“…the image…highlights another reason that many mothers tend to be critical of their daughters’ hair: they are subjecting their daughters to the same scrutiny to which they subject themselves. That a mother looks at her daughter’s face the same way she looks in a mirror suggests that she sees her daughter as a reflection of herself. This explains both why many mothers critique their daughters’ appearance and why many daughters wish they wouldn’t: The sense that our mothers see us as reflections of themselves clashes with our wish to be seen for who we are. At the same time, our mothers’ scrutiny seems to confirm our worst fears: we are fatally flawed.”
from Deborah Tannen’s You’re Wearing That?:Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation
My mom and I have the same hair. Deep auburn, staticky and stick straight. From the beginning of my memory my mom has dyed her hair to stay true to the red-tinged brown that suits us best. I’d watch from a perch on the bathtub as she carefully mixed, smeared, timed the dye. We’d journey to the kitchen to share a can of Dr. Pepper until it was time for her to use the sink’s sprayer to rinse the dye in vivid streaks down the drain.
In the same kitchen, I often watched my mom perm and cut my grandmother’s hair. With the blue stool from her desk centered on the tile, I’d watch as wisps of white fell like down feather from my grandmother’s head to the floor, a faded mauve towel catching what lingered on my grandmother’s shoulders.
After years of making due with the mauve towel, my mom bought a cheap black cape like the ones hairdressers button too tight, and every few weeks during the summer, my mom would wrap my brother, and the blue stool under him, in the cape on the patio. She’d run electric clippers over his head, bleached nearly white by the sun, until he was appropriately shorn and we could all rub his soft stubble for good luck.
As for my haircuts, she took me to her own hair dresser, a woman named Deb whose picture on her cosmetology license looked like a knock off Fran Drescher, and for years instructed her to cut my hair “long enough to still put back in a ponytail.” While my mom and Deb talked adult talk, I stared at myself in the mirror watching wet strands of my hair fall from her scissors. When Deb was done, my mom would take my seat, give Deb a few more instructions, and shoo me to the front with the magazines. Happy to be out of the hot seat, I was content to flip through oily pages of hairstyles and highlights.
The attention my mom paid to my hair was in its styling. On days we travelled, she braided by hair in two, tight French braids. On days we took pictures, she sectioned my hair into curlers set with a thin cloud of hairspray. On days we needed to leave the house before my hair naturally dried, she blow-dried my hair with her round brush. As a kid I’d grow impatient with any of the processes about a third of the way through and fidgeted so much that it was nearly impossible to not touch a too-hot spot to my scalp.
When I got old enough to drive myself, I dreaded getting my haircut at Deb’s. Her dated salon smelled like chemicals and her conversation made me anxious. There are few things a sixteen year old girl wants to talk about with a woman her mother’s age, but my mom made the appointment and I didn’t care enough to find my own. I sat in the chair—alone now—trying to say as little as possible lest the ordeal last longer.
Deb always left me feeling worse than when I came in. Often the first thing I did when leaving her salon was shower and restyle my hair with less product and more heat. My hair spent most of its time in the two styles I had mastered: a tight ponytail and a damp mess around my shoulders.
In the summer months before I left for college, I worked up enough resolve to tell my mom not to make an appointment with Deb. Instead, I called the Ulta in the strip mall by our house and took whatever was open that day. When the stylist asked what I wanted, I began confidently, “I need a trim and I’d like some layers,” but suddenly felt it necessary to add “but still long enough to put back in a ponytail.” The woman nodded and went back to talking over my head to her coworker about their terrible boss. I left with an indiscernible hair shape that even in my visor mirror looked ragged.
I came home and performed satisfaction, flipping it back and forth at my dad’s and brother’s oos and aahhhs, but woke up the next morning and cried in the mirror. I turned my straightener to its highest setting and tried to iron out the errant fringe. Between the singed strands of hair that made my head look rounder, I set a brave face before meeting everyone at the table for breakfast.
