the continuing saga

When Don read my blog, we were both in fits of laughter, so much so that Don had to go to the bathroom to get some toilet paper to wipe his eyes.  I was laughing too, but when he went to the bathroom, a few of the laughter tears turned sad for a second and I had to scrub furiously to get them mopped up before he returned.

“My aching stomach,” he moaned, clutching it on the return.  And then he returned to the reading aloud of it, and we returned to the belly aching laughter, and it was really funny, until he got to the end and read the last couple sentences.  “Oh...” he said, shrinking slightly in his chair.  “I’m sorry.” Eyes stricken.

“Oh, I’m fine now,” I said.  And I was really, other than my brief sorrow when he dashed to the bathroom.  That was a momentary thing.  A .05% of the rest of what I was feeling.  I know what my haircut looks like.  I know it’s ridiculous.  I was laughing too. 

I went upstairs to our bathroom to look at it again in the mirror, a chagrined Don at my heels.  “You know what it is?” I said to Don.  “The bangs right here are too heavy.  They fall into my face, get stuck on my glasses.  I just need to cut them a bit and maybe it will look better.”

Sheer panic on Don’s face.  “You’re kidding right?”

“Nope!” I said.  Because really, I could take the bread knife to my hair and it couldn’t look worse.  “Where are the scissors.”

“Don’t do it!” Don said.  “It’s not that bad.” (Interpretation: You’re only going to make it worse.) No matter.  I grab the scissors and wield them with more confidence that I feel.  It’s sort of like a kid has just dared me to eat dirt.  Why not, right?

I start snipping, a little hair here, a bit more there.  I am not a hairdresser by any means.  Don was watching in horror.  I was having fun. 

I’m not even going to try to guess how relieved he was when my ride to the CWILL meeting arrived.

As Karen (aka KC Dyer/author/ kcdyerblogspot.com) drove us into town she shored my confidence up with how much she liked my haircut and that it was cute etc.  And then at the CWILL meeting that Kari Lynn-Winter (author of Jeffery and Sloth, also up for a BC Book Prize) arranged for some teachers to come in and talk with us about what they liked and didn’t like about the teacher’s guides they were getting.  It was very helpful.  And not only that, but I got a lot more reassuring comments about my disaster of a haircut.  “It makes you look way younger,” someone piped up.  Really?  Yay!

So, I felt quite a bit pluckier returning home.  Actually, most of the time I forget that it looks different because I’m not seeing it.  I’m just looking out of the same old eyes and face.  I can’t see what my hair looks like.  And whether I like the haircut or not, I’m certainly not about to lurk about town with a brown paper bag over my head. 

Look at it this way, a lousy haircut on me, can make everyone else feel much more grateful and happier with their own hairdressers. 

I get home and Don is being quite sweet.  It is obvious he’s thought a lot about my, “Honey, you are supposed to say things like, you look cute, it’s like a whole new you, it makes me want to leap on your bones.  That sort of thing.  Even if you don’t like it.  Because there is nothing I can do.  The hair is cut.  It’s gone.  I can’t glue it back on my head.  Then in a few days, or a week, after the shock has worn off, then you say, I like this look, but I think perhaps I even like the way you used to wear your hair better.”

“I like your haircut now,” he says, following me into the kitchen, lying through his teeth.  “I think I just needed to get used to it is all.  Now that it’s flattened out a bit, it’s quite flattering.  It’s just when you’d first walked in this afternoon, the hair dresser had poofed it or something and it was all fluffed up on the top of your head like a huge souffle.  But now?  Now it looks.  Well, I’m getting used to it now.  I...” he swallows.  “Like it.  It makes you look...” and I’m thinking he’s going to say what that wonderful author at the CWILL meeting said.  I’m thinking he’s realized it as well.  That he now thinks I really am happening and fresh.  “It makes you look...” he pauses, his finger and thumb together like a French chef about to say Voila, “More...” feeling around for the word.  “Mature.”

What?!  That is definately not what a middle-aged woman wants to hear.  A “mature woman” is just a polite way of calling someone old.  Great.  Not only do I have a sucko haircut, but my husband thinks I look like an old crone.  Which will be fine when I am an old crone.  But I’m not yet.  I’m only forty-eight.

Posted by Meg Tilly on Friday, April 11, 2008 in Chewing the Fat

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