When I was born, I had a head full of hair. It wasn’t just a lot of hair for a baby, it was a lot of hair in general. It was jet black, and so thick you couldn’t see my scalp, even right out of the womb. Well, probably right out of the womb, it was pressed flat to my head and rather damp, but I imagine that once I was dried off and wrapped in a blankie, I was quite the startling sight. With blue eyes that never darkened, pale skin, and enough fat rolls to earn the nickname, “the Michelin Man,” my appearance caused complete strangers to stare at me. When I say I was striking, I don’t necessarily mean in a beautiful way, but I was surely arresting.
From the time I was born until I was eleven, my hair was never cut. And I mean never. A trip to the salon meant that my long curly hair was deeply conditioned, combed out, and maybe a half inch was snipped off the bottom. Then it was braided into long neat plaits, with the ends curled. When I was only ten months old, my hair was long enough for two French braids. I know it’s true because I’ve seen pictures. And from there, it just grew. Even when I was only a few years old, I could never wear it down because it would get too tangled. All the girls in class wanted to play with it, but I wouldn’t let anyone touch it. If I did, I feared their fingers would become entangled forever and I would have to spend a painful eternity brushing the whole thing out. Ironic that I had the most feminine, flowing locks in the whole grade, but I couldn’t even brush or do my own hair.
My nanny/second mom, Edrie, had only to sit in a chair or on the floor with a brush in her hand and her knees splayed and I instantly ran over to her so she could do my hair. She was firm but gentle enough, even though it hurt to have her tugging at my head. Edrie came from one of the only black families in town, and everyone knew her as “the singing hallmark lady,” but I didn’t know that race had anything to do with how she combed and braided my hair. She did my hair similarly to how she did her niece’s hair, and she was my best friend, so I assumed we should have the same hair. The most my mom could manage was two braids, because I would start crying when she would tug to brush it out. Edrie, however, a wise woman of many “hallmark” phrases of her own, would tell me, “whining only gets you one thing; me angry.” So I shut my mouth, and sat motionlessly while Edrie did cornrows, microbraids, two-into-ones, and the next day at school, friends would ooh and ahh about the concoction she’d come up with to keep my hair in place and untangled for as long as possible. Edrie had been doing my hair since all there was to do was two “palm trees,” little gatherings of hair splaying out on every side of a ponytail holder.”
My hair’s length had nothing to do with my preference. It didn’t really have anything to do with me. It had everything to do with my mom. My mom seemed to be the only one who had stick-straight, straw-thin hair. Us children had inherited my father’s thick, curly, Jewish hair. Just as my mother had never been Jewish enough for my father, according to his family (she was raised reform, and he was conservative), her hair was never enough, so she lived through ours. My mom has had the exact same chin-length bob since she was eight. It has gotten a little reddish recently as she has tried to cover the grays. But every time she has tried to grow it longer, it becomes brittle and thinner. So she did not let me cut my hair. I didn’t really mind, but when my family moved to Minnesota when I was seven, my hair now extended beyond my butt, and I no longer had Edrie to braid it for me. It was like this uncontrollable monster, not even attached to my own body. Pulling it through a ponytail holder required vigorous, full-body movements. Every time I sat down, I had to sweep it in front of me so I wouldn’t yank my neck back sitting on it. The motion was like a tic and it was completely automatic. My mid-thigh hair probably weighed several pounds, and it took hours upon hours to dry; it would freeze it the sub-Arctic Minnesotan weathers. It would constantly get stuck on everything and tangled in everything and I was always shedding feet-long hairs everywhere I went.
I probably began petitioning my mom to let me cut it when I was around nine or so. It took two full years of pleading, cajoling, and flat-out begging before she let me cut it. It was her hair more than mine, her pride and joy. The compliments cost her nothing, but having my hair shut in car doors were more than a pain in the ass. Her allowing me to finally cut it probably was due to the fact that my pleas had grown in intensity; we had just moved to Providence, Rhode Island, and I was desperate to fit in at my new school, an all-girls Quaker school chock full of WASPy girls who would never accept me anyway. I didn’t know that their non-acceptance of me would run beyond materials and aesthetic goods. All I knew was that I wanted milky pens, a baby G watch, New Balance sneakers, and shoulder-length straight hair. So my mom dropped me off at her fantastically stylish gay stylist, Paul. She couldn’t even come in; that’s how devastated she was. I went with a few of my new friends. Paul cut off 21 inches and the tiniest shred of my childhood. I felt lightheaded and elated. I also felt like I had a phantom limb for weeks. I would run my hands through it and be shocked when it ended. I would put it in a ponytail and it would go through with one tug. I continued to make a sweeping motion to my front every time I sat down. My mom wouldn’t let me donate it to locks of love, though they could have made two wigs out of it. She insisted on keeping it. I have no idea where it is now, and I am pretty sure she doesn’t either.
