The Final, Hair

Hair, How to Wear It

By Leisa M. Clement

           I have more hair than most people I know. I almost always have. In fact, I  remember very few times that I have not had my hair long. Once was for convenience, once was an accident, and once I had it cut on purpose. Excepting for those three times in my life, I have always had it long enough to sit on, get stuck in the car door, and in general be a pain in my neck, on a regular basis.

            The earliest time I can remember that I had my hair short was the summer when I was going into third grade. My family lived in Seymour, Connecticut, and we were moving up to Maine, where my parents were originally from. I remember that we were packing up the house and my mom was very busy. I remember my Mom at the next door neighbor’s house, mad because I had gotten gum in my hair after she had just washed it. I can still see her in my mind’s eye, stopping what she was doing and looking at me for just a moment, then asking me if I minded if she could just cut the gum out. I, in my youthful naiveté, went ahead and gave my permission. The next thing I knew the back of my neck was getting sunburnt. It must have affected me greatly because I can still remember the episode vividly. I also remember my mother saying, “it will grow back, it will grow back, don’t worry.”

            My mother was right and my hair eventually grew back. It took a couple years before it was almost where it had been when she whacked it off. We were settled in our new home in Orrington, Maine by the time the next episode with short hair arose, when I was in fourth grade. That was right about that time when I became aware there was such a thing as hairdo styles, and clothes and cliques. The shag cut, either short or long, was THE hair style to have. I begged my parents repeatedly for that haircut. I smartened up and talked to my grandmother, who came to Brewer every week, just to have her hair done at the beauty school. That must have worked because Gram came and picked Mom and I up one Saturday afternoon, and took us to the beauty school. I can still see the old storefront, and remember the odd smells inside the salon that first time. I remember being excited and proud when I told the lady that I wanted a long shag. I fairly strutted to the chair and hopped up on the little stool they put in the chair because I was so little. In the large mirror in front of me, I watched with pride, as the “beautician” snipped and snipped at hair on the front side of my head, and then my pride turned to absolute horror, as the next thing I knew, the woman continued on, right around my head. At that first wrong snip, my eyes welled up and the tears started to roll. The beautician, noticing this, asked if there was something wrong and I can still hear my mother’s reply, “No, nothing’s wrong. She is just so excited about her haircut.” I heard the quiet tones my mother used and knew what she was trying to say. We were in public, the deed was done, and couldn’t be undone now. “Don’t worry,” my mom said, when we got home, “it will grow back.”

            The last time I ever had my hair short was when I went to boot camp. I was nervous about boot camp to begin with, and wasn’t sure what to expect from the whole process, but cutting my hair was not something that had crossed my mind. It ran across the pathways when the new company commander reminded those of us with long hair, if it fell out of being put up, then the whole company was going to have to do push-ups. She used the only argument that could have worked with me, which was, others would have to pay for my hair falling out of the updo that I put it in. Eventually, that would have pissed off someone, so I chose to be proactive, and to have it cut. I was the only one with long hair that chose to do so, and I am glad that I did.  For the few girls that opted to keep their hair long, we in the rest of the company, had to pay for it with a few extra push-ups . Life is not good when you have 79 girls all mad at you because your hair fell out of the hat you stuffed it in. I kept it above my shirt collar for the next three years. It was not until I knew that I would not be enlisting again that I began growing out my hair again. It has remained as long as I could possibly get it since then.

             Many things about me have changed throughout the years, where I live, the accent in my speech, my weight, the one thing that never has changed is the length of my hair, unless it was to get longer. Taking care of my hair is the one ritual that I have kept throughout my lifetime. It relaxes, and soothes me. I do some of my best thinking at night, when I am combing out my hair and giving it a few healthy strokes with the hairbrush.  I spend much time each day washing, combing, styling and in general, fretting over the state that my hair is in. My children have learned that that is a time that they can have my complete undivided attention, and every time my son wants to sorely aggravate me now, for whatever reason, he sneaks up behind me and, quick as the pesky little varmint that he is, will pluck out a gray hair, all the while laughing like a loony and saying, “Don’t worry Ma, it will grow back.”

Hobbies or Life,What's It Going To Be?