Seeing my mom in the kitchen, who immediately turned to face me, I felt a fresh wave a panic. Instinctively my hand went to the back of my head to pet down the strands that stuck to nothing in the air.
“It looks good, Allison,” my mom said from the toaster.
The hand relaxed away from my head in relief and the wave retreated.
“Thanks, mom.”
During that first year of college, I took to picking at my split ends leftover from the shoddy cut, a new coping mechanism in the face of new stressors. It still fit in a ponytail but looked like someone had carefully burned each end, every strand like frayed thread or a dead tree branch splitting in every direction. By the time I came home for spring break, I wanted a chop, something shorter than ponytail length, a fresh slate to start my resolve to not ruin my hair while zoning out in the back of lecture halls.
But I didn’t know where do go. I couldn’t go back to that strip mall salon—I had avoided the Ulta altogether since my bad haircut— and I didn’t want to return to Deb’s. While laying in my spot on the couch resisting the urge to check in on my dead ends, I remembered my mom cutting my hair. In the memory I am freshly bathed with the mauve towel, less faded and still fluffy enough for my sensitive six-year-old skin, wrapped around me. My mom combs my hair carefully. The scissors rest against my back and make satisfying sounds of cutting hair in spots I can’t see.
It was a faint memory, but even so, it was more palatable than sacrificing my head to Deb or braving my awkwardness and anxiety to try someone new.
I rustled myself off the couch and into the kitchen where my mom walked back and forth inside that sometimes-salon square.
“Ma, can you cut my hair? I want a bob. Like a short, short.”
She cocked her head toward me.
“I can make you an appointment with Deb. She may be booked this week but you could come back next weekend and I bet she’d have an opening.”
“I don’t want Deb to cut it. I want you to cut it.”
She shook her head and pivoted on her heel toward the stove.
“Alright. Maybe later.”
That was enough to send me back to my spot on the couch and leave her to finish lunch.
The day wore on. I buzzed internally about the moment she’d situate herself on the back porch over the stool, the feeling of the fine-toothed comb making its way through my hair, the nonchalance I would tell my friends about my mom cutting my hair.
Lunch was had. Sportscenter played loudly in the living room. I became restless. I imagined that if all the other tasks were done, we could get to it. So I helped with the dishes, folded my laundry back in my duffle bag, and propped myself up at the counter idly, waiting for my mom to remember my request. She continued to brown ground beef for the stroganoff dinner I couldn’t stay for, not picking up on my silent inquiry.
Frustrated, I threw my things in my car parked on the street out front and I asked her again. This time insisted. Impatient. Whiney.
“Mom. Can you cut my hair now?”
She sighed that heavy sigh and looked at the clock before she said, “Sure, Allison. If that’s what you want to do. Go get the stool.”
Buzzing, I set up the blue stool on the back porch and whipped the mauve towel around my shoulders. I nearly leapt across the grass in bare feet to retrieve a sun-bleached clothes pin from the line to fasten the ends together.
My mom met me on the porch with the dusty box of hair supplies. Digging through the perm rods and clipper covers, she retrieved the hairdressing scissors reserved for cutting my grandmother’s hair. I situated myself on the stool and waited.
The sun was setting around us and the air exhaled a warm breeze. She began to comb my hair and pepper me with questions.
“Are you sure you want it short?”
“Why don’t I just make you an appointment.”
“You might not be able to put it in a ponytail.”
I brushed them off: Yes, to my shoulder. No. Deb never does it right. That’s ok. I know. Then insisted: “Mom. Just do it.”
She bent at her waist to be eye level with my chin and made a heavy SWICK sound, scissors on thick hair. I felt the new ends tickle my chin and smiled.
“You know I don’t know how to do this, right?”
My smile melted.
“What?”
“I don’t know how to cut hair, Allison. You know that.”
“I thought you used to cut my hair all the time?!”
“I don’t know where you got that idea.”
I didn’t either. I’d seen her cut my grandmother’s hair a hundred times and my brother’s a thousand. And there was that story that a gossipy neighbor used to tell while drinking Zimas on this porch about my mom fixing her daughter’s botched bangs. But had she ever cut mine?