A lot of things happened between then and my freshman year of college, all various adolescent expressions of myself through hair. I bleached it and dyed it blue, pink, and turquoise in turn, further jeopardizing any shot I would have had at fitting in either at my private school or the public schools I shortly transferred to. At my middle school, where the student body was only ten percent white, it was bad enough that I was already a distinct minority, but I made it worse for myself by having hair every color of the rainbow, a condition which earned me the nickname “skittles”- hissed, never spoken loudly lest a teacher should hear, in the hallways as I passed. I cut it into a stylish bob when I lived in Portugal, trying to let go of the dorky, dowdy, frumpy self I imagined I had been in high school, wearing mostly painters pants I stole from my dad and my mother’s vintage pieces from the last four decades. When I returned from Portugal the summer before college, having skipped out on high school seven months early, everyone agreed I had changed; I had an entirely different attitude about myself, everyone said. The hair was just a physical representation of that.
February of my freshman year of college, my roommate who I’d been living with for two days (having left vicious and evil roommates days earlier after months of begging the res life office) walked in on me naked, standing on a towel, scissors in hand, with the floor covered in my hair. I leapt, shrieked, and jumped behind the closet door until she could coax me out. It had taken me months to get to this point. The usual anxieties of starting college, coupled with the previously-mentioned evil roommates, my sister’s recent marriage and the consequent results it had had on our relationship, and a completely debilitating depression had all brought me to be standing naked, with scissors, in my dorm room, with my hair scattered around the floor. I don’t know exactly what I was trying to do, but I needed to do something. Of course, my hair was fabulously uneven, as I had begun chopping away haphazardly. I shoved on a hat, and at my roommates insistence, ran to the mega mall that was just on the other side of the woods that shrouded our campus. I took off the hat inside and asked if they could fix it. The middle-aged haircutter at whatever discount chain barber I was at told me she could basically give me a flat top, or buzz it. “Shave it off,” I muttered without hesitation, feeling a secret thrill as I did so. I felt a surge of emotion, a private high, that I disguised with a determined frown as she put the guard on the clippers and began moving them across my head. With each pass, watching the hair fall off and the baby-down, clean, new hair that was left, I felt stronger, prouder, more determined. I saw my rigid, square jaw becoming more prominent, my set eyes jutting out from their usual recess. My god, I thought, why didn’t I do this sooner? When she finished with the last pass, I stared at myself and two concurrent thoughts popped into my consciousness. The first was, “badass mother fucker.” The second was, “holy shit, what did I just do?”
No one can know the secret high of shaving your head until you’ve done it. From that moment, roughly three years ago, I’ve had my hair short, occasionally shaving it, carving it into Mohawks, setting in racing stripes. I cannot let it grow. There was something about having short hair that was so satisfying, so empowering beyond description. It made me feel so much bolder, so much more unique, so much more edgy than I’d ever felt. I could walk around with a fucking onesie or overalls on and still feel sexy. I felt a certain respect from others, a certain awe and reverence for what people deemed to be my courage, or boldness, or something they felt they didn’t possess. “I’ve always wanted to shave my head,” came bursting forth from so many delicate, pretty mouths of close friends and total strangers, “but I never had the guts!”
Some people, when they feel angst or frustration, when they feel any sort of pent-up emotion and need to express it in some way, turn to heavy drugs. Others self-mutilate, just to feel something, or perhaps to numb the pain. Some get piercings, some tattoos. Some people just break shit. I shaved my head. It was a physical and emotional release, and once I got it in my head that I needed to shave my head, I had to do it right then. I would rush home as soon as I could as this tension built up inside of me, a tension that could only be broken when I was standing with a towel around my shoulders and felt that first satisfying zip as the razor touched my scalp and the hair, and all my emotions, fell away. And I would emerge anew, rejuvenated, slightly less angry about everything, for at least a little while.
