Don't look - my hair's invisible

The queen of the unnoticeable haircut, that's me.

I'm not good about going and doing pretty things for myself, probably because in my mind it still qualifies as an errand, and I hate errands. But I have known for quite some time that I needed a haircut, especially since the whole greasy, stringy, hospital hair fiasco.

But guess what? I like long hair; I like long, straight hair on me. Oh, yes, it's boring, unadventurous, and, no, I don't blow-dry it or style it or put any kind of texturizing, root-lifting, or shine-inducing product in it 99% of the time. My hair is stick-straight and unstyled but healthy. I have never dyed any part of it in my 33 years.

Some of you are sad for me. I feel it.

Worse in your minds, I'm sure, will be my confession that I make my husband trim my hair, since it is so straight and long. Yet, the time had come to pay a professional a princely sum to chop off the split ends and shape it nicely, and so I did.

But I quoted the wrong number. I said four to five inches, and the stylist heard six to seven. It didn't look like much when I held my locks up between my fingers. Maybe it's because my normally shiny hair looked so dull and dirt-brown in that salon mirror. Maybe I was feeling daring, because I had just refused highlights when every woman I know had advised me to try them. While leaping off the bandwagon of high-maintenance coloring, I tripped down the stairs of shorter-than-I-wanted discontent while getting chatty with my hairdresser.

When I got home my husband acknowledged that it was shorter than he would have liked, but he said it looked like it was professionally cut.

No one else noticed. Not one person today looked at me twice, speculating on that fresh look, that change. I took off at least five inches, people! My hair is layered to frame my face, and dammit! It's shorter by half!

I'm the Queen of the Unnoticeable Haircut, and I've known it for years. Each major haircut there are no compliments, no exclamations of, "Did you cut your hair? I like it!" My hair could grow to my feet and then a mad man could cut it off while racing through a public park with a pair of scissors. As he loped away cackling, my friends would all rush to my side and exclaim, "Hillary, are you alright?! What did he do to you?" I would point to my hair desperately, and they would all stare back with blank, uncomprehending faces until I told them to never mind.

I should have gotten those highlights.

I should have gotten my brows plucked, too.



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Renewal Work,  The Rule of No Pens, Pencils, Knives or Scissors

A Shame

As soon as our little daughter came into our room this morning and said, "The tooth fairy was too busy, so she did not come last night," my heart sank.

Too busy. Those were the words that hurt. Too busy for our little Ella? No, no. Just forgetful, just easily distracted.

Grrr. That Tooth Fairy!

Thank God at least that this was not Boo's first tooth. The tooth fairy and I would have had a smack down, which means I would have slapped myself in the face repeatedly while looking in a mirror.

I am very sad to confess this is not the first time for our kids that the Tooth Fairy has been tardy. It has happened on a few occasions, either because there were no two-dollar bills available or because the two adults in this house responsible for reminding her of their sweet, gap-toothed children forgot.

Yes, I feel your scrutiny, but I don't have the heart to defend myself from your opinion of my parenting.

When the fairy is overwhelmed with the millions of teeth shed across the world, we tell our kids to be patient, because she WILL come. She's just busy. She just didn't have the chance last night, but she is faithful, if sometimes late.

That's where Ella got the "too busy" idea, in hearing our conversations with her older siblings. I was sad to hear the words come back to us.

We comfort ourselves that her being unpredictable makes her more believable, more realistic. It works, I guess, because our ten-year-old who argues everything, including religion, still believes. What's funny is that our sweet, compassionate eight-year-old girl has some big doubts. Does she perchance see too much of her mother, who does not do things when she should, who forgets so many things, who is distracted at every turn, in the unreliable Tooth Fairy?

I particularly feel this shame, because somehow over the course of raising our children, I have relegated the Tooth Fairy responsibilities to my husband. He goes to the bank for the special bills. He usually gets down the pillow, the one his mom sewed, per his request, especially for our kids. And because I really stink at sneaking, he slips the reward into the tiny fairy pillow late at night. I don't even do a good job of reminding him.

He told me this morning as we whispered together, "You've got to help me. If you think about it, just tell me."

