rough hands and patting down the fly-away wisps of yesterday’s nicely loosened French braids.
Then came picture day at school. I forgot to tell mother the night before, and next morning she had a particularly bad migraine. A month later a packet arrived in the mail. In it was a picture of a smiling eleven-year-old, with scraggly, water-patted-by-dad braids. That did it.
“Get it cut.” yielded mother. “It has to be better than you looking like an abandoned urchin. People must think I am the laziest mother in town.” (Appearances meant much in our small town). She made an appointment for me at Betty Jean’s Beauty shop, where she and my grandmother always had their hair done.
Betty Jean’s shop housed a row of chrome hair dryers that looked like something from a Flash Gordon movie. The smell of harsh chemicals for permanents, jockeyed with perfumed shampoos, fingernail polish and cigarette smoke. In the midst of this cosmetic kingdom was Betty Jean, a tall, raw-boned, brassy blonde with big red hands, yellow teeth, and a laugh not unlike the neighing of a horse. I never saw her without a cigarette in her mouth. It was fascinating to watch how it clung to her lip for dear life as she guffawed her big laugh and gossiped non-stop with her customers.
Mother had instructed me to go straight to Betty Jean’s after school. “Here’s the money for the haircut. I called Betty Jean and told her exactly how you wanted it cut.”
At last, I was going to be like the much envied, Julie — no I would look better than Julie. People would stop in the streets as I passed by; paying silent homage to my dark crown of glory as its tender waves crisply framed my noble eleven-year-old brow. I ran from school to the beauty shop that wonderful day.
Thus the cutting began. I watched with fascination in the mirror as smoke erupted with the fury of a Vesuvius from between Betty Jean’s off-white teeth while she shared the latest town tidbit of gossip to the other customers.
The last snip was snipped. I looked closely at Betty Jean’s art in the mirror. I frowned. It didn’t quite look as I had imagined. Betty Jean grabbed a comb and started combing. Oh, yes that would make it look better.
Ripping the comb through my hair, clenching her cigarette more tightly between her teeth, and squinting through the smoke, she was a woman on a mission. Every available hair was masticated between the teeth of her comb, every curl, wave, and cowlick battered into submission. But for all that, it still didn’t look right.
I began to panic. Why had I begged Mother to let me have a hair cut? Was this God’s punishment for arguing so long and hard for the coveted Julie look?
“There ya go.” Betty whipped off the cloth as though unveiling the Mona Lisa. “Whaddya think? Looks great, don’t it?” Taught to be polite, a shy squeak resembling a “Yes, ma’am” trembled from my lips.
I wanted to find a dark place with no mirrors. I looked like the Dutch boy on the Dutch Boy paint can. All I needed was a pair of baggy pants and wooden shoes and his job would be mine hands down.
I fled down an alley toward home. Home, where I would stay for the rest of my life, never to be seen again in public. I wondered how much private tutoring would cost, but who cared, I would never go to college anyway. I would live at home until I was an old, old lady with a grey Dutch boy haircut.
I fled past mother, my feet barely touching the stair steps that led to my room. I tore off the scarf, my heart pounding with futile hope. Perhaps on the trip home the chopped locks had relaxed into Julie-like waves. But one look in the mirror banished that hope. If possible they looked blunter and thicker than ever. I burst into tears just as mother entered the room.
One look at her face told me that she was even then considering locking me away in the cellar, away from decent, God-fearing eleven year-olds who wore French braids without murmuring and never, never asked for haircuts.
“Oh, Mom,” I wailed. “Do something!”
“Well,” said mom, never taking her eyes off my cranial war zone. “Let’s wash your hair and I’ll try to taper those ends a bit. But it was no use; now my poor head looked like a butchered shrub.” Finally, one of my aunts upon learning of my plight, took me to her hairdresser in another town. That lady, totally unlike the unforgiven Betty Jean, gave me a beautiful haircut.
Today, my childhood plight has softened into a humorous event related at family gatherings.
When yesterday’s trials evoke the laughter of today, it heralds a lesson learned, and another step taken into maturity. Healthy laughter brings balanced perspective to life’s hard moments.
The Bible says that all trials are for “just a little while” in comparison to eternity. A haircut grows out, an eleven-year-old grows up and goes to college and does not have to live in the basement after all. Mother’s migraines even lessened when I left home.
The only things that remain of most trials are memories. And it is the lessons learned from those memories that make us realize that faith and humor are not such strangers after all.
Proverbs 17: 22 say, “A merry heart is a good medicine.”
But it’s still a good idea to run a background check on your hairdresser.
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