Having short hair, particularly a Mohawk or buzz cut, as a woman, arises many questions about sexual preference. Never in my life had I had anyone question my sexuality, but suddenly, I had women hitting on me because they thought I was gay, men hitting on me because they thought I was gay and hoped to convince me to bat for their team, at least for a threesome or two. The men I dated had to justify their liking me as some sort of novelty or fetish, as though it wasn’t normal for men to attracted to girls with shaved heads. One boy I dated called me “alternative,” and when I asked for he meant, or what about me was alternative, all he could come up with was my shaved head. Because I didn’t fit into peoples’ assumptions of what having a shaved head meant. I wasn’t a punk, I wore flowing summer dresses, and I was-GASP!- straight. Shaving my head had nothing to do with my sexual preference, though it did have a lot to do with my sexuality. It gave me confidence and projected an image. It inspired my friend Maggie to dress me up: “Oooooh! Now that you have short hair, you can wear all these frilly dresses and v-necklines and skirts and it’ll be great! It’ll be a great contrast”
In august of 2008, just before starting at Pitt, I was in a horrible car accident. My friend was driving, distracted at the wheel on a rural country road outside of Rochester, NY. He ran a red light at 60 mph and crashed into a tractor trailer. The other three people in my car emerged, somewhat unscathed, save one friend who fractured one of his lumbar vertebrae, his L3, I think, but even he jumped out of the car in the aftermath, the Honda civic now resembling an accordion rather than any identifiable make or model of car. I was trapped, immobile in the backseat, certain I was going to die right there in the backseat. For the pain was so overwhelming-my abdomen seemed as though it had been split apart-that I couldn’t imagine anyone could stay in this much pain for long. Having passed in and out of consciousness, I pieced together much of the day later on from various peoples’ information. The inches-long gash on my scalp was immediately apparent and quickly stapled together with thirteen hard, cold staples. The tears in my small intestine, ripped apart by the seatbelt, were not so apparent from the outside, but were found within inches of my life, and minutes of my death as I bled internally. I spent a week in a hospital 600 miles from home. I was given welt-inducing Heparin shots every 8 hours so I wouldn’t get blood clots, I was constantly poked and prodded, would awake at 4 AM to find my surgeon lifting up my gown and examining my swollen stomach, pointing out the various aspects of my bowel resection and its healing process to the ten med students I would quickly notice in the darkness, scribbling maniacally on little notepads. The catheter gave me a UTI, and later, when it was taken out and I had to go to the bathroom, it would take up to a half hour before a nurse would answer my button press, leaving me writhing in pain, as IV fluids make the urge to pee come rapidly and forcefully. Once, a nurse’s aide reattached my GI tube after having unplugged me from various machines so I could go to the bathroom, She reattached it wrong, misdirecting the bile that was supposed to be sucked out of my stomach and through my nose into a bag. I woke up covered in my own filthy, stinking bile, my gown and bed soaked, and waited for over an hour, unable to move, before the nurse came to clean me off.
I got a real glimpse of what it will be like to be old- “Ms. Tenenbaum,” the nurses would cadence gently, “Do you think you’re up for a walk today?” “Would you like to try to sit up Ms. Tenenbaum.?
The staples and the IV were the last things they removed on the morning I left. The staples came out one by one and made loud plinks in the steel basin. I gingerly touched my head, feeling over my greasy, unwashed hair to the razor-straight scab beginning to form on my scalp. I was told I could pick at the derma bond on my stomach when it began to heal, but NOT at my head. That I had to let fall off naturally. I imagined what a hit I would be, starting at Pitt, when a piece of my head fell off in my salad as I was attempting to make new friends. I picked at it in Gabriel brothers a few days later, taking of giant pieces of hair in an immensely satisfying gesture while asking the sales dude to pull down various Oriental rugs as he stared at me in disgust.
The aftereffects continued after I left the hospital. I was helpless for two months, unable to drive, lift over ten pounds, reach up, exercise, or walk more than a few blocks without utter exhaustion. I lost fifteen pounds, mostly muscle, and couldn’t get up a flight of stairs without getting winded. On my back, I was a turtle, my abdominal wall so torn apart that I could not even sit up without rolling to my side first. I went through acid reflux so severe it sent me back to the emergency room for an overnight stay, and anemia and B12 deficiencies, because my small intestine, which had been responsible for absorbing the vitamins and nutrients I needed from my food, no longer worked the way it was supposed to, scarred now and missing pieces. I also could not be a passenger in anyone’s car without nearly breaking down in tears, or, on many occasions, actually doing so.
I shaved my head only once since the accident and found the long straight scar waiting for me, showing itself under the Mohawk. The foot long, meandering scar on my stomach was hideable. The only people who had seen it were those who had seen me naked or in a swimsuit since the accident, and this was a small number of people. Suddenly with this visible scar, it was not only a daily reminder to others that there was something on my head to inquire about, but a daily reminder to me of the horrors of the accident and its aftermath, of how much it had fucked with my life. I would see it in the mirror now, even when fully dressed, a visible representation of the damage that had been done. Many well-intentioned people, upon seeing it would remark on how “cool my racing stripe was,” then realize over time that it never grew in, that it was perfectly, unnaturally straight, and that there was not one to match on the other side. It opened up a can of worms with total strangers or mere acquaintances, who upon asking what the line on my head, were unprepared for emotionally-loaded, heavy answer. I willed it to grow in as fast as possible.
Now I am trying to grow out my hair. I vowed not to cut it all year. It is already longer than it has been in some time. Maybe down the line I will be able or ready to shave it again, or to do something else with it. For now, I need to not be “the girl with the Mohawk,” “the girl with the crazy scar,” or “the girl who is clearly a lesbian.” I am not done with those forever, not necessarily. I think I might just be ready to blend in for a while.
