Yesterday I had a small revelation. Washing my hair, an undetected jagged fingernail caught my scalp, and suddenly I was 8 years old and lying in the hairdresser's chair with my head back over the basin, as her scarlet talons dug viciously into my scalp underneath the steaming, scalding spray. I knew that in moments, she'd be wrapping my head in a towel twisted so tightly I could feel my hair ripping out, and possibly even snipping into the tops of my ears, which happened more than once. Always passed off apologetically as an accident, a moment's inattention, perhaps I'd wriggled...
No wonder I hated having my hair "done" which, sadly, my mother saw as the ultimate luxurious treat. For years I've wondered whether my total indifference to the art of coiffure was as much down to some "mildly autistic" trait, as to being "blessed" with thin, fine baby hair that's never grown down past my shoulders and can't hold a style for more than ten minutes. But that unpleasant memory, & others like it, was added internally to that of the young gentleman who in 1977 plastered my scalp with eye-watering "perm" solution, then wandered off to the next-door bookies for half an hour or so, leaving me to go off to university for the first time in a strange country, topped with brittle greenish frizz and a scalp that was gently leaking blood in several places.
No wonder it takes wild horses to drag me into a salon now! I'm very grateful that my darling daughters will occasionally consent to snip an inch or so off, though sometimes I'd like it to be more, but they'd rather like me to keep it longer. And I have braved the hairdresser's chair once or twice lately, just for a trim prior to one or other of my older boys' weddings. But I'd really rather ignore the stuff altogether to this day.
Looking back, I see now my mother's earnest wish to treat me & get me interested in matters of style & personal appearance, rather than scrambling up trees and braiding grasses. The hairdresser who likely saw the "rich, spoilt" kid from the big house couldn't have known that we were actually pretty much penniless & that Mum would have fed us baked beans for a week rather than "let the side down" by ever appearing in public without her hair carefully coiffed, lipstick applied and her stockings & panty-girdle on. To her, and probably the vast majority of her fast-disappearing generation, keeping up appearances was literally a matter of life & death socially, rather than a statement of who you really are. I can't watch the old sit-com "Keeping Up Appearances" without wincing sometimes!
I think what I'm trying to say here is that sometimes, what we see as a huge treat, and possibly even a necessary rite of passage, is actually an ordeal for the "lucky" recipient, for reasons that we're not aware of. I'm very glad that in some ways now we are more willing to let children be children, rather than trying to turn them into miniature adults "for their own good" or our own social standing, and to try to make them fit a mould they may not be suited to. And I do hope that we have at least begun to learn the lesson that there's a huge difference between "socialising" children and the kind of in-their-own-interests cruelty that led eventually to, say, foot-binding, or FGM.
And I can begin to forgive that hairdresser who seemed so sadistic to the child who was me. She must have seen a child who absolutely failed to recognise how privileged she was, to have a mother who could pay for this "treat" and was interested enough to do so (IIRC the poor girl had been raised in a children's home) and who was not in the least bit grateful for her undoubted artistry. I'd never realised the burden of distress and anger I'd been holding onto for so very many years, which has led a daily comb-through being about as much as I can stand.
Not that that's likely to tempt me back into a salon any time soon...
Pic of Jinxi in a vintage "vanity" case as cat tax!
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