It felt like a hopeless battle between my hair and the brush. The brush was my hair’s archenemy. I hated the brush. It was always trying to hurt me and rip my hair from my scalp. So in protest of the wretched torture device (a brush) I never brushed my hair. My hair whirled around my head like a twisted, frizzy bird’s nest I looked like a girl from “Annie”.
I peeked out from under the brim of my yellow bangs. They came across my eyes cutting my vision in half. It was the first day of first grade and I had to tilt my head all the way back to see my teachers face from behind the curtain of hair. I was a no non-sense kind of kid and I cut to the chase with this new teacher immediately in hopes of eradicating my most pressing fear about first grade. “Are you mean; my brother told me you made a little girl cry?” I curtly asked her. She was taken aback and my mother quickly apologized and ushered me into the classroom. I have felt guilty about that comment since the day it slipped through my lips.
The bangs had been my mother’s idea but they were constantly in my face making me resemble a shaggy, overgrown hound. I begged her to let me get rid of them but when she said no I just did it myself. I chopped them off with my favorite pair of child-safe ladybug scissors. After that nobody ever tried to tell me what to do with my hair again.
When I was in sixth grade, on a Tuesday afternoon, the impulse for change overcame me. I begged my mom to give me a haircut and despite her ambivalence she finally obliged. It was awful, with each snip it got shorter and shorter. She had butchered my hair; I burst into tears. For the rest of the year I wore my hair in a tiny bun in the back of my head. Now a day if I feel impulsive I go to the hairdresser to have a professional cut my hair.
