Weddingbee

For as long as I can remember, my hair and I have been at odds. I don’t know what started the feud, but, looking through pictures of my childhood, the early years spent basically bald, I can see that there is a long-standing tradition of my hair rebelling against me.

The first time I can recall butting heads with the stuff on my head was when I was about five-years-old and encountered “bangs” for the first time. Not yet a teenager in need of extraneous hair for forehead camouflaging, their whole purpose was a mystery to me. They seemed to grow about 15 times faster than the rest of my hair and forced me into a sheepdog-like existence where I was constantly huffing them out of my face or using my hand to pull them out of my eyes so I could read.

This battle continued for about a year until, two weeks before school picture day, I took the small scissors out of my grandmother’s sewing kit and, without the aid of a mirror, cut a large chunk from the centre.

Ha! I thought mirthfully to myself. That’s the end of that! And it was . . . for about five minutes, until my mother saw what I had done to my ’do, started screaming and dragged me to the over-priced hair salon across the street, where I spent several unsuccessful hours with the stylist Nino, trying to repair the damage. Needless to say, we didn’t order doubles of that year’s picture.

For a few years after that, it seemed the hair and I had a bit of a truce. I had acted harshly, wiping out several follicles in a single slice and it seemed to realize the reign of my power. I had shown it who was boss and it was ready and willing to cooperate . . . until junior high when a section on the side of my head broke off and staged a coup, gathering together to form a cowlick the likes of which the world had never seen.

No amount of water or brushing would keep it down; it would pop up again so forcefully that it seemed ready to take out anything in its path. Take that you Goody combing bastard! it seemed to retort. So I tried to ignore it, reasoning that if I just ignored it, it would go away and admit defeat. This, however, did not end up being the case as the rogue strands got others to join their cause, becoming a solid mass, expanding their territory from my right temple to the back of my skull in a matter of days.

My mother, a cowlick sufferer since 1956, felt my pain. Having long ago abandoned the fight against her own crazily full Irish hair, she had resorted to an extreme pixie cut in an attempt to end her own suffering. “You’d look really cute with shorter hair,” she tried to comfort me, stroking my head . . . although not the side of my head with the cowlick, since even she was afraid of the lengths my hair seemed to be going to win this battle.

Finally, after months of struggle, with a desire to look half-human again (and to avoid being called “tumour-head” by my 7th grade classmates), I went to the drugstore to pick up supplies. Armed with copious amounts of hair product and hair clips, I took to the bathroom for the showdown of showdowns. After a few hours, about a dozen hair clips and a mixture of products derived from a process nothing short of alchemy, I emerged victorious. Sure, my scalp was bleeding from the numerous hair clips embedded in it and my hair felt sticky and slimy like I had just mashed gum into it, but dangnabbit, it was staying put and that was good enough!

And, so for years, things were quiet on the Northern front. We had an understanding and things remained calm . . . until I lost my head in my senior year of high school and decided it would be cool to dye my hair black.

I should have seen the revolt coming but, somehow, I reasoned that it WASN’T a stupid thing to do. After all, the year before I had dyed my hair red and, $15 and thirty minutes later, my locks had looked astoundingly similar, so it didn’t seem as though it would take in that much dye. Besides that, my hair was already pretty dark, so it wouldn’t be that stunning a change, would it?

Oh, how wrong I was, as my hair turned not only as black as humanly possible but also, thanks to the harsh chemicals in the dye, became thin and extremely brittle.

As I braved school that first day after dyeing, I realized that, instead of looking exotic and stylish like my desired hair role model (a la 1950s pinup Betty Page), I looked wimpy and washed out (a la Shelley Duvall in The Shining). I tried to play it off as if it were no big deal - after all I was 17 and this was the time to do stupid things with my hair. But, as my locks quickly degenerated, becoming more and more damaged with every attempt to repair them, a week before starting college, my hair flecked with multiple colours and split ends, I had to concede defeat.

“Cut it,” I told my hairdresser, “Cut it all.”

It was my Hiroshima hairdo. I had gone too far.

Since my high school hair debacle, I’ve pretty much left my hair alone, pushing the stuff on my head to the back of my mind, but with the wedding coming up, I’m a little torn with what I want to do with it. Should I go dramatic and try something completely different from what I normally do or should I just wear my hair like I normally do? I feel like dyeing it would just be asking for trouble, but I feel like the occasion calls for something more than running a wet brush through my locks (seriously, this is my hair routine in the morning - no product for me).

What do you think ladies? How did you decide on your wedding hairdo?

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