By Lisa Scottoline
I just got a fabulous new haircut.
By me.
Do you understand what I’m saying?
Please tell me you have felt this way:
When your hair is bothering you and you can’t stand it another minute, so you grab a scissors and you start hacking away, so impatient that you don’t even put your glasses on first.
This is not a hypothetical.
This is exactly what just happened an hour ago, and you know what?
I’m fine with it.
I don’t know what came over me.
I know you’re supposed to get more patient as you get older, but I am more impatient than ever.
I’m on borrowed time, after all.
I could go at any minute.
And the past few weeks, my hair has been getting longer, but I’m on deadline and I can’t take time to get it cut. So the ends of my hair, which is only fictionally blonde, start to look like hay.
It’s a good look, to attract a horse.
And at the same time, my roots are growing in and they’re gray.
What drove me to the scissors is that I had gray on the top and hay on the bottom.
I remember I used to be horrified at black roots, and then they got cool so I didn’t sweat black roots so much. But when my roots turned gray, I sweated it. I would go with the gray totally, but I don’t have uniform gray, I have skunk.
I’m not looking to attract skunks.
Especially not since Thing Two.
In any event, I was so fed up that I got out of the shower, grabbed the scissors, and started cutting.
I think of it as a rough draft.
As for the gray roots, I’m looking funny at my drawer of Sharpies.
Or maybe I should be looking funny at my drawer of Highlighters.
I could highlight my hair, literally.
Then I could attract office supplies.
My favorite!
I remember a time when my hair really mattered to me, like at sixteen. I would cut pictures out of magazines, which is something that used to exist back then. They even had haircut magazines.
Also, dinosaurs.
In any event, I would bring pictures of haircuts to the salon, then discuss my haircut endlessly, and hold my breath the entire time she cut my hair.
I remember one time my hair came out so short that I wanted to cry, but I didn’t want to make the stylist feel bad. So I fled to the car and went full Italian opera.
Over a haircut.
What was I thinking?
And this was before you could blame social media. There was no Instagram back then to tell girls they should look perfect.
We had to rely on the world for that.
Of course, it came through.
And so what happens in a woman’s life is that she begins to think that all of the things that matter don’t matter as she gets older, she starts to understand that none of it matters.
That she gets to decide what matters.
Haircuts don’t even make the list.
I look like Raggedy Ann on Medicare.
I may look worse than ever, but I feel the best ever. That’s what matters.
© Copyright 2024 Lisa Scottoline.