My friend, and hairdresser, instructed me on the eve of my fiftieth birthday that there was no way I could continue to wear my hair as I was wearing it after I’d reached the dastardly 5-0. I guess it was some kind of beautician rule.

I like my hairdresser, still do, but I ignored her. Her advice was unsolicited albeit well intended. I suppose she was trying to save me from myself but as far as I’m concerned I didn’t need any saving.
 

I thanked her but didn’t capitulate and allow myself to be coiffed and shorn into a more presentable (and less suspect?) ‘matron’.

I wasn’t sure what the 50-year mark represented to her but apparently
something along the lines of ‘cut that hair, tamp it down and behave yourself, woman!’

I am now four and one-half years past fifty and have continued to wear my hair as I’ve worn it the past twenty years: unmanageably curly, yanked up on top of my head, boisterous and unkempt.

My hairdresser now categorically denies ever instructing me to cut my hair.

She did.

I have a big memory under this big hair.

Some people take issue with my hair. If fact, it’s apparently so disturbing to an outspoken few that my hairdresser has had to come to my defense and has become my staunchest supporter and ally in the war of the mane.
 

She now defends my disobedient locks, forgetting that she the very first to tell me that they had to go.

When I told her that I’d received an anonymous
letter—complete with before and after drawings of my hair and me—with a comb attached (did this person actually think I could get a comb through this?) and a suggestion that I might use the appliance—my hairdresser took great offense. How dare someone say that about my hair?

I merely laughed, framed the letter and put it on display in my office.

It is nothing for me, a 54 year-old professional woman, to walk into an event and have some man, always a man, spout off some bitchy remark about my hair. Generally the men who feel entitled to publicly belittle my hair either have no hair or the equivalent of the comb-over from hell.

Do their jibes bother me? Not much. In fact, it intrigues me that a little, old thing such as hair can get a grown man’s boxers in such a twist. It’s hair, for God’s sakes. I’m not walking around with my butt cheeks exposed.

My hair is not spectacular hair. It’s just messy hair or an attractive
nuisance, as my lawyer friend says. Big f-k you hair, as my other friend says, who also claims: Big hair, fast women.

Big lie, I chortle.

My friend says I am treated like public property.

She is right.

Whereas most well-mannered men and women would never in a million years issue a public dictate about a person’s weight or their wrinkles these rules of decorum apparently do not seem to apply to me and my hair.

This is America, the land of the free; however, if a 50-year-old woman
lets her hair do its thing with no intervention one might easily conclude, based on the ire that hair apparently incites, that this act is borderline heresy.

My hair is not a lethal weapon. Truly. It minds its own business and never strays too far (well, not that far) from my scalp.

It’s not even a political statement.

It’s simply the hair that I was born with, struggled with, fought against
for years, and then came to terms with long ago and stopped trying to corral.

My favorite waitress, Jeanie, is convinced that I would look just darling with a Mary Martin Peter Pan cut. Yeah, like that’s going to happen.
My favorite lunch partner argues with Jeanie—this is how we spend out lunch hour—that I would not be me without my hair so back off, sister. I distance myself from this free-for-all and munch on my lima beans, letting them have at it.

My daughter used my hair as the department store mother-finder when
she was younger and would get separated from me. “I would just look for your hair.”

See, the hair does have some functional value.

The only thing that my 24-year-old son has ever said he liked about me
is my hair.

My 90-year-old neighbor always identified me as “the neighbor with the crazy hair”.

And the funniest part is … if my detractors could see this torrent of hair when it’s not clipped up, in a feeble attempt at containment, when it’s hanging down, to the middle of my 54-year-old back, all herky-jerky and Janis Joplin-y why they would most certainly die of apoplexy.

The Cowsills had the right idea: Hair, hair, hair, hair, flow it, show it, long as God can grow it …my hair!

When you turn fifty, something liberating happens: some of us stop caring what other people think.