Why I Haven’t Cut My Hair Since November, 2016
“Mom! Mom!” My grown daughter’s voice cut through the fog of sleep, and I sat up. I hadn’t heard her sound this concerned since she accidentally set the house on fire.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Trump is winning,” she said.
I groaned and fell back into the bed. The nightmare had begun.
When I’d gone to sleep earlier, Hillary Clinton was in the lead. I’d gone to bed secure in the knowledge we were finally going to have a woman president. I knew the country was full of misogynists, but surely they weren’t insane enough to vote for Donald Trump, were they? Well, I had my answer. One quarter of the registered voters had jumped off a cliff and taken the rest of us with them.
The next morning we went out to breakfast, and I remember looking around the room, wondering, did that person just set fire to my country? Or that person? A pall hung over the room, and the eyes that met mine were wide and wondering, too.
I didn’t know what to do. No one did. We just wandered around bumping into furniture, not bothering to say, “Ow.”
A few days later, I looked in the mirror. My shoulder-length hair was in need of a cut. No, I thought, resolutely. I will not cut my hair. Not until he’s gone.
I wasn’t sure why I had made this decision. Had my inner hippy emerged? Was I letting my freak flag fly? What possible difference would it make to anyone that I wasn’t cutting my hair?
I thought of a poet named Sparrow who fasted on Fridays to protest the CIA. When I learned of his private protest, I was pretty sure that the CIA could not care less whether or not he ever ate, and yet I understood this need to remind oneself and those close to us that there are people and institutions out there who are up to no good. That, I realized, was the point of letting my hair grow. I wanted a constant reminder that there was someone rotten in Washington, a reminder for me and anyone who knew me.
People noticed.
“Your hair is so long,” they’d say. I’d explain, and after a while most of my friends and acquaintances knew what I was doing.
“I’m afraid you’re never going to cut your hair!” one of my colleagues at the university where I teach wailed when we met on the elevator one day.
A friend recently saw my profile picture on Twitter. The picture is of the back of my head, my gray-streaked mane hanging down my back.
“I love that picture. It’s your brand!” she said.
“It’s not a brand,” I said with a laugh. “I just thought it was more interesting than my face!” But I did start using it as my profile on other platforms.
I did get a trim and highlights in honor of the impeachment, but otherwise my hair keeps creeping down my back. On really bad days, such as when Trump sics the military on peaceful protestors or advocates drinking Lysol, it actually grows faster. It’s now about the same waist-scraping length as it was in my 1973 senior photo from high school when I wore it long and straight and parted in the middle.
That was the style then. It’s not the style now, especially for someone in her 60s.
Not only is it not stylish, long hair is a pain in the ass. It’s heavy and hot in the summer and gets tangled easily; sometimes I can’t even bother to brush it. My favorite pandemic style is to put it in a ponytail directly on top of my head and just wear it like that for days. I call it Pebbles after a night with Bam Bam.
If I forget to put it on top of my head like Pebbles Flintstone before I go to bed, then I’m constantly having to pull it out from under my shoulders. If I can’t find a ponytail holder before a yoga class, then I nearly suffocate. Once I actually got trapped in a chair because my hair was caught between the back of the chair and the wall.
Before the pandemic, I was telling some friends over dinner about the trouble it caused, and one woman insisted I cut it. “Don’t let him control you like that!” she said.
I ignored her. When Trump is gone and the pandemic with him, I can resume my role as a fashionably coiffed woman. But as long as he stays, the freak flag flies.