            Among my many talents, or faults depending on your point of view, I have a hobby that I find totally relaxing. In moments of stress I go off in my own little world "doing my thing" and it calms the chaos in my inner being, enough so that I can come back to the real world and act like a quasi-sane person. I like to take photos. I usually like the scenic photos, but I will snap a picture of anything given half a chance . Taking photos is a relatively new hobby for me and now, in this digital age, it is quite inexpensive to dabble in it on a regular basis. There is a great difference between the me that is taking photos and the me that everyone meets on an ordinary regular basis. In the process of getting the picture and developing it at my local drugstore photo kiosk I am a very different person, I am physically stronger while getting the photo, I come back spiritually recharged, and I am definitely mentally quicker than when I woke up that morning. Especially after spotting the perfect picture, getting it on camera, and getting it developed that same day. Only cost 29 cents but the benefits to me are priceless.
            I have always liked taking photographs, but with the 35 mm rolls that had to be sent off to be developed, which cost an arm and a leg, I never really had the time or the money unless it was a special occasion such as a wedding, funeral, or a school play. A couple of years ago I was given a small digital camera by my company when I started my new job as a newspaper delivery person. This was so that when I was out and about delivering papers and happened on a story, I could get some pictures to go with it. From that moment on, when I realized how easy it was to take the pictures, develope them right there in the store and it took just a few moments to get it done, I was hooked like a hungry trout in a river full of fishermen. I especially love to take photos of the sunrise and since I travel through three counties in Maine, at different times of the morning, I often have the opportunity of doing so. When snapping my photos, I become so totally focused on getting the picture, I am not aware of the rest of my surroundings. I am not afraid to crawl out on a tree limb to get a different angle of the stupid bird that flew off anyway, or to follow the stream flowing off the side of a mountain to see where the water ended up and maybe catch the sun off the water or something. I have snapped a few of those. In my ordinary life I can't focus on a gnat and have to look at the road when I step off the curb for fear of falling, but put a camera in my hands and a sunrise in front of me and I am someone totally different, fearlessly focused and driven to get the shot. I allow nothing, not even time to get in the way of my quest. I do not understand why that is, I only know that if I want a shot with my camera no branch is too small, no mountain to steep, or water too cold for me to try to get my shot.
              After taking the perfect shot or I should say thinking I did I hurry through the rest of my paper route, or whatever else I am doing, and get to my local drugstore as quick as I can while hoping I don't have to knock anyone off the developing kiosk that is my favorite one. It is the one that prints them out right then and there. I remove the little card out of my camera, then as if I was Dorothy stepping out of the house over the rainbow, there is another world for me, full of color and light. As I am cutting and cropping and adding a bit more of color to this picture or subtracting some of the glaring light off a body of water in that one, I tap into my personal creativity, which generally, in the dull humdrum of my life, is damn near strangled right out of me. It helps that I have the computer right there and can reset and do over, if I don't like this or that thing that I have done to the original picture. I can edit my photo and keep both versions of it  although I do that on a hit and miss basis since my jinx with mechanical stuff still applies. When I am completely done withall the photos I want developed I walk out of the store grabbing my little treasures and more alert than I have felt all week. I have gotten into the habit of balancing out my check book on these days as for some reason it goes smother for me at this time. I try to balance it right to the penny. Sometimes I succeed. I also can figure out my budget and I often remember all the bills in my budget. I think there is truth tto the fact that artmakes you think. I certainly prove it when I am done with my pictures.
            Spiritually the quest to take a perfect picture is like beginning an adventure. I am alone when I am picture snapping usually and happy to be out in the woods and in the elements. Something about walking in the woods fills me full of life. Maybe it is the smell of the air, hearing the wind, feeling the sunshine on my face listening to the sounds of nature, but when I walk out of the woods I am so full of life that my hair is just about standing on its' ends. If it were possible I literally soak the life of the woods in through my pores. I come home happy full of life, love and an appreciation for all the living beings around me. I am literally in love with life at that point, and those endorphins or whatever it is that I am so high on, last me for days.  I don't know of anything that charges me up like that if there ever was anything in my life that did.
           Taking photos for me is the best hobby that I have ever found for myself. Maybe someone else feels the same about a different hobby such as building birdhouses or collecting stamps, or a different place, like the beach or the desert. For me nothing will ever come close to the way I fel when I am taking a picture of the sunrise over a small pond or the sun coming up behind the mountains. I am constantly amazed at the beauty all around me and the fact that tomorrow I will wake up and there will be another sunrise just for me to take a picture again. Tomorow I will be able to emerse myself in the color and the light of the morning sunrise, and my body, my mind, and my spirit will be renewed and ready to face another few days of the dull drudgery of my day to day existance. My hobby is a part of me now, as important to me as going to church sometimes. I feel closer to my God out there in the vast expanses that He has created, then I ever really have in any of the buildings I have worshipped in. After all He made the sunrise just for me to photograph.
        

