hair today, gone tomorrow

Full disclosure: I am sitting here with half a head full of bright pink hair.

See? What you can't see is the other half of my hair. There's a reason for that -which we will come to in a moment.

I generally forget my hair. I know it's there, I wash it, I get it out of my way. Every once in a while, though, I feel like I should do something with it because that's what people do. One year, I cut it all off --& I mean all of it. Another year, I went blonde. And so on. 

Flashback to last night: I ran a Twitter poll to find out what to do with my hair. Yes, I asked other people what I should do. What do you do when you don't know what to do with your hair? Most people said go with an 'unnatural wild color'. That, I haven't done before. Hmmm ...

Through a series of miscommunications resulting from different definitions of the word "blonde", I ended up looking like Lucius Malfoy (according to my 9 year old, who -at one point -seemed to be on the verge of tears and kept repeating, "I'm sorry ..."). So 'wild unnatural color' it was to be after all, but not as planned. The original compromise had been blonde hair with some pink-purple in the front, and now, I looked like Lucius Malfoy. I had wanted to have my safe cake and eat my wild cake, too, or whatever it's called when you want things both ways, and it had backfired --badly.

And I was afraid. Even though I was reassuring my 9 year old, "Don't worry, honey. It's just hair," I was afraid.

I know it grows. I know there's more to people than what they look like. But it looked and looks awful, and for some reason, that fills me with fear. Maybe I'm more hung up on looks than I thought? 

Oh, and I think I forgot to mention one important detail: my son needed to be at a birthday party at 12:45, so we had to stop everything at 12:30 --no matter what the state of hair affairs was --and that was to be that. So pink-purple in the front, Lucius Malfoy in the back with an incomplete haircut is the hair I ended up with as of 12:30.

And I hate it.

But leaving gave me time to think and reflect. 

It is just hair. It is responsible to and for no one. It doesn't hurt anyone if it is different. 

And this situation with my hair is a metaphor for my life. The areas of my life I feel most successful in are the ones I made a decision about and I committed to that decision. I did not do that with my hair. I compromised about something that didn't really require compromise, and I was left feeling horrible. If I want to try pink, I need to try pink. I didn't walk in wanting to try Lucius Malfoy, so I don't need to accept Lucius Malfoy.

It is just hair. It is temporary. One shouldn't be left with regrets when all is said and done. So I am going back, and I'm going to do it right. All pink it will be.

And I can live with that. For now. And we'll see how it goes.