I got a bad haircut. It happens to everyone from time to time. My hairdresser moved with no forwarding address, so I took my chances with someone else. The girl was very nice and pleasant to talk to. My hairstyle is short to begin with, so I really only wanted her to take about a half of an inch off. I was tired after a long day at work and my commute, so at first I did not pay a whole lot of attention to what she was doing. I spent much of the time with my eyes closed, so I did not see myself in the mirror. I began to wonder, though, when I thought she surely must be done only to have another glob of hair land in my lap.
I went prematurely gray, so I have been coloring my hair for years. When she finally was finished, she kindly told me that I will have to color it again soon. It was then that I looked in the mirror. She had cut the sides so short that it was down to my white roots. My eyebrows, which I am not used to seeing because of bangs and my glasses, looked stark against a forehead that looked more wrinkled than I remembered it.
I had to go to work the next day. I got up twenty minutes earlier than usual so that I could color my hair. I squirted that stuff on as quickly as I could and waited the allotted time. Maybe it would not look so bad if it was colored.
Looking in the mirror and smiling, I reminded myself of a clown. My cheeks puffed out much farther than my hair, and my dimple popped. I used a mirror to see the back, and I realized that I had missed a spot with the color. I still had a white blotch on the back of my head. I also seemed to have a cowlick that I did not know I had. Picture Alfalfa from Little Rascals. Off to work I went.
I started by telling anyone who noticed and mentioned my haircut that I did not like it because it was so short. I appreciated the little white lie and the kindness of my coworkers when they said they liked my haircut as much as I did the comments verifying that it was cut extremely short, but that it would grow. I opened a piece of chocolate in the afternoon, and the wrapper said, “Rock a bad hair day.” After that, if someone complimented me, I just thanked them.
The weekend went by, and I decided to dress up a little Monday morning for work. I could not control my hair, but I could control what I wore. It was during my duty at kindergarten lunch that a girl raised her hand because she needed something opened. After I helped her, she said, “Thank you. You look beautiful today.” It nearly brought tears to my eyes. I do not remember when, if ever, someone has called me beautiful. That good feeling was short-lived, though, as later the same day one of my students told me that my sideburns reminded him of Elvis and that the top part of my hair looked like a bowl.
You may ask, then, how bad is it really? It is pretty bad. I am a clownish, spotted, cowlick-bearing, beautiful, Elvis lookalike at the moment, but I have decided that is okay. We are different things to different people. To a five year old girl, I am beautiful. To a nine year old boy, I look like Elvis with a bowl on his head. To my friends and coworkers, I am someone they want to be kind to. Mostly, I am grateful that it is just a bad haircut and nothing worse. Hair grows. Life goes on. I kept the candy wrapper. I will have to “Rock a bad hair day” for at least a month or two.