Examples of Time

       Getting old is a as natural as the river behind my house. For a long time I did not want to admit that I was getting old. After awhile, in the face of overwhelming evidence, I can no longer hide the fact of what the rest of the world already knows, I really am getting old. The deterioration of my vision, the fact that I seem to feel every little ache and pain as I never have before, and the overwhelming preoccupation with my body weight. It doesn't mean that I think that I am ready to move into the local retirement home or subscribe to AARP yet, but I am realizing that I am not the spring chicken I used to be anymore, and I  completely regret the wasteful excesses of my youth that cause my discomfort today.
             In my youth I had the vision that would allow me to spot an ant on a duck's behind at a hundred yards as my father likes to tell it. I can say that this was probably mostly true, my eye exam when I enlisted in the service was better than twenty-twenty.  Although why I would want to look at a duck's behind always escaped me and Dad could never explain why I would want to either. Regardless, as time flowed onward to whatever destination it is always working towards, my eyes have slowly lost the ability they once had to focus on that ant and right now I have to sqint to see the duck as well. I think of all the times I stayed up past my bedtime reading under the covers with a flashlight, the marathon computer work that I had to do for the service or even all the times that I was out in the sun without my sunglasses and I have to wonder if my vision would be as bad as it is if I had not done all those things. Maybe, maybe not, I will never know. I do know that I now cannot read the print on cans, boxes, bags, and even my paycheck. Yesterday I had forgotten my glasses and had to ask Stephanie at the bank to read the balance to me. Quite often I have to have my children read me instructions on the labels so that I know what I am doing. It grates on my independent soul like salt in an open wound. It is a small inconvenience though, and at least I do not have the accompanying headaches.
             As I get older I more and more of the aches and pains that I have acquired through the years. I know now why people speak of athletes as having a limited career. If these aches and pains are what they feel every day, then I understand completely. My feet swell and ache, my back is stiff every morning, I have tendinitis in both shoulders, although it is worse in my right one. Guess what hand I use most of the time. I can barely lift a coffee pot on rainy days. Due to an accident in 2001 I have quite a bit of metal in my left forearm so again on cold, wet, days there is aches and pains there as well. I remember as a youngster I could run, jump, dance the night away. Now I get winded thinking about it. If I had known how I was going to feel as an aging adult, maybe I wouldn't have got on the four wheeler behind a drinking driver, or I certainly would have said something when asked to shovel heavy, wet, snow over eight foot snow banks a couple of years ago. Had I known then what it was going to do to my future comfort, or lack there of, I would have definitely refused to do it. The long and short of it, as I have already stated, is that we spend our youth doing what ever we want and we spend our middle age regretting the excesses that we did as youngsters and dreading what we are to look forward to as oldsters.The aches and pains only get worse as I get older, they never really go away, each twinge reminding me of a time that I was simply having too much fun, and not realizing the future price that I would have to pay, daily.
            Another sign that I am growing older would be the regrettable slowing down of my natural metabolism. No longer can I eat anything, and everything in my sight with no more consequence then walking through a field of flowers. I have always liked food, alot. I still try to eat as if I was cramming for finals in high school when I ate candy bars three or four times a day and downed them alongside cans of Pepsi with no consequences except my father's wallet was a bit thinner. My metabolism was high enough that after giving birth I was in my pre-pregnancy clothes a week later. That is not an exaggeration. Now, today, if I even think about chocolate I'll put on two or three new pounds. The extra weight has caused me to break the laws of gravity in places policemen can't . How my itty-bitty little legs are holding up my weight I will never know, but they do and it is intensely uncomfortable for them, and my feet. I am so uncomfortable that I have begun doing research on I word I heard once. Diet. Even the sound of the word reminds me of death. Die-t I am now wearing pants that the federal budget could fit into and I truely hope I can get through this holiday season without outgrowing everything. Again.
              There is something inheirantly wrong with the fact that we have all our health and vigor in our youth, when we are to numb to realize what a gift it is and that it should not be taken advantage of. Someone, who shall remain nameless, has a real mean streak for that one.  There are more examples that I am getting older that I could list, but these are the ones that I am most familiar with. I honestly regret some of those excesses that I was too numb to think about and now have no one but myself to blame for them. They are the ones that rear their awful rotten heads on a daily basis and force me to remember that life goes on and on and nothing in the world will make me one day younger. It is a good thing that at least my knowledge is increasing along with my aches and pains, and my waistline. Now at least I know when I look at something I can tell if it is going to be a bad idea or not, and with the wisdom of my increasing age I can look at something and realize that I really don't want to do that. Somehow that thought percolates into the part of my brain that handles my actions. Must be because I can't really remember what it was I wanted to do...

