What’s the oldest things you’re wearing today?
(Ooh! Bad grammar in the question today! Ow! It burns!)
I was going to try and be clever with this and say I’m wearing the weight of other people’s opinions or something philosophical like that, but that’s just not true. I have very much embraced my I-don’t-care-what-you-think era.
The next thing that I immediately thought of that I’m wearing is my hair. It is definitely the oldest thing on me (not counting tattoos from 20+ years ago).
The last time I cut my hair was the spring of 2022. I only remember that because it was the year I started grad school. In fact, this was the picture I took that year to send in for my student i.d.
With the heat and humidity here in the south, I would always cut my hair short just as the warm weather started kicking up. But once I was in grad school, life became too busy for me to really care what my hair was doing. So I didn’t cut it again.
Then, sometime last year, one of my former students came to see me. Her mom was/is the prek teacher at my old school. This young girl had just graduated high school and wanted to come see me when she was visiting her mom at work. I asked her about her future plans. She seemed kind of embarrassed to tell me that she was only going to go to the local community college and go through their cosmetology program. She and I have always had a special bond and I think she thought I would be disappointed that she was going to go to just community college and not something more prestigious. I encouraged her as much as I could to be proud of what she wants to do.
I followed up with her mom periodically after I left the school. She told me that her daughter was having trouble with getting her FASFA turned in so that she could pay for school. I think her mom said she was dragging her feet. So that’s when I made an executive decision about my hair. I told her mom to tell her daughter that I have some seriously scraggly hair because I hadn’t cut it in two years. I need a haircut but I will NOT cut it until she gets to the point in her cosmetology program where she can practice on real people. I emphasized that she needed to hurry up and get started because my hair is in a desperate situation. Her mom was happy to pass on the message.
This reminds me that I need to check in with her to see how that process is going. Maybe I’ll send her this picture of my most recent bed head to emphasize that my hair needs her help.
Until she’s ready to cut hair, I’m just going to let it keep growing and aging. I want to be like her mom…hair to her waist and pure grey. My gray is coming in at an annoyingly slow rate, but I’ll still be happy with long, flowy, hippy hair. Grow on hair, grow on.
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