So a night like last night happens, and I am hanging my head. What is worse is that I see how the disappointment affects my little Ella Boo. She's more touchy about everything, including little things at preschool, and when she tells me after I pick her up, "I'm just having a bad day," I can't help but feel it's all my fault. The Tooth Fairy isn't a fairy at all.

One thing did help - oh and how I thank God for other moms who reject a chance to judge - and that was Ella's preschool teacher saying to me with meaning in her eyes and kindness in her tone, "Yes, I do. I do know how that goes, but the Tooth Fairy will make it up tonight."

Dang right she will, because she does care. She cares so much more than it shows sometimes.

Of butter, and Julia, and romantic pauses

I had two chocolate scones last night, spaced decently to aid digestion, and two cups of skim milk - one cold and one not which always turns me off. I won't drink milk if it's not chilled and accompanied by at least a humble cookie, and to drink milk with anything savory would send me into convulsions of disgust, I suspect.

But I had to have the two scones, because I was watching Julie and Julia, and butter is mentioned an ungodly amount of times in that tale. It's a movie that makes even a reluctant cook like myself think of possibly, remotely in the future, maybe, eventually delving deeper into the culinary arts just to eat the delicious meals in Julia Child's cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Plus, my dad has so exalted French food since his vacation to France with my mother that I am sorely tempted to feel that I have not truly experienced life if I do not find a way (and soon!) to have French food on a semi-regular basis.

But honestly, I don't have a yearning to master the art of any cooking, and French cooking makes me think of being chased by an angry mob through Paris' streets in my underwear; I imagine the result of my efforts would make me feel similarly desperate, outmaneuvered and exposed. Just watching shows about competitive cooking, like Gordon Ramsey's Master Chef tv series, sends me into spasms of chills and makes me involuntarily curl up my limbs in awkward tension. If by some cruel conspiracy of the universe, I ended up on such a show, I would army crawl out the double doors silently while everyone else was viciously whipping their egg whites into clouds, terrified that the cold, skinny Italian guy might spot my escape and throw a supercilious dart of parting pure disgust my way.

But back to the movie. I needed a good movie last night. My poise, patience, selflessness, and compassion were tapped out by evening time. That's not such a problem if one can be alone at the end of a long day, but if you have four children to put to bed it is a serious deficiency. I turned into "a grumpy bear" according to my eldest girl. I was not the gentle lullaby-singing, child-cradling, laughing, long-hugging mother that I do truly try to be as much as possible. My frustration had climaxed, and it had rushed forth to its denouement which left me, after my children were finally in bed, feeling guilty about my lack of motherly softness. So I cried it out to my husband on his birthday when he came home from having drinks and dinner with friends, and I apologized for not wanting to make love on his special day, but added wolfishly, "Well, would you want me like this?"

And by that I meant sniffling, puffy-eyed, looking like a pacing animal in my stress-induced wildness.

"No! Not like that," said Matthew with a shake of his head and a chuckle, but with disappointment hanging behind the words.

So we turned on the movie, and I began to relax. We sat together in the recliner. That is quite a feat, because my hips are so voluptuous that I have to fold up the lower part of my body at a strange angle just to accommodate anyone else. But we fit, and once the movie had begun, it was so lighthearted and sweet, especially the parts concentrating on Julia Child's life, that the tension seeped out of me. Matthew held my hand, something I don't get often in public since he has a blanket policy about even little PDAs (except for the surreptitious bottom pat when he feels he can get away with it). I began to play with Matthew's thick, dark hair that I love so much which he took as an invitation to caress back, of course.

There's a scene in the movie when Julia is writing a letter to her sister or a pen pal, and in the missive she describes her husband coming home for lunch and how she cooks for him. Then next you see him pull her to the bed in a playful embrace, and Julia is writing "and then Paul takes a nap..."

"That's about right," I said to Matthew with a smile. He agreed with an answering, mischievous grin.

Men will zonk out right after lovemaking, and women will be awake, all keyed up and energetic regardless of how tired they may have been beforehand, and it is my solemn belief that if we made love as often as men want us to we could literally rule the world, because we would be so unflagging in our productivity.

The unexpected, somewhat disjointed chemistry on screen between Meryl Streep as Julia Child and Stanley Tucci as her husband made me giggle and made Matthew bolder in his advances to me, and he soon found he had warmed me up sufficiently to receive the birthday gift he wanted.

