Grade Seven Hair

Junior high was a scary yet delicious transition
To me, a grade sixer
Who couldn’t wait to grow up and move on
To the exciting and more independent real world
Of grade seven.

And at the worldly age of twelve
I was more than ready to delve
into this strange new terrain.
This…was where training bras were traded in
for over the shoulder boulder holders
that actually had cups.
This…was where girls tittered in the corner,
whispering wisely about getting their periods
While other, less enlightened girls
thought they were talking about punctuation.
This…was where my mother stopped laying clothes out on my bed.
And where she finally unleashed to me
my freedom
to choose my very own hairstyle
For my very own head.

You see, up until grade six,
I was forced to wear “bowl-cut slash-Frankenstein” hair
With bangs that looked liked they’d been slashed by a machete,
But had really been cut by mother.
Because, my mom said, it was easier to take care of this way.
It was easier to untangle.
It was easier to unmangle.
It was easier to cut the gum away.

Yes, but it was also easier for more than one kid to snicker meanly
While they asked if I was a boy.

But now, oh joy,
with my baby days and my baby ways behind me
I had entered the big leagues.
I was in the majors.
And Majors was exactly what I wanted.

A Farrah Fawcett-Majors hairstyle!

I brought a picture from Tiger Beat magazine
to my mom’s beauty salon.
You know, the one with Farrah in the bathing suit.
And my mom’s hairdresser thought it was soooo cute.
But later, I was anything but
As I tried to make sense of my much anticipated
But totally inappropriate
Haircut.

It didn’t take a long look in the mirror
for the truth to become brutally clear:
I wasn’t Farrah Fawcett.

I was a twelve year old with thirty-year old hair.

At least, until I left the hair salon.
From that moment on,
all sense of any hair “style”
Was gone.

For hours
Every day thereafter,
I would fume in the bathroom.

Brandishing a curling iron like it was Luke Skywalker’s light sabre
And my hair was Darth Vader
A dark force to be reckoned with,
To be beaten and tamed.
Or, if necessary, to be maimed.

The heat from the curling iron was intense.
The stench of burning hair was unbearable.
Yet one side wouldn’t take a curl at all.
While the other side immediately took on a texture
that curiously resembled cotton candy from the mall.

My grade-seven yearbook picture is a testament
to the most depressing fact
That, more times than not,
I came out on the losing end of a curling iron fight.

But after all the singed bangs
All the bathroom tantrums
All the forehead scars
My next yearbook picture--in grade eight
Confirms, believe it or not, an even worse fate
for my already horrible and horrified hair.

The perm.

And if you’ve ever been a teenage girl,
Just the word
Makes you squirm.
And you’re probably painfully aware
That I don’t need to explain that unfortunate look
any further.

© 2007 Jan Mann