I have underinvested in myself over these last ten years that I could categorize as misshapen baby bearing days. I have invested in my kids and my career but not so much in myself. And I decided one day at the beginning of the school year that it was high time to celebrate my disinterest in my outward appearance. I got a new hair stylist named Michael from a guy giving out coupons at the Pier One one day. I who once bought make-up at the chanel counter am getting coupons from guys at a wicker shop. I went to try him out.
"I'd like to cut all my hair off and let it be grey- it will be much easier and I just need to face the facts - I need simple" I emphatically request of my new friend Michael.
Quickly and without a second thought, Michael looks sort of condescendingly at me and replies "honey, you don't know me and I don't know you but know this... That plan isn't going to work for me. You are too young. No way.".
And this is how I ended up spending 600 dollars and 5 hours on hair that cost under a hundred for the entire year preceding. I was bored and soon to be very poor but the hair, it mud be said, was gorgeous. Strangers say so and that's how I know it must be true.
New hair on head, I am emboldened and my will to solve my fabulous second childs misery is strong. No one with hair like this lets their kid be bullied by their peers and teachers, after all. His teacher doesn't control her classroom well. It is loud and chaotic. The teacher yells at the kids constantly but without impact. She dishes out random points for acts of excessive wonderfulness that only a precious few seem capable of achieving. There are no kids he knows in this class - not a single child from the previous year. This could all be fine if my son wasn't completely a mess of a 7 year old boy every day. So basically it's not fine.
And so I set up a conference. A rule of thumb... If you need a conference on the second week of school things aren't going to go well. Maybe not a universal truth but I'd put a pack of Bublicious on it that it's more true than not.
I take it one step beyond setting up a conference, I actually proceed to leave work in the middle of the day and attend the meeting that I had planned. Actually I spent some of the prior evening printing and putting sticky notes on the printouts in an attempt to explain my child and the environment in which he would thrive. The teacher took all of the papers I had prepared and printed and circled and dotted and sticky noted carefully depicting how yelling and chaos impact my auditorially sensitive son. She looked at me with horror as she shared that she had trouble managing the class, there were lots of behavioral issues and that, perhaps, she should have been an accountant.
And I felt then like I was back in the salon asking for grey short hair and leaving with tri-toned million dollar flat ironed extra long hair. This class would not be like any before it. This year was not to be calm and peaceful as I had so desperately hoped.
At the end of our conversation the teacher, in her second year of post-undergrad teaching which, according to my calculations makes her very youthful, thanks me for coming. She tells me two things in that moment of departure that I shall not soon forget. Two things that I carry in my heart to this day. First, that she doesn't want me to to ever go to see he principal without seeing her first. Second, that she'd like me to know that most single mothers of four look like hell but that I look great - especially my hair.
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