Winner of the Gimme' a Head With Hair! Long, Beautiful Hair!! Contest

A big thanks to Joy Cressler from Crowley, TX for sharing her “locks of love and trepidation” with us!

Hair Today, Hair Tomorrow

By Joy E. Cressler

My school pictures show a girl with crystal blue eyes and hair in full distress. She has silky dishwater blond hair kinked tight with super-strength Lilt perms interspersed with whiskery stubble jutting from my scalp, like new vegetation after a forest burn. Other photographs reveal that the cursed kink has faded into tall poofy hair, ridiculously mature for an elementary-aged girl in the 1960s.

By the time I enter high school, Mother has reluctantly abandoned her vigil to window shade my hair into rows of humiliation. I have wrenched control of my hair from her grasp in junior high, and now, my sophomore year, early mornings find me pouring over the mirror shard on my dresser, meticulously parting my hair down the middle with a concentrated frown and protruding tongue, making sure every strand falls from the part in flawless harmony.

One morning in 1973, my ill-tempered Mother notices my perfectly combed hair as I head for the front door with the bus chugging toward the bus stop. As I try to sail past her, she musses up my hair with both hands, flinging me into a fit of rage. I hate her at that moment and tell her so. She promises that my father would hear of my angry words and he did, that night, via the end of a belt.

A decade later and rid of childhood shackles, my long hair hangs to my waist, shining and healthy as nurturing hormones enrich the roots during pregnancy. My young husband admires it and others in his family often complement me on its beauty. On a whim, I visit the beauty shop and have my hair shagged and permed; the length reduced to a few 1980’s rock star spikes snaking down my back. Many are disappointed with what I have done to my hair and tell me so. Not my husband. He finds it alluring and soon, I am with child again.

Now approaching fifty, my long tresses are gone and so is my husband. My hair, however, remembers a woman from long ago, the quirks in the way Mother-hair lays and the luster it loses with age. Beautician intervention only yields hairstyles determined to imitate the way my mother fixed her hair as a career woman. I am destined for the snow-white locks of the woman who bore me. I am reconciled and so are we – almost.