My little girl's first concerns as she greets each new day are: a) did my hair get long over night⢠and b) if not, where is my fake hairâ¢
Well-nigh bald until she was 2, my daughter cultivates what most beauticians and child psychologists would term an obsession. Her idea of a perfect play date is to spend it tinkering with the invariably longer tresses of the little girls who've come to play, a game which always ends with somebody crying.
What my girl wants is something soft and silky and blond to flip over her shoulder. To this end, she had taken to wearing hair extensions. By now she has about a dozen of them, golden hanks of synthetic hair the likes of which I've only ever seen in two other places: on the heads of Barbie and on the rear ends of plastic horses.
I know why she got her first fake hair. One morning last spring my daughter locked herself in the upstairs bathroom with a pair of scissors. By the time I discovered the door bolted, she had plowed a 4-inch bean-row into her crown. At her feet were the feathery remains of a good year's worth of coaxing and waiting.
Seeing as she had given herself a reverse-mullet, repair was in order. A beautician evened things out by cropping the rest of her head, leaving her with a summer buzz cut.
Shortly thereafter, a baby sitter brought a first set of hair extensions, a half-dozen light brown skinny braids clustered on an elastic strap. (Try as I might to attach the elastic to a hank of her stubby hair, I failed. Our painter, Scott, finally solved the problem by putting the elastic around her head, allowing the braids to fall to one side beneath her ear, launching her Rastafarian phase.)
That was in May. The girl has not appeared in public without the hair since. She wears her hair for swimming, bathing, sleeping and eating; neighbors don't even comment any more.
There's something to that Sampson and Delilah story. After driving eight hours to the shore for summer vacation, we arrived to find our daughter had lost her braids.
Utter despair ensued. She could not possibly enjoy this vacation without her hair. After trips to Target and Wal-Mart turned up nothing, I decided to fashion my own set of braids from a skein of golden yarn and a length of elastic. And then, while unpacking the car, my husband found the hair clinging to the side of a fishing pole.
After that I bought two or three backup hair extensions. Friends and neighbors have added to her collection, making my girl's noggin the equivalent of a Vo-Tech cosmetology lab.
Still, her favorite is the original cluster of skinny braids, worn at her right ear. Over the months they have frayed and matted and become crusty with chlorine and fruit juice. When I rushed her to the hospital with a mysterious high fever last month, she was wearing her hair. As the ER doctor looked my daughter over, I'm pretty sure the same thought occurred to both of us: Were those skanky braids carrying disease⢠As she slept that night I stole them and put them through the hot cycle of the dishwasher.
Some day I'm going to steal them again, for the last time. I'll tuck them away in a box with her first teeth and her first ballet slippers. And when, on her wedding day, she stands before me in all her white splendor, I'm going to pull out those braids and tell her about the summer she thought she was hot stuff when she wore them. She probably won't believe me.
I'm guessing her own hair will have grown back by then.
