Hair Chronicles

Ah, the complicated relationship we have with our hair. Mine is going through a strange phase right now – still short, not super short, but hasn’t hit my shoulders yet either. For a while, it looked like the hair of the Brady Bunch boys. (Specifically Bobby.)

But I’ve been trying out two types of ponytails these days. One is where I side-part my hair and pull it back into a low ponytail, but one side of my head has a thick blanket of bangs covering my eyes and cheek. I’ve been getting a lot of compliments this way, but I think it’s from people who believe the emo kid look with the tiny, greasy ponytail is still in.

The other way is all my hair pulled back into a ponytail with no part. I do this sometimes when I don’t want to worry about it. I look in the mirror, and I think, “Yeah. Yeah, if you suck in your cheeks enough, you look like a Sears catalogue model. Who’s selling lawnmowers. Work it.” (This is part of my daily mirror confidence boost.)

The problem is (and this is actually why I chopped it all off in the first place) that I’m one of those people who wants their hair to be PER-FECT. Like every pin where I left it, no hair slipping out. But conversely, I’m also one of those people who actually doesn’t care enough to use like products to make my hair stay, or heating tools, and I never buy pins and hairties (I just look for them in the corners of my carpet). So basically, I can never actually have my hair the way I want it because I’m a lazy perfectionist who can’t commit.

But the relationship with my hair has indeed been a journey. I have chronicled it in depth below:

Age 0: This whole preoccupation with my hair started when I was born with congenital male pattern baldness. I was pulled out (C-section), relatives took one look at me and said, “She looks just like her grandfather!” My dear grandfather looked like Jeffrey Tambor (Emmy-award winning actor of the Larry Sanders Show, Arrested Development and Transparent.) So lest you think their reaction was one of loving pride, I think it was more startling horror, because a female South Indian version of Benjamin Button was indeed possible.

Age 2.5/3.5: As is customary in many Indian families, my parents had my head shaved 3 times before I turned four. We had already been living in CA for a few years at this point, and they had also enrolled me in preschool. (Many people in America are not familiar with this custom of shaving kids’ heads in India, because many people in America are not familiar with anything at all.) I did not rock the bald look – my head looked like a defective melon before the advent of shape-control GMOs (because of the C-section, so my mom says). My immigrant parents would buy the two-for-one toddler clothes at Walmart, which were often little boys’ clothes with turtles or trucks on them (my parents did not think twice about gender norms then, but times have changed), or khakis. When I wore these, some folks probably thought I was a little boy with pierced ears, all Caillou-like. Otherwise, they’d see a little bald girl decked out in pretty, pink, fluffy frocks and probably wiped their sad, misinformed tears, thinking I had childhood cancer.

Age 6: My best friend had gotten bangs, and I thought they looked so cute on her, and because we always wore the same clothes (and we sometimes still do), I also got bangs. It was tragic (at least, my mom didn’t like them and would always pin them back) . I had just lost my upper teeth with bangs that covered my eyes. It looked like I had emerged from the losing side of a bar fight. I was also older than my friend so the cute factor had long left me.

Age 7-8: I was obsessed with Arthur, the TV show with the Aardvark. (Absolutely nothing has changed in 15 years around that fact). I had my mom take me to SuperCuts while we were in Canada, and got my hair cut super short. I’d always wear two barrettes in my hair around my temples. Without meaning to, I ended up looking like Francine Frensky, except with less sports acumen. (Way less – I’d spend PE and recess with my friend Matthew, looking for small, smooth rocks to add to my fledgling rock collection, rather than doing active stuff like the monkey bars or tag. Matthew later ditched me for Bertha, who actually played softball at recess. And my mom scattered all my rocks in the backyard, as well as my dreams to become a child prodigy geologist.)

Age 8-10: Between all these haircuts, my hair would grow out really quickly. So naturally, my mother braided it in two pigtails and sent me off to school, like her mother did when she was young. (So like Muffy now but nowhere near as rich.) Sometimes, when I got to school, I’d pull out the braids, and put my already crimped hair in a high ponytail like the “cool girls” (I never achieved the cool status. My two braids, and maybe my nerd capacity, had branded me). My mom would ask what happened to my hair? when I’d get home. “Gabe pulled them out!” After a while, she caught on (she knew there were never boys), and told me I could do whatever I wanted with my hair. (Mama luv!) However, my grandparents came to visit one summer, and my traditional grandmother was appalled that my mother never put coconut oil in my hair. Therein began my pre-puberty oily hair days, which were really about my mother appeasing her mother-in-law. My hair was but a victim – a greasy, ruffled, dripping travesty, like a duck in the BP oil spill.

Age 11.5-13: This was the first time I got layers. I was just about to start middle school – it was to be a new start, my chance at coolness. Never mind that I was going through a growth spurt and my pants were too short. Never mind that I wasn’t allowed to shave my legs until the next year. I had layers in my hair, that was the ticket to sitting at the center lunch table. It ended up looking pretty ok – except that I always wore it in a tightly pulled ponytail. For like three years. I think I had traction alopecia a decade before it became popular with the man-bun (Retrospective popularity – that’s all I can hope for at this point.) And before Gwyneth-Paltrow-like beauty blogs recommended women to skip hairwashing days, South Asian women everywhere had been doing it for centuries – only for me to hear at school, “Ew, you only wash your hair every 3 days!?” Whatever. I wasn’t about having my hair look like dyed-black straw. (And I was saving water. Ten years from then, that concept would catch on in California.)

Age 14: That summer, I had visited India for a couple of months with super long hair I had grown out, down to my butt (I call this ass hair, unhyphenated. Hyphenated forms another meaning). I had been needing a haircut, but naively wanted my relatives to see how dedicated I was to growing out my hair (a common belief among my Indian female relatives is that the longer the hair, the more illustrious and glowing the woman. A common belief of mine is that the longer the hair, the more likely the woman will find stray hairs in stray cracks).