He kindly offered to rewind my movie after our romantic interlude, and then he stretched himself out full on the couch and, as was only expected, fell asleep. I meanwhile had replenished my energy stores enough to get through the second half of the movie, had my second scone and now too warm milk, and thoroughly enjoyed my alone time while the sleeping presence of my husband a few feet away sent off friendly, warm, comforting vibes.


Julie and Julia

All the world's a backyard...and it's full of weeds and mud

I was digging my nails into the soil with brutal determination, clawing at the thatched Bermuda grass to get at the weed stubs while my kids made a splash mud pad beneath the slide with the hose. I only turned to growl at them on every third or fourth weed I pulled, angry that they had yet again turned my yard work into messy, muddy happy hour.

My kids weren't really to blame for my bad mood, to be fair. They had only exacerbated it with their shenanigans. No, my bad mood was directed at the world at large. I was feeling bad about my fellow human beings, which people have the right to do with temporary abandon now and then. Just the day before, you see, I had read the news.

Then right after, I had read celebrity news. That's a little like wandering the sewers for pleasure, grinning like an idiot, sipping on a martini and smoking a fat cheap cigar. In the end, it all just reeks, you're definitely going to feel a little sick afterwards, and you'll never quite feel like you've cleaned off the filth.

So you can see how the pulling of the weeds became an analogy for my worldview. My yard, you see, is rife with weeds. They're choking out the grass and have long since gone to seed. I only managed this Spring to eradicate them from my plant borders. And I comforted myself as I campaigned against them in the wider yard that I was at least aerating my yard with my dogged labor.

Wish I could aerate the world sometimes.

As for my kids' labor of love, the mud bath, it was mostly my eldest son's doing. I should have known better than to take him up on his offer to water the ground, so I could pull the weeds more easily. The ground didn't get watered all that much. The concrete patio did, the slide did, and I did, but the place where I was actually laboring on two-foot tall weeds - not so much. Kids and a hose...well, that's bound to mean trouble. It means there will be running and screaming and terrorizing of siblings, followed by loads of mud, then the removal of caked shoes and browned socks so that bare feet can squelch in freshly dug holes in the yard. Everyone will end up soaked and grimy, and the baby will get in the midst of it all, mud plastered up to the knees on his overalls, his blue eyes wide at the promising prospect of this newly discovered joy.

I was in a foul temper, shouting at the kids to stop their mud slinging, when Matthew came home. I didn't rise from my weed-pulling to give him the kiss he deserved, so he retreated back inside to change out of his work clothes, only calling through the bathroom window, "So what's for supper?"

Supper-schmupper. I hate supper.

I paused, draping a muddy hand over my knee, and called out boldly, "Okay, I'm not going to hide it anymore - I hate making supper. After all that happens during the day..."

I trailed off, but Matthew already had his response ready.

"So when did you ever try to hide it?" he asked with a laugh.

"I've tried before," I answered grumpily. "I've made some good meals..."

I couldn't remember any examples off-hand, but I knew it was true. There had been a few solid meals here and there that didn't involve plopping all manner of stuff out of a can, forking salad out of a bag or shaking cheese and noodles from a box. But, really, people need to understand a fundamental truth for some of us humans - making a meal at the end of the day, it's like Purgatory after a hard life. A messy life where little leprechauns, cute as hell, follow you around and dump just picked-up toys out of the cupboard, unroll miles of paper towels in order to dance on them, dump their lunch on the floor with a what-you-gonna-do-about-it nonchalance, and spill gallons of milk and juice every day.

"I'll start supper," said Matthew, my hero. "I don't mind."

And, after all, why should he? I was pulling weeds. I haul out trash, too, and handle recycling - both typical "man duties". Hey, I prefer doing them myself; I'm a liberated woman (don't know exactly from what...), and I'm only trying to liberate Matthew as well, so that we can live in peace and harmony like a retro Coca-Cola commercial.

Besides, I still had more weeds to wrest from the yard and some little leprechauns to haul out of the mud and bathe. In my way, I was about to make the world a slightly better place. I just hoped there would be a good meal waiting for me when I was done.