Hair is Everything
I skipped off to London to get a haircut. Unsurprisingly my hairdresser didn’t recognise me. The last time I cut my hair was 8 months ago - I’m the sort of woman who is especially bad for business, I completely missed the part of femininity that compels one to brush, let alone style one’s hair. It does what it wants, how it wants and I just let it.
Now it is all bouncy and compliant - chin length and curly with wrinkle-softening layers around the eyes. I too feel bouncy as though unearthed beneath the layers. What if the girlish curl does poke me in the eye repeatedly, what is blindness when faced with beauty?
I have returned to look after the same octogenarian couple in the British countryside. Most days her Alzheimer’s won’t let her remember me and she’ll get annoyed and swear at me in Swedish. He’ll tell me stories from years gone by in an excruciating amount of detail. Well that's how it was, but in my 4 month absence in South Africa Mrs Alzheimer’s has gotten worse. Her bad spells last longer, the swearing in her mother tongue more prolonged and her hair is wilder too. She has always had a chic white bob. It is professionally washed and blowdried once a week but now mere hours later it looks like we’ve brushed it with dynamite. Every morning I help Mrs A to brush the back of her head, hair which is increasingly knotted and sweaty from fighting her pillows. 5 minutes later it is wild and windswept. It’s like a barometer of her psyche, a little peek inside a slowly unraveling mind. Growing old when your own mind is the enemy holding you hostage takes a certain strength to endure. Mrs A’s wayward hair seems to be her own white flag of defeat. Cruelly, she is both in this world and the shadow world of dementia. She tells me that she feels at sea, the world rocking beneath her. I brush her wayward strands as though this will somehow calm her flyaway mind and anchor her to this world.
We have family staying for Easter - families are noisy and chaotic. Their abrupt movements, unintelligible in-jokes, and loud voices unnerve Mrs A - she has the look of a prisoner eyeing out the exits. As her panic rises so does her hair, silently communing with the unseen. I smooth it down gently and ask her if she’d like to go for a walk.
Perhaps a woman’s hair really does tell you all you need to know about her.
Now it is all bouncy and compliant - chin length and curly with wrinkle-softening layers around the eyes. I too feel bouncy as though unearthed beneath the layers. What if the girlish curl does poke me in the eye repeatedly, what is blindness when faced with beauty?
I have returned to look after the same octogenarian couple in the British countryside. Most days her Alzheimer’s won’t let her remember me and she’ll get annoyed and swear at me in Swedish. He’ll tell me stories from years gone by in an excruciating amount of detail. Well that's how it was, but in my 4 month absence in South Africa Mrs Alzheimer’s has gotten worse. Her bad spells last longer, the swearing in her mother tongue more prolonged and her hair is wilder too. She has always had a chic white bob. It is professionally washed and blowdried once a week but now mere hours later it looks like we’ve brushed it with dynamite. Every morning I help Mrs A to brush the back of her head, hair which is increasingly knotted and sweaty from fighting her pillows. 5 minutes later it is wild and windswept. It’s like a barometer of her psyche, a little peek inside a slowly unraveling mind. Growing old when your own mind is the enemy holding you hostage takes a certain strength to endure. Mrs A’s wayward hair seems to be her own white flag of defeat. Cruelly, she is both in this world and the shadow world of dementia. She tells me that she feels at sea, the world rocking beneath her. I brush her wayward strands as though this will somehow calm her flyaway mind and anchor her to this world.
We have family staying for Easter - families are noisy and chaotic. Their abrupt movements, unintelligible in-jokes, and loud voices unnerve Mrs A - she has the look of a prisoner eyeing out the exits. As her panic rises so does her hair, silently communing with the unseen. I smooth it down gently and ask her if she’d like to go for a walk.
Perhaps a woman’s hair really does tell you all you need to know about her.
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