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I would catch my morning hair outline casted by the low-lying winter sun onto the newly painted, Feybuk Blue walls of our bathroom. My silhouette announcing a crazed, disheveled symphony of curves and angles that was way too loud for my inner, pre-shower sleepiness. There you go again, hair. Looking like the mane on The Little Prince or something out of Edward Scissorhands. I must figure out why my bed head is always identifying itself with lonely, misfit boys. Yes, Freud would have a field day.
It started with the Achalasia (Wk 29).
I think it is telling that, when you make the sign of the cross, you touch your forehead first for 'the Father' and you move vertically down to touch the center between your ribcage, the pit of your stomach, for 'the Son'. Maybe some people don’t touch down that far, some only go to the crossroads of their chest. But for me…my right hand seems to land at the Solar Plexus, reaching for the part of my self that instinctually resides there. My illness related to my psyche and to my digestion equally, I feel. In my quiet moments, I allow the possibility that the circumstances of my mom's death decimated my psyche, and then my belly echoed back, "I can't do this. I cannot feel like this all the time. I can't live another day like this…anymore.” It decided to go on strike for the whole of me, because it was tired of waiting around for me to take action. I couldn’t live like that either. My stomach just did me the favor of refusing food – a tangible, scary-as-hell scenario, requiring immediate attention.
Many parts of your body are badasses: the heart, the liver, the brain. Amazing at what they do, but you've better pray they never malfunction. They are not like the whatever(slash)deadbeat organs, like the tonsils or the appendix: one minute you have them and the next you need immediate surgery to get them removed, all along still without any idea of their purpose or benefit to your system, or why you can now go on with your merry Life without an entire body part.
In the name of the mother, the daughter.... My digestive system simply went off duty – a slow ensuing nightmare – in order to save the daughter. I know I will get it back fully somehow. I believe. It is a miraculous thing to be forced to listen to your body.
And because of the Achalasia came the Anemia. I think I could write a whole book titled, Don’t Mess With Anemia.
I used to think it was a simple thing without much repercussion. I had gotten rejected once, when I was 25 years old, at the blood donation clinic on Masonic in San Francisco. Jimmy and I had gone in together in some newlywed, post-honeymoon-travel grand gesture, in our effort to save the world one pint of blood at a time. I was sitting, waiting, in the off-white sea of off-whiteness classic of places that draw blood and are, therefore, overcompensating with a visual announcement that they are really sterilized clean. The tech matter-of-factly takes my index finger, punctures it, and drops a couple of beads of my blood into a liquid solution and after a second, these float up to the surface. Nope. Denied. “You are Anemic.” My mother would later enumerate the possibilities for this bout of low-iron…yes, the stress of the wedding preparations; oh, that motorcycle accident (everything could be blamed on “that motorcycle accident.” My mom would always find a masterful, transitive property way to go back to it somehow.); and her final and perseverant thesis, her always-stowed-in-her-poker-hand Ace: “You and Jimmy just don’t eat enough meat!”
And back then it seemed straight-forward. Ramp up on your spinach eating, and you are good to go. This time it was different. It was drawn out and prolonged and scary.
I noticed the dizzy spells right away. These were more than just getting up from the couch too fast and seeing a couple of black and teal little dots swimming around your field of vision. I was petting my dog one afternoon at the park, and stood up. My peripheral vision was shrouded in dense gray blinders on either side. Anemia created a virtual, claustrophobic prison, where my ability to stay erect and stay conscious – things that maybe I should not have taken so cavalierly for granted my whole Life – were now fully compromised.
And I did not notice my Edward Scissorhands Head getting pounded by the illness until much later. At first it was a passing “huh.” Yes, there were several hairs in the palm of my hand during shampooing. Then, I realized my hairbrush was in need of clearing way more often than I ever remembered, not just a few strands every few days, but more like handfuls.
There was a product in the 70s. It was basically a thick shoe polish for the scalp that had a lengthy commercial to convince viewers that it would mask hair-thinning wondrously. My dad, in his grand baldness, would cling to the words of the announcer way too keenly. We kids thought he was weird. Now, I understand. Our relationship with our full head of hair is sacred; we believe it is our birthright.
And so it happened: one day I noticed an eerie bald spot that had emerged near my temple on the spot where I had bonked myself a week before. It was a large spot, the size of a Sacagawea dollar. The area where my scalp had received the blow had given up, my body replying that it was too malnourished to tackle regrowth for a while. It would take weeks, refusing, like a lazy teen in front of a basket full of laundry to fold, "Ugh, do I gotta?!?"
