My hair used to be so long that I could sit on it. My mother’s hair was just as long as mine–it was something that we shared. Hers was blonde, and she called mine “chestnut.” She washed hers everyday and combed it into a beautiful, straight, and flowing cascade down her back. For days, I would go without brushing my own hair, and it would weave itself into a red and gold highlighted mess, which I refused to take care of. My mother and au pair would insist that I brush it, but I resisted, kicking and letting tears spill down my cheeks whenever someone tried to drag a brush through the matted knots of my hair.
But, when I was four years old, my grandmother, a no-nonsense and distinctly pragmatic and practical woman, insisted that my hair finally be cut. My mother and I were visiting her in my grandparents’ house in Faribault, Minnesota. It was snowing outside. She had, time after time, insisted upon brushing my hair whenever she had visited our family in D.C. I sat silently, crying, knowing I could not kick and scream with her the way I did with my mother or au pair. I was to be silent, compliant–obedient to her tugging and pulling away at the roots of my hair, making me feel as though my scalp was on fire. Tears streamed silently down my cheeks onto my pajama shirt.
We drove through the snow to the stark, undecorated hair salon where I would have the curly tendrils of my hair cut into a bob. Afterwards, my hair would grow straight, with only minor variations that could be misconstrued as curls or unruly waves. Its beauty was suspended–perhaps even gone.
The color of the walls in the salon was an ugly mustard. I remember quietly hating that color–but saying nothing. I smiled as we piled back into my grandmother’s station wagon, pretending that I did not want to cry, sob, collapse into an Ophelian heap.
To me, my hair is an essential part of my being. Besides that one time when my grandmother insisted that it be cut, my hair has always been long;an extension of myself. I hide behind it, I toy with it, I curl my fingers around it to be coy, I absently distract myself by playing with it…it is as though it is a living and breathing part of my body, just like a lung or an artery. It identifies me…my long hair is sacred, it is romantic, it is high-maintenance, it is beautiful, it is luxurious, it is girlish.
I wonder if there will be a day when I cut it all off, like some women I have known who once had long hair. “I feel free now, like I can’t hide,” a friend of mine said to me, after cutting her shoulder-length hair and getting a pixie cut. I could not, for the life of me, believe or understand what she had said to me. I only understood the separation between us in that single moment.