At the end of my trip, I asked my cousin if she could take me to a hair salon in Bangalore. She mentioned two salons to me: one took 250 rupees for a haircut, and the other took 50 rupees. Due to my pubescent (& post-pubescent) misunderstanding that less is always better, at my bequest, she took me to the 50 rupee place. I wanted to cut off all 12 inches of my hair to donate, so I asked them to cut it off while in the ponytail. Although the hairdressers were uncomfortable with the idea that my disembodied ponytail would be donated for cancer wigs, they complied. I asked them for layers, and they said, “You mean steps?” No, like layers, like on top of another, then like blended. “We can only do a U-cut. Is that what you’re asking?” I asked if that would look like layers. “Yes.”

And this is what happens when you pay 50 rupees (less than a dollar) for a haircut – you end up with a modified bowl cut. At age 14. All that hair that I had cut off, I took it to my aunt’s house, and ended up throwing it under the bed in anger. I never donated it. Weeks later, after my family and I had come back to CA, my aunt called about the hair and asked what she should do about it. She first thought it was my grandma’s tie-in extensions for her thinning hair. But I think that’s what my detached hair eventually became – hair extensions for the women who wanted/needed to be illustrious.

Age 16: I had grown out my U-cut, and it was once more long ass hair. I wanted to try out this donating hair thing again, but this time through a Locks-of-Love program through my high school. Not wanting to go it alone, I convinced my best friend who had beautiful, brown flowing hair (she actually has Pinterest hair that you will never have – beach waves and all), to do it with me. She somehow agreed, and so on the Friday after sophomore year, we set off to the hair salon. I donated 12 inches, while she donated 15 inches. Because all of my prior haircuts were so terrible, I kept my expectations low and ended up loving my really boring haircut. My girl, on the other hand, hated her hair. She straightened it, curled it, tried everything, and then wore it up for weeks until it was presentable (by her standards though, I thought it and she were still gorgeous). She never cut her hair that short again (regrew it out to beautiful, flowing, and long), and never let me talk her into another haircut. Thank god for that, because I didn’t stop getting bad ones.

Age 18-20: I went through this two-year cycles of growing ass hair, then cutting it off to around my neck, then not cutting it until the next two-year deadline. It was my thing. At my college orientation in July, I had long ass hair. I cut it right before the first week of college, and people I had met during the summer didn’t recognize me. For a while, I reveled in the comments, “Oh I didn’t even recognize you! You’re like a changed person!” I was. I had shorn off the clueless, neurotic, naive, long-haired, high-schooled me, and was blossoming into a clueless, neurotic, naive, short-haired, college me. Yes, yes, it was freeing. But then my hair would start to grow out.

So I would “shake things up” by consistently getting terrible bangs. Freshman year of college, I had stringy (I had asked for “wispy”) bangs once again that looked the bars of a jail cell around my forehead. By the time they had grown out, I was bored again. So mid-Sophomore year, I got them cut again (I never cut them myself because I didn’t trust my hand. Not that it would be any worse than if I got them cut). Once again, in the pursuit of trendiness, I got my bangs cut super short in the middle of my forehead, like an inch above my eyebrows. Classic hipster. After two weeks, they just got in the way. I was complaining about them, and that best friend (the same one I had gotten bangs with when I was 6) told me that bangs might not be my thing. Do I listen?

No. A few weeks before graduation my senior year, I was feeling antsy. I was studying one day at a cafe, and scratching my head pensively (onlookers might have said rabidly). I caught my reflection in my laptop, and I saw Doc Brown. That was it. I marched across to a hair salon across the street, and got side-bangs. I didn’t care so much as I wanted a change. My bangs proved problematic later because I couldn’t tuck them underneath my graduation cap nor could I take my cap off because they had gone so flat, like my post-graduation employment prospects.

Age 22: That was it. I had enough with My Hair. I had debated for months whether or not to cut all my hair off into a long-ish pixie. I was ready. I had picked the haircuts I wanted. I had done the research on the products I would need to use. I had consulted with several friends who were wary of my decisions due to my troubled past with the haircuts that had betrayed me, but in true friend fashion, advised me to do what made me happy (or complain less). I was going to chop it all off.

My sister and I made our appointment on the same day. Solidarity! We thought. (Solidarity ended on my behalf when my sister was monumentally more pleased with her hair than I was. She was literally like, “Bye, sista!”) As the hairdresser cut off bit by bit, I kept telling her to cut more. She was more hesitant than I was because she thought I was going to regret it. Little did she know – I always regret my haircuts, so the only thing that varied was the magnitude of it. By the end of the session, my hair was more similar to Kate Gosselin’s than Halle Berry’s. (I will never use those two people in the same sentence again, I promise you.)

Anyway, a week later, I walked in and made the hairdresser modify and cut off the extra hair in front. Naturally, I still hated it, even though the long-ish pixie was a hit among my friends and family. Mostly because everybody tells you how much maintenance a pixie is, and you never listen. I got like 5-6 haircuts in a year to try to keep it up. That’s actually more than I had in the prior decade.

Present-day: My hair grows at a startling rate, so I’m just going to let it chill and do its thing. Someone at work told me my hair was like wild weeds, and I’d have to take a weedwhacker to my head (she scared me a little). Right now, it’s somewhere between “Soccer mom” and “President of Joan Jett‘s fanclub”. This is solidified by the fact that I often drive a beat-up mini-van (Honda O-Desi.) People soullessly cut me off in traffic. Middle-schoolers have called me Aunty. I’m actually taken seriously in certain environments.

I know it has something to do with my hair.