Bad Hair Day

I have never had a hair dye fiasco, very possibly because I read Anne of Green Gables as a little girl and was duly warned off trying to mess with Mother Nature too much. I have absolutely had bad hair days. The fringe I had in elementary school, which I did not know how to wrangle successfully, probably did not help matters. But, before elementary school, before I read Anne of Green Gables, there was a very bad, no-good, awful hair day.

On weekends, I woke up very early and played in my room, or sometimes went downstairs to watch cartoons. My parents would have coffee in bed while I entertained myself, usually setting up melodramas with my stuffed animals. So it was one fateful Saturday morning. As my mother tells it, she and my father were enjoying their coffee, half-listening to me talk to my toys in my room. And then, alarmingly, my running commentary faded into silence. As anyone with children will tell you, silence may be golden, but it is not your friend. And then, according to my mother’s memory, a little voice pierced this worrying silence.
"Uh oh.”
My parents flew from their room to mine, coffee long forgotten, and stared down in horror at my handiwork. I had gotten my pudgy little hands on a pair of craft scissors and gone to town on my bangs. As a three-year-old (and until about the age of ten or eleven), I had a straight, fine fringe, usually split by an untameable widow’s peak. But that morning, evidently displeased by my unruly hair, I had slowly and methodically cut my bangs - off. There was a tiny stiff line of what was left of my bangs sticking straight up from my hairline, and the rest lay on the floor.

My poor mother. There was no chance of saving my fringe - there wasn’t really any fringe left to save. She whisked away the scissors, explained very carefully that we do not cut our own hair, and did her level best to cover my shameful hairline with a headband. The headband situation would become my reality for about four months while my mirco-micro-micro bangs grew back out again.

Since then, I have had bad hairstyles - does anyone else remember the sidebangs of the 2000s, or the crispy frying sounds of a wet-to-straight flat iron on damp hair? - but have never attempted another DIY haircut. I learned that lesson the hard way. I do still have a store of emergency headbands - just in case. What I do not have, and may never have, is enough apologies to my long-suffering parents. Sorry, Mum.

Jennifer