'Mom hair' crisis

My sister is going to kill me ....
for posting this

My younger sister recently had her third child. She's looking great and doing a great job juggling the demands of piano lessons, preschool, and breastfeeding. She was getting a bit tired of all the time it took to manage her longer hair - and all the mess that it creates, less than a St. Bernard sheds but more than a short-haired chihuahua. She looks great with a short hairdo so in her postpartum mother moment, she went in for the cheap-o $18 cut and ended up with a floppy Monkey's mop reminiscent of 1960s "I'm high but I'd really love to cut your hair" results. My older sister took one look at it and said, 'What did you do to your hair? You look like Mom." Now for any woman, no matter what age, particularly after just having a baby, it is not flattering to be compared to your mother unless she's Lauren Bacall or Sofia Loren. Marla quickly placed a call for the emergency what-the-hell-did-I-do $80 haircut at the best salon.

Now I've done the same thing once in Seattle when going short. The first cut started just fine but at the last minute I ended up with bangs! Now if you've seen my eyebrows - think Groucho Marx on a girl - you know my forehead does not need another line of interest hovering above my eyes. I looked like some friar monk without the bald spot. Heck, a bald patch might have made me look at least edgy. The next day I shelled out around $100 for the help-fix-it-do and ended up very happy. I had a fun Mia Farrow meets Oscar version of Haley Berry. Why do we take out hair so seriously? That is a topic for some serious PhD psychology dissertation.

So Marla let me get my eyebrows waxed and tamed so I don't look like the old men in the Muppets balcony. Then I swapped kid-watching duties so she could go get some pampering. We headed to KFC for some popcorn chicken, big treat for the kids. Marla headed into the care of a very metro and super-skinny Asian hairdresser named Ase or Agee or some other variation of a name with too many vowel sounds and no indication of how to accent the spelling. Aseh/Ageh had his own funky haircut - a version of a top knot with undercut urban shaved section towards the nap of his neck. This should be interesting. So I return with the kids just as Marla is heading out of the salon. Kid you not, she looked like a stylish mom from the neck down, with her white laced top and Capri black pants - all set for the country club or a suburban book club night. Scanning up to her face, I could not stop laughing. She was punk queen! She'd gone from our mother to a groupie for the Sex Pistols! She had such a good sense of humor about the whole thing. "Why do I let people do this to me? I just sit there and say, 'Thank you, looks great!' when I'm close to pulling a Britney Spears and getting it all shaved off." So we drove her spiky head home to wash out the goop they put in it to defy gravity. I knew the cut was great; she just needed less product and more natural styling to make her look great. So post-gunkifying her hair, she looks fabu. She gets a little frustrated at a few rouge hairs that like to pop up and stand up straight but these are not noticeable and the cut will grow out nicely. So all's well that ends well. And just remember, don't go for that $18 cut - and don't pull a Britney. It'll all work out in the end.