Self-image

A New Hair Stylist


 

I am looking for a new hair stylist, and I swear it is easy to find a different gynecologist then someone to cut and color your hair. The cutting part isn’t as important to me as the coloring however. A bad cut will grow out. A bad batch of chemicals and you’re hair is crispy and falling out in clumps. But, I do need to touch up the highlights and sprinkle in a few low-lights as well. Rob seems to think that letting my natural color grow back, and allowing the grays to continue their obvious take-over, would be a good thing. I guess, being a man, he doesn’t see the point of something that needs such time intensive upkeep. For me it’s more about the natural color than the grays, which are actually white. If I were all-white, which I will be one day I guess, I would look like an albino for starters. But the trouble is, I am nowhere near all white yet, and my natural color is a dark red, not quite auburn, that I have never liked. I have been lightening my hair since I was about 18. The low-lights are recent. Until I tried them, I hadn’t ever dyed my hair, just bleached it. 

 

For many years I just went back to my hometown to have a high school friend of my sister’s, who is a stylist, do my highlights. It wasn’t until I married Will that I found a stylist in the area near my workplace. Coming to Alberta meant finding someone new again and without the benefit of someone I knew to make recommendations. Both of Rob’s daughters manage to avoid salons. The older one has a friend who is a stylist, and the younger does her hair, from cutting to coloring to styling, herself, and quite beautifully I might add.

 

My first cut here was just a trim, and I went to a fellow who used to play beer league hockey with Rob back in the day. He did a good job. Wasn’t pushy, did what I asked, but a trim is not a highlight. A new acquaintance recommended a stylist at a spa in the nearby town. She said that he got high marks from many people she knew when she first came here. It’s funny, and not so, that I am putting more thought into this decision than I did into picking my daughter’s new school. Of course, a school experience is usually what you as a parent choose to put into it, and if you are paying any attention at all problems can be headed off or corrected before damage occurs, my hair could be ruined in an instant.

 

It’s so ridiculous. To worry so much about what amounts to a bunch of dead skin cells. I guess it goes back to my childhood. Even when I was fat and awkward, people would remark about how beautiful my hair was. Today I listen to people say the same thing to my daughter, and I watch her soak it in and wonder what the long-term effects of that will be. For me, even though I am not the fat girl anymore – I am told often enough that I am thin and even pretty – I still guard my hair and consider it an asset of great importance. Interesting is hardly the word for something so pathetic.

 

The Women’s Locker Room


I’m not modest. No shock or even mild surprise there, eh?  Even when I was a fat teenager and awkward co-ed living in the dorm, I didn’t have a problem with nudity. Not really. When Will and I were first living together he asked me out of the blue one day if I ever put clothes on when I was inside the house. He was teasing me but only just. I don’t know if Rob is as taken aback by my clothing optional ways once the wee one is tucked in for the night but given the fact that the neighbors once had to ask his late wife, Shelley, to talk to him about the possibility of adding a towel or robe to his early morning attire, I highly doubt it.

 

The one place where one would think that au naturel would not be a problem is the changing room at the gym or the swimming pool, and maybe it is just a Canadian thing, but I have never been so weirded out by women’s reactions to my changing into and out of my running clothes. I embarrassed some woman again today at the DCC fitness center. I was about half dressed after showering when she rounded the corner of the locker bay and seeing me topless, did a half retreat, stuffed her jacket hurriedly into the closest locker and fled. This isn’t the first time I have gotten strange looks for changing in a changing room either. It’s happened several times. Always with much younger women. Even at the town’s public pool, I noticed that everyone changed in little cubicles that were most impractical for mothers with children due to their size and configuration. I asked Rob about this one night when his friend Chris was visiting and they both assured me that Canadian men at least, have no such problem with locker room nudity and neither knew of any cultural precedent for what I had experienced. Rob did mention to me later though that Shelley hadn’t any problem either with using a changing room for its assigned purpose but both his daughters made mad dashes for any privacy they could find when having to change in a public locker room. 

 

So, maybe it is a generational thing? That would be ironic. A generation of young women whose clothing is by design quite revealing, and not always in a flattering way, harbors a latent prudish streak. I guess that makes sense really. The chief complaint my female high school students had about P.E. class, which incidentally was the main reason so many of them failed, was that they wouldn’t dress out for class. Not because they were worried about getting sweaty or didn’t want to participate in the activities but because if they changed their clothes, someone would see them naked. Other female someones. Who would judge them. Negatively. Never mind that these were girls in clothing so tight and in some cases scanty that what they looked like was not really a mystery to anyone with even a half a mind to speculate about it.

 

Still, just another thing about Canada that I find perplexing. That and the fact that I have yet to walk into a washroom stall and find that the toilet seat hasn’t been liberally sprayed. 

Self-Definitions


Last evening as we were driving home from city, Rob and I got to talking about how widowhood should not be an experience that defines us. He is feeling a little angry about how Shelley’s death has impacted his life and changed its course. Understandably so, we all feel, or have felt, that way from time to time. It’s impossible to silence the “what ifs” and “why me’s” completely. Human nature is such that we usually take situations that upend our lives as personally. I can honestly say that I didn’t spend much time asking “why me”. I don’t see Will’s illness or his death as something that happened to me. It happened to him, and Katy and I were impacted because we shared his life. I know many people who have let tragedy completely make them over. Some positively. Others negatively. Life is about change and we are the sum of our experiences, but no single experience should dominate to the exclusion of all others. Letting widowhood hog the center stage for too long is a recipe for stagnation. At some point, Will’s death should recede to it’s proper place in my life’s history and memories. What that place will be is something I am still working out, but I am closer every day. I think all people who suffer tragedies spend time putting the event into perspective and taking from it the positives that will add to who they are. Or at least they should. Still it’s not easy.

One of the more galling lessons of a tragedy is that we are not always allowed to chart the course of our life independently and free of interference. Destiny allows us free reign only up to the point where what we want clashes with what it has already decided. It’s difficult not to resent that. After all, what was wrong with the plans I had that made God’s or Fate’s so much better? I think though that it is not a question of better. Will’s time was up and that had nothing to do with me even though it effected me greatly. I am okay with the fact that I am not where I planned to be not almost eight years ago when Will and I were married. Where I am at is every bit as good. That doesn’t mean I don’t have as yet unrealized dream and plans. I do. I think most everyone does. Complacency, in my mind, is the worse kind of getting stuck. I don’t want to let that happen, and I know it is far too easy to do. 

Ten days from today would have been our 8th wedding anniversary. I had hopes and dreams that day. Heading into the second month of marriage with Rob, I have new hopes and new dreams. It would have been easier to lament what I have lost. To not hope or dream again. Let my pain and loss become who I am. What is gained by doing that? I don’t know. I do know that much would have been lost.

I was a widow, a mom and a teacher, and though I will always be widowed, now I am a wife, a mom, and a writer. While I can’t control all the events in my life. I can always decide who I am.