Effects of Life

               No one can say with any certainty what is going to happen in their future but never would I have dreamed that my thirteen year old stepson would molest my nine year old daughter. As devastating as that was for my family, the thought of sending my stepson back to a nightmare existence with his mother without trying to help him, warred with the thought of what he had done and might possibly do again to my daughter. Back and forth I went about this decision and with my now ex-husband refusing to make a decision between his two children, it left the decision of what to do completely up to me. After much thought, and many discussions with my pastor, and many counselors, and my family physician, I chose to try to help my stepson, After two years of family therapy I found out I had chosen wrongly. This event cracked my family apart at the seams destroying my family forever, or so I thought at the time. The guilt, anger, and self-loathing caused me to break my faith with my God,and my future is now radically different than it would have been had this event not happened.
            By the time that I realized helping my stepson was never going to happen, I was living in Cherrypoint, NC. I had him removed from the house and sent back to his mother and I did not care what was going to happen to him at that point. The kids and I closed ranks around each other. Although he was in the USN at the time, my ex husband volunteered for every temporary duty he could and conveniently was sent off to parts unknown. There were other issues, there always are, but the long and short of it was that we were done as a couple, a family, however you want to look at it, our future was gone. I had lost a boy that I thought of as my own, and my children had lost a brother. Because my husband and I soon split up, they also lost a father. The day I moved back home to Maine, my ex husband stopped being in their life. I realize now this was his choice, but for many years I thought it was my fault. However I wanted to look at it, my life as I had known it and thought it was going to be, was never going to be that way again. My family was in splinters around me and I knew that it was going to be a long time before there would be a return to peace or stability in my life.
             During all the drama that was going on initially we were in Florida and I had my pastor and my church family and my faith, my ex husband received orders to NC and the stage was then set for the final disintegration of my family. When my family finally did split in to pieces, I was very isolated and so angry.  I felt like everything was my fault and I could not handle the overwhelming sense of guilt, anger, and self-loathing. So I blamed God. It was very easy to talk myself into believing that every bad thing was God's fault because He had let this horrible thing happen to my daughter and by extension,to me. No more would I share my burdens with Him or ask for His wisdom and guidance, or have someone who knew how I felt without my having to tell Him. I now had to handle everything that came my way on my own with no one to talk it over with and I had to rely on my own judgement to get me through every situation. I hope that I never have to be that alone and lonely again. It made me realize just how inadequate we humans are to make decisions on our own. There was a rage in my heart that I could do nothing with. It led to behavior that I am not exactly proud of, to say the least, but I do not deny it if I am asked about it. I was not in a place that I could accept my own responsibility in the whole mess and I had to blame someone, so I blamed God. I decided that since God didn't protect my daughter, my family, or my future as I thought they  should be protected when I asked Him to, then I was not going to give Him what He asked of from me either. That left a huge, very deep, very dark void in my life which I tried to fill with all the wrong people, habits, and things. I ended up hurting no one but myself really.Maybe that is what I was trying to do, punish myself for make the wrong choices. I finally crawled out of my pit and returned to my faith but I will always remember that deep, dark place when I was so bitter and alone. I know that I will never make that mistake again because even though I am alone at this point in my life, I am not lonely. I have too many people who care about me and love me and I will always have my faith to turn to to see me through the rough spots that I know will come my way.
             Before this event in my life happened, I thought that marriage was forever. Whether or not my husband was good, bad, or indifferent, he was my Prince Charming and we were going to live together happily ever after. I was supposed to have an old farmhouse with a wraparound porch and an apple tree in the yard. My husband had a job in which he was going to retire soon, we were going to buy that house, the kids would move out in their turn, and I would go back to school full time. I would then get a really cool job. I was supposed to be an accountant, or secretary or even a missionary. My life was all set, my future was assured and I was going to have a fifty year wedding anniversary. Then this happened and all bets were off. I was now the object that I had always pitied, a single mother with no education, struggling to take care of her kids as best she could with all the state aid she could qualify for. It would be another two decades almost before the idea of school could even be contemplated. What I wanted to be then is not what I want now. I would never have dreamed that I would be the wife of a prisoner who is doing hard time. I never thought that I would be cleaning toilets for a living, and living in a forty year old trailer with issues.
              So here I am today and time heals all wounds as my mother kept trying to tell me through all this and I have to say the only thing that I am sure of in my life is that my mother is a very smart woman and I should have listened to her about many different things a long time ago. I eventually picked up the pieces of my life and put them back together albeit in a different order than they were to begin with. I found my faith again and feel blessed that my God is a forgiving one. I am not alone anymore and have found the kind of peace that I needed to make it through life on my own two feet, and I have a whole church family that are there for me and to help me stay on the right track. As for my future, although it is radically different then I thought it was going to be,I own my own home such that it is right on the river. I am in college and I am there on my terms not anyone else's. My children are grown and becoming responsible citizens whatever that really is, and my husband although a bad boy is one of the most honest people I have ever met with a bigger heart in him than almost anybody I have ever met. He can spot bullshit from across the room and instinctively knows more about parenting than I will ever read in all the how-,to books out there. He is the love of my life and beside him all others pale in comparison. This thing that happened to my family was an awful thing, more awful then anything I could ever have dreamed of, but I got through and I helped my daughter through it. She doesn't hate me for which I am thankful for. My husband is coming home soon enough and the future is starting to look pretty good again. I guess my mother was right after all and time does heal all wounds.