But eventually and with acupuncture and careful maintenance of my nutrition, the baby hairs started sprouting. Baby hairs was an expression my daughter and I used to have for the little strays that will not stay with their pack, the little tiny ones at the upper reaches of your nape or on the edge of your forehead. If you have straight hair, the baby hairs will decide to grow curly; if you have curly hair, just the opposite – all to fully mess with you and your hair-coiffing plans. Post-anemia, I had unruly baby hairs everywhere. I managed to maintain a socially will-do head of hair, even if secretly I was nurturing the Sacagawea crop circle bald spot on one side and a pony tail that was now about 1/3 of its normal diameter. It is kind of creepy when you notice that the hair tie has to make 5 go-arounds instead of your usual 3. Also unsettling, how much suffering one can endure without others ever noticing.
But, these newlings were a sign of hope.
These days, the baby hairs are teenagers now. A little bit annoying in their comeback: at around 5 inches long, I have an army of young, black strands – thousands – that make my head ‘top-heavy’ while the ends are still lonely in their not-fully-recovered-from-the-anemia scraggliness. My daughter joked one day in the spring, on one of my singularly bad bad hair days, “It is looking kind of 80s, mom. Sort of big on top. It’s cute.” I realized she meant a Joan Jett type of rock mullet.
Haircut upon haircut, in the transitional months, to get the baby hairs to reconcile lengths with the scragglies, I now sport a new short and sassy shoulder length do that, to excuse the pun, "makes ends meet" – and reconciles the months of illness with my newly growing appreciative self. This shortness is harder to relinquish to than you will realize, when you are a Latina. We have been programmed like Stepford Wives femmebots to always have a long cornucopia of hair – so scarily so that its length, somewhere in our depth, equals beauty.
But, I am appreciative about so much more. I am appreciative that even at age 51, I have a good, deep brown going. I was at a theater with my sister-in-law a couple of years ago. We were doing the girlfriend thing where you go to the bathroom together so that you can linger by the washbasins and mirrors after and have girlfriendy conversation while reapplying lipstick, and she asked, “How often do you color your hair?” And I stopped, “I don’t color it.” By her expression, I got it immediately. We are exactly the same age. So I should be thankful. When the grays come, they will come. And, trust me, they are coming. I am still in the pull-one-out-if-I-see-it phase, but it is getting more frequent. Some days I wonder how Head will go. Will it be an all over succumbing, very salt and pepper, or will it be very dignified, with a dramatic, one-sided shock of white, like The Bride of Frankenstein?
For now, thank goodness for the wild, out of control, gravity-defiant, pre-flat-iron taming, just out of bed ways of my anarchist head of hair. There have been many things in the last 18 months that my hair, my body, has had to defy, and for this, let me just say, I love you, Edward Scissorhands Head – almost just as much as I love me some Johnny Depp!
A little Wednesday jam that is close to my heart. Turn it up!
Mirror In The Bathroom - by The English Beat
www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VzakY8h5vI
It started with the Achalasia (Wk 29).
I think it is telling that, when you make the sign of the cross, you touch your forehead first for 'the Father' and you move vertically down to touch the center between your ribcage, the pit of your stomach, for 'the Son'. Maybe some people don’t touch down that far, some only go to the crossroads of their chest. But for me…my right hand seems to land at the Solar Plexus, reaching for the part of my self that instinctually resides there. My illness related to my psyche and to my digestion equally, I feel. In my quiet moments, I allow the possibility that the circumstances of my mom's death decimated my psyche, and then my belly echoed back, "I can't do this. I cannot feel like this all the time. I can't live another day like this…anymore.” It decided to go on strike for the whole of me, because it was tired of waiting around for me to take action. I couldn’t live like that either. My stomach just did me the favor of refusing food – a tangible, scary-as-hell scenario, requiring immediate attention.
Many parts of your body are badasses: the heart, the liver, the brain. Amazing at what they do, but you've better pray they never malfunction. They are not like the whatever(slash)deadbeat organs, like the tonsils or the appendix: one minute you have them and the next you need immediate surgery to get them removed, all along still without any idea of their purpose or benefit to your system, or why you can now go on with your merry Life without an entire body part.
In the name of the mother, the daughter.... My digestive system simply went off duty – a slow ensuing nightmare – in order to save the daughter. I know I will get it back fully somehow. I believe. It is a miraculous thing to be forced to listen to your body.
And because of the Achalasia came the Anemia. I think I could write a whole book titled, Don’t Mess With Anemia.
I used to think it was a simple thing without much repercussion. I had gotten rejected once, when I was 25 years old, at the blood donation clinic on Masonic in San Francisco. Jimmy and I had gone in together in some newlywed, post-honeymoon-travel grand gesture, in our effort to save the world one pint of blood at a time. I was sitting, waiting, in the off-white sea of off-whiteness classic of places that draw blood and are, therefore, overcompensating with a visual announcement that they are really sterilized clean. The tech matter-of-factly takes my index finger, punctures it, and drops a couple of beads of my blood into a liquid solution and after a second, these float up to the surface. Nope. Denied. “You are Anemic.” My mother would later enumerate the possibilities for this bout of low-iron…yes, the stress of the wedding preparations; oh, that motorcycle accident (everything could be blamed on “that motorcycle accident.” My mom would always find a masterful, transitive property way to go back to it somehow.); and her final and perseverant thesis, her always-stowed-in-her-poker-hand Ace: “You and Jimmy just don’t eat enough meat!”
