I just made my annual visit to the hair salon. Unlike many women who visit the inner sanctum several times a year, I have been to a stylist perhaps two dozen times in my life. I have never had a chatty friendship with my regular girl. No one knows just how I like my hair cut because I seldom see anyone more than once. I always feel slightly ill-at-ease when I walk in; I don't know the protocol since I am obviously not a regular.
I find visiting the salon a bit like going to the dentist, or taking my cat to the vet. "You don't floss every day?? (tsk tsk)" "You don't want the test for feline leaukemia?? (you negligent person)" "I can tell it's been a long time; just look at those split ends." I shrink down in the chair and vow to myself that I will start to come regularly, but I never do.
This is one of the parts of my life that makes me feel as if I am not really a proper grown-up; as if I am masquerading (very convincingly) as a middle aged woman, but I have never completed the rites of passage. I have never, for example, mastered the art of, or felt comfortable renting a car (homeschool moms don't travel for business very much), ordering a bottle of wine in a restaurant (what are you supposed to say when you sniff the cork and taste the wine?), tipping service people, or shopping for clothes in a really nice shop where the saleswoman follows you around and checks in to "see how you are doing." The beauty parlor is definitely on the list.
But the real reason I don't do the beauty parlor well or often is that at heart I'm a long-hair girl. I don't need a trim every six weeks. My dad was a long-hair guy and I was a real Daddy's girl. My husband is a long-hair guy even though all the women in his family have very short hair. He's always liked my hair long and expects I will wear it long all my life. He's always pointing out elderly women with long, gray hair, saying, "See, you don't have to cut your hair when you get old." He is a serious Emmy Lou Harris fan and seems to think I will look like her when I finally go gray. Wouldn't that be nice?
When I visit my in-laws my hair is one of the many things that identifies me as the outsider. My mother-in-law and my husband's two sisters have always had very short, tidy hair which they have trimmed often. Their bathrooms are well-equipped with appropriate styling products and devices which I curiously examine behind the closed doors. Some I recognize, some baffle me. I feel embarrassed that I don't even own a blow dryer or a curling rod (If the truth were known, my antique bathroom even lacks an electrical outlet.) My long hair feels unkempt and slightly wild next to their neatly coiffed heads. I feel rather blowzy, somewhat shaggy, definitely unsophisticated.
It's not that I have never done anything with my hair, though I do usually fail those quizzes which ask things like, "Have you changed your hairstyle since high school?" I did the Farrah Fawcett look in college, I had the wildly kinky spiral perm treatment in my early thirties, I even tried bangs once, but it's always been long. I was raised on the doctrine that a woman's hair is her glory, and I guess I came to believe it.
So now I'm raising a house full of gloriously long-haired girls - five, to be exact. Rapunzel is our favorite fairy tale. Our drains are always clogged, our shampoo and conditioner budget rivals our grocery spending, we can never find a hairbrush though we own about a dozen. My daughters color their long locks pink and purple, they fix their hair in French braids, fish tails, chignons and upsweeps. But, like their mom, they never visit the salon.
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