That was a heck of a perm.
"Yoo-hoooooo," I said. He quickly stopped staring at the side of my head and looked me in the eye. I pointed to the hair behind my ear.
"Why are you looking there," I asked and then, pointing to my mouth, finished, "when the words are coming out here?"
"Your hair is curly," he said, furrowing his brow. Well, not so much curly as beautifully wavy and luxuriously soft -- as one friend put it -- "like a cocker spaniel's."
"I know. It's nice isn't it?" I asked my son, but he just shrugged and stopped staring at one of the few side effects of chemotherapy that I actually enjoy. In the last few weeks, my hair's post-chemo return has progressed in style from super short Annie Lennox back-up singer to wavy-cool Molly Ringwald circa 1985, only brown instead of red. And everybody feels the need to comment on it.
I was talking to my neighbor at the school bus stop when I realized she, too, wasn't paying any attention to what was coming out of my mouth.
"You don't have any gray!" she complained.
"And a few months ago, I didn't have any hair!" I quipped. Gray, schmay. That's easier to cover up than bald is. At least with hair dye, no one wonders why you're wearing a headscarf in 90 degree weather.
One afternoon, my father-in-law, too, stared at me with a puzzled look on his face. "Wasn't it a lighter color before?" he asked.
"Yep," I answered, not offering that it's because I had
highlighted my hair blonde for years. But I'm not sure I want or
need the chemical load anymore. When my oncologist advised "proper
ventilation" with any hair dye, I pictured my hairstylist in a
Hazmat suit and thought the better of it.
A mom on the bleachers at my son's baseball game loved my curls. "I
wonder if I shaved my hair if it would come back all nice and curly
like that."
"It wasn't the shaving that curled it," I answered. "And that was one heck of a perm."
I don't recommend it.
And yet, I'm enjoying all the fuss over my hair, not just because I have hair to fuss over in the first place, but also, because it's all so... normal. When I told a friend whom I ran into at the supermarket I was happy just to have a normal looking hairstyle so that people wouldn't stare at me in the produce aisle anymore, she offered, "Isn't that something? You spent your whole life trying to stand out, and now you just want to look like everyone else."
I thought about the blood test I'll have this week which will determine whether the cancer has returned or not.
"Yep," I said. "Normal is great."
But curly is spectacular.
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