My hair is falling out, permanently. The doctors can`t precisely explain why, beyond saying that this is something that sometimes happens.
On balance, I suppose this is good news. When I first consulted the doctor, the list of possible diagnoses included cancer and lupus. So simple hair loss begins to look like a relatively attractive option.
Nevertheless, I grew up in a generation that viewed hair as more than ornament. For girls as well as boys, the hair on our heads expressed our politics-a constant, uncombed defiance of our parents and their values.
When I was young, I always had long hair, worn straight and parted down the middle-Joni Mitchell hair, Judy Collins hair.
The message was explicitly sexual. We viewed hairspray as a stiff, sticky symbol of bourgeois respectability. We were aggressively natural, tossing our long, straight manes, perfumed with lemon and herbal scents.
I first began thinking of my hair as an expression of my own sexuality when I was in junior high school although I did not use those terms to define my feelings until later. I remember my friend, Michael, was sitting at a desk, drawing something. He beckoned me over to look at his artwork. I leaned to look over his shoulder, and a lock of my hair fell forward and touched his cheek. He looked up at me, and I have remembered that moment ever since.
By the time I finished high school, I had abandoned my long hair in favor of severe Jazz Age bobs. Then I got married, and got a job, and acquired one of those young professional-type haircuts. Their message was: ”I am the New Woman of the `80s. My hair, like the rest of me, is sleek, sophisticated, and overwhelmingly serious.”
That statement remained relatively constant for years, until I became pregnant and the word ”sleek” left my vocabulary. As my pregnancy became more and more obvious, I let my hair get longer and longer. I explained that I had just become too busy to worry about my hair, that I had no money to waste on empty vanity.
But, looking back, it was one last statement. I was unwilling to cut my hair, to sever the last few strands that tied me to my youth. My long, straight hair-by then truly unfashionable-was an attempt to signal that I was unchanged, that I could hang on to the irresponsible free spirit of my girlhood.
I kept my hair long for a couple of years after my daughter`s birth, defying well-meaning friends and relatives who gently suggested blunt cuts and hot rollers. When they looked at me, they saw a young mother who was ”letting herself go,” an aging hippie with long, stringy hair hanging flat against her face. One woman, every time she saw me, walked away mumbling: ”That girl just needs a good haircut.”
Finally, the decision was made for me, in an irreparable way, as I watched my hair disappearing. The last time I saw the hair specialist, she shrugged and prescribed a body wave, to be applied at two-month intervals to chin-length hair. As I walked away from her office, I cried; then I made an appointment at the beauty parlor.
As time goes by, I become more reconciled to my secret little bald spots. I now have something to contribute to the conversation when my male peers discuss their ever-lengthening foreheads.
To my husband, bless him, I apparently remain the fluffy-haired coed I was when we met. And I have found that short, thin hair does not spell the end to mild flirtations with interesting men at parties.
Yet sometimes, I find myself thinking about a blustery day in a rained-away April. I was walking across the Michigan Avenue bridge, and a gust caught at my hair and pulled it out behind me. I struggled on against the elements, pulling my coat tighter to my body. I barely noticed a man in a suit walking toward me. But as we passed, I saw him turn all the way around to look at me, with my long hair flying like a wind-snapped flag.
