…and the Beautiful Cut Hair

My mother sent me this photo and a packet of childhood photos. Wasn’t I a beautiful bald baby?

I was bald for a long time. And now I will be bald again. I’m actually not that put out by it. The hair went mostly on Monday. When it started coming out in strands, I had Steve cut it. Both pairs of clippers we had were completely inadequate, so he just ended up chopping it all off with scissors. The small hairs that are left will fall out over the next week. I put on my turban and called it a day. Our niece came over later for dinner and I showed her my hat collection.

But the next day, yesterday, I went grocery shopping. And I did not feel self-conscious at all. Maybe, having my eyebrows and eyelashes, I don’t look too odd. Just a woman in a turban. Today running errands I wore one of my new hats, and everywhere I went I got compliments on the hat. People are definitely talking to me more– people behind me in line at the grocery store, clerks at Kohl’s. That is interesting. It is maybe a kind of anti-shaming: we are not going to look away or treat you like you’re invisible just because you seem to have no hair under that hat.

Yesterday morning, before we went to begin Round 2 of chemo, I took some selfies in the bathroom mirror. I have never done that before. I find the selfie-in-the-bathroom-mirror shot to be a particular kind of statement. Here I am looking at myself and inviting you to look at me at the same time. Here I am in a very private place, the bathroom, inviting you to look at me looking at myself. It’s so strange, isn’t it? But for this particular act, it seemed the right “staging.”

I am maybe more prepared for this than others. I have always been a minimalist when it comes to my hair. I hated the years I colored it– I started going gray in my 20s. I’ve never been good about getting regular haircuts. I am willing to blow dry it and comb it, but not much more in the way of styling.

And in 1996, I had my first husband shave my head down to 1/4 inch. Partly it was because that was how he wore his hair and it seemed liberating. Also, I was ending a job where I’d been miserable, in large part due to the office climate. It was an office that provided graphics projects (Educational Design) for faculty at Loyola University, and there were 5 women managers and no other staff to speak of (just my stable of student workers). For many months our staff meetings were held as we got manicures (our supervisor got wind of this and called it off). The women were very focused on female empowerment and power suits and such. I was so not into it. My position, cranking out over 200 projects a year (slide shows, PowerPoint, research displays, illustrations for publications, and any number of other things) with a few unreliable students to help, was disproportionately stressful to the other positions. I developed pretty serious tendonitis and quit. But before I left, at the encouragement of some of the hip students and just feeling a need to make a break, I shaved my head.

The first day on the bus, I was nervous and self-conscious. But a fellow passenger came up and said, “Hey, is your name Linda?”  “No,” I said with a smile. “Oh, Linda wears her hair like that– I thought you might be her.” I felt instantly better. This was not so odd in Chicago. My first husband and I did agree that, because my hair is fine and had some gray, I did look just a little like a cancer patient. But by the time it was 1/2 inch it looked much better. By then I was teaching at Lake Forest College and Columbia College as an adjunct professor and no one seemed to even notice.

After I left the job, George and I went on a camping trip in Door County, and there we encountered a porcupine. He came down from a tree where he slept during the day right into the campsite and waddled off as we ate dinner. While we slept, he came around looking for salt and things to chew on. We found quills all around, and I took them back with me and made a little picture book, “Susan and the Porcupine,” about the magic connection given me by my haircut. I gave the books to my young nieces, who were a little freaked out that I looked like a boy.

After that I headed to a writer’s colony for a month in Lake Forest (where I scored the job in a real stroke of right time/right place).

One day that fall, I went into a Middle Eastern tea and spice shop in the Andersonville neighborhood. The man behind the counter said, “When I see women wearing their hair like this, it is so beautiful, I wonder why all women don’t do it.” That was the highlight of that particular experience.

Now, everyone will be telling me how good I look. And I will mostly not believe them. But that’s OK. People will be kinder, or go out of their way to help me, I expect. People will tell me their own stories. I am marked as one of the tribe. I am going to have some fun with these hats and turbans. I also have a wig that looks a lot like my “old” hair. For when I want to be incognito in airports or restaurants and such.

I have a poem in my recent book, H is for Harry, (which you can now purchase on the books page), called “My Two Husbands.” It relates some of the odd similarities between my first and second husband, and some key differences. Now I can add this– that they have both cut/shaved my hair. The first time, it was such a Romantic gesture, in the nature of Whitman’s bold self-styling. This time, it is for real. It is facing a reality. In that way the parallel seems to hold up as well.