And back then it seemed straight-forward. Ramp up on your spinach eating, and you are good to go. This time it was different. It was drawn out and prolonged and scary.
I noticed the dizzy spells right away. These were more than just getting up from the couch too fast and seeing a couple of black and teal little dots swimming around your field of vision. I was petting my dog one afternoon at the park, and stood up. My peripheral vision was shrouded in dense gray blinders on either side. Anemia created a virtual, claustrophobic prison, where my ability to stay erect and stay conscious – things that maybe I should not have taken so cavalierly for granted my whole Life – were now fully compromised.
And I did not notice my Edward Scissorhands Head getting pounded by the illness until much later. At first it was a passing “huh.” Yes, there were several hairs in the palm of my hand during shampooing. Then, I realized my hairbrush was in need of clearing way more often than I ever remembered, not just a few strands every few days, but more like handfuls.
There was a product in the 70s. It was basically a thick shoe polish for the scalp that had a lengthy commercial to convince viewers that it would mask hair-thinning wondrously. My dad, in his grand baldness, would cling to the words of the announcer way too keenly. We kids thought he was weird. Now, I understand. Our relationship with our full head of hair is sacred; we believe it is our birthright.
And so it happened: one day I noticed an eerie bald spot that had emerged near my temple on the spot where I had bonked myself a week before. It was a large spot, the size of a Sacagawea dollar. The area where my scalp had received the blow had given up, my body replying that it was too malnourished to tackle regrowth for a while. It would take weeks, refusing, like a lazy teen in front of a basket full of laundry to fold, "Ugh, do I gotta?!?"
But eventually and with acupuncture and careful maintenance of my nutrition, the baby hairs started sprouting. Baby hairs was an expression my daughter and I used to have for the little strays that will not stay with their pack, the little tiny ones at the upper reaches of your nape or on the edge of your forehead. If you have straight hair, the baby hairs will decide to grow curly; if you have curly hair, just the opposite – all to fully mess with you and your hair-coiffing plans. Post-anemia, I had unruly baby hairs everywhere. I managed to maintain a socially will-do head of hair, even if secretly I was nurturing the Sacagawea crop circle bald spot on one side and a pony tail that was now about 1/3 of its normal diameter. It is kind of creepy when you notice that the hair tie has to make 5 go-arounds instead of your usual 3. Also unsettling, how much suffering one can endure without others ever noticing.
But, these newlings were a sign of hope.
These days, the baby hairs are teenagers now. A little bit annoying in their comeback: at around 5 inches long, I have an army of young, black strands – thousands – that make my head ‘top-heavy’ while the ends are still lonely in their not-fully-recovered-from-the-anemia scraggliness. My daughter joked one day in the spring, on one of my singularly bad bad hair days, “It is looking kind of 80s, mom. Sort of big on top. It’s cute.” I realized she meant a Joan Jett type of rock mullet.
Haircut upon haircut, in the transitional months, to get the baby hairs to reconcile lengths with the scragglies, I now sport a new short and sassy shoulder length do that, to excuse the pun, "makes ends meet" – and reconciles the months of illness with my newly growing appreciative self. This shortness is harder to relinquish to than you will realize, when you are a Latina. We have been programmed like Stepford Wives femmebots to always have a long cornucopia of hair – so scarily so that its length, somewhere in our depth, equals beauty.
But, I am appreciative about so much more. I am appreciative that even at age 51, I have a good, deep brown going. I was at a theater with my sister-in-law a couple of years ago. We were doing the girlfriend thing where you go to the bathroom together so that you can linger by the washbasins and mirrors after and have girlfriendy conversation while reapplying lipstick, and she asked, “How often do you color your hair?” And I stopped, “I don’t color it.” By her expression, I got it immediately. We are exactly the same age. So I should be thankful. When the grays come, they will come. And, trust me, they are coming. I am still in the pull-one-out-if-I-see-it phase, but it is getting more frequent. Some days I wonder how Head will go. Will it be an all over succumbing, very salt and pepper, or will it be very dignified, with a dramatic, one-sided shock of white, like The Bride of Frankenstein?
For now, thank goodness for the wild, out of control, gravity-defiant, pre-flat-iron taming, just out of bed ways of my anarchist head of hair. There have been many things in the last 18 months that my hair, my body, has had to defy, and for this, let me just say, I love you, Edward Scissorhands Head – almost just as much as I love me some Johnny Depp!
A little Wednesday jam that is close to my heart. Turn it up!
Mirror In The Bathroom - by The English Beat
www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VzakY8h5vI