Tears bubbled in my eyes and I fixed my gaze on the pointed ends of the backyard fence.
“Well, I have to leave soon anyway, so just finish it.”
She made her way quickly around my head, neither of us saying much. Inches of my hair floated by my bare feet then drifted away in the breeze.
When my mom passed me the small hand mirror from her bathroom drawer, I flipped my new bob back and forth. The sharp ends made a soft woosh when they flew past my ears. I didn’t bother to meet my own eyes in the mirror.
“Looks good to me.”
I passed the mirror back to my mom and shook the towel off my shoulders. Little clipped hairs marked a line down the front of my white t-shirt where the towel didn’t quite do the job. I picked up the stool and walked inside to examine myself more closely in the large circle mirror on the mantle.
I didn’t think the haircut was particularly bad—I liked it as much as I’d liked any of Deb’s and more than the cut that encouraged my split-end picking—but I didn’t feel satisfied.
“Looks good, Al,” my dad offered from his recliner.
“Thanks dad.”
My hand reached up to touch the newly exposed nape of my neck as I shook back and forth again. The whole thing felt better in motion than it did lying flat. I followed the momentum and collected my keys to start the drive back to campus.
My mom returned the scissors to their place and the towel to the hamper while I said my goodbyes to my dad and brother. She was setting water to boil when I met her in the kitchen again.
“Bye mom.” I reached out for a hug, “Thanks for cutting my hair.”
She brushed clippings from my neck before meeting my embrace.
“Okay. Be Safe. Call me when you get there. I love you.”
“Love you, too.”
In my car, I waved goodbye, avoiding the mirrors around me, and held my breath until I drove past the city limits. I pulled into a gas station to take another look. In my rearview mirror, I didn’t feel anything about what I saw, but the tears I’d held back on the porch came back in full force.
My mom had given me what I’d asked for, but as I searched for more fast food napkins in the console, it dawned on me that it wasn’t a bob I wanted but her—the feeling of her combing my hair, the sensation of her attention on me, a comfort I didn’t know how to ask for.
By the time I pulled in to the dorms a few hours later, my eyes had receded from their teary puffiness. I tossed my bags onto my bed and made my way down the hall toward the voices in room 223.
“Hey!!” the congregated girls sang toward my direction. But they quickly cut the sound short and let a silence bleed between us.
One friend said through a tight smile, “…you got a haircut!”
My gut turned, “Yeah, my mom cut it.”
Julianne, a political science major and Emily Post etiquette minor, responded first.
“Do you want us to fix it?”
Embarrassment blurred my eyes as I nodded. I met her in the communal bathroom to sit on the sink and let Julianne make tiny cuts around my head. Another friend looked on and kept us company with a story about a particularly cringy lab partner.
For a moment our entertainer left and Julianne began softly, “Is your mom a hairdresser?”
A crimson rose in my cheeks.
“No”
“Then why did she cut your hair.”
“She used to.”
I put my hands, cold from the porcelain of the sink, to my cheeks, now hot with the rush of blood.
“Or I thought she used to.”
Julianne let a small sliver of hair fall from a cut of her scissors instead of asking more.
Our friend returned and brought me back around to better spirits enough to let my cheeks return to their normal color before modeling Julianne’s work to the rest of the group.
I flipped my hair around for them and started before anyone could comment, “Julianne did a great job. I guess I should ask her to cut my hair before I ask my mom.” Everyone exhaled a relieved laugh.
I laughed too and resolved to rewrite the memory as another “bad haircut” story.
In this story, I cut out the loaded silence and stomach-sick feeling. I trim the bit about her hesitation and my insistence. I blowdry the tears and curl the whole thing into a recognizable comedy.
My hair grew back and when it did I razzed my mom about her poor technique and temporary omission.
“You asked me to cut your hair!” she laughed, being a good sport.
“Yeah, but you shouldn’t have listened to me!” I volleyed back.
We toss our heads back in a cackling harmony, our hair in near identical form just below our shoulders.