Yesterday I went to the hairdresser for my quarterly cut and colour.
It is, by now, a small ritual. I park in roughly the same place. I arrive with a bag full of things I will not use. I hang my coat. I decline coffee too quickly and then spend the next twenty minutes wondering why I did that.
Then, for a few hours, someone else is in charge.
There is luxury in that. Not the scented-candle kind. The deeper kind. A woman who spends much of her life remembering what has to happen next gets to sit still while another competent woman says, “I think we’ll bring this up a little here.”
Reader, I have recovered from worse weeks on less.
Somewhere between the foils and the toner, I realized that she and I have been doing this together since 1998.
Since 1998.
In 1998, I was still young enough to believe a haircut could make me a different person. Not simply a better-groomed version of myself. A different woman entirely. One who owned a perfect black dress, understood wine, wrote thank-you notes promptly and never interrupted.
I came in with pictures torn from magazines. Actual magazines. Gwyneth. Meg. Winona. I wanted layers. Then no layers. Highlights. Then lowlights. Then something “natural,” by which I meant expensive and barely visible.
She listened.
She listened through the years when I was trying to look older. Sharper. More convincing. I wanted my hair to say, “I am a competent professional,” even when the rest of me was being held together by coffee, lip gloss, and an unreasonable attachment to new notebooks.
Then came the children.
The appointments changed after that. Everything did.
There were years when I arrived tired in a way that seemed to have settled into my bones.
She heard about the boys when they were babies, then toddlers, then little boys with lunch kits and missing mittens. Then hockey arenas. So many hockey arenas.
She saw me during the years when I was mothering hard and not always noticing myself.
Not because I announced it. No one walks into a salon and says, “I seem to have misplaced myself somewhere between the grocery store and the Grade 2 classroom.” You say, “Just the usual.” You say, “Maybe a bit shorter.” You say, “I’m fine.”
Then you sit there with wet hair and no earrings, which is about as undefended as a woman can look in public.
And in that state, over the years, you talk.
Not always about the big things. Often you approach them sideways.
A marriage. A job. A child. A disappointment. A plan. A difficult person. A difficult person you love. You talk about kitchens and schools and mothers and vacations. You talk about bodies changing, faces changing, and how the lighting in fitting rooms could be improved by either a dimmer switch or basic human mercy.
You talk in fragments.
A little story. A sigh. A look in the mirror. A pause when she asks, “How are things?”
Over twenty-eight years, the fragments add up.
She has seen nearly every version of me arrive in that chair.
There were years I probably talked too much. Years I said almost nothing. Years when the appointment was maintenance. Years when it was rescue.
A good hairdresser knows the difference and does not make a performance of knowing.
That may be the genius of the relationship. It is intimate, but contained. Confessional, but not untidy. She knows things, but not everything. She has seen me age, but not with the weird intensity of someone studying it. She remembers enough to ask, but not so much that I feel trapped inside an older version of myself.
There are not many people like that in a life.
By midlife, the cast has shifted more than you expected. Friends you thought would be permanent become people whose children you recognize on Instagram but whose actual lives you can no longer quite place. Former colleagues reappear on LinkedIn with excellent headshots. Neighbours move. Couples separate. Children leave. Parents age.
And somehow, there is your hairdresser.
Still there.
Still mixing colour in the back.
Still remembering that you do not want anything too ashy. Still knowing that “a little shorter” does not mean short. Still understanding that “I don’t want it to look done” is, in fact, one of the more labour-intensive requests a woman can make.
I have been thinking about the people who know us this way. Not the emergency contacts. Not the people who were there for the large, dramatic moments. The others. The ones who see us at intervals.
The dentist. The neighbour. The barista who knows your order but not your last name. The woman at the alterations place who has quietly observed your body across weddings, funerals, work events, and dresses bought under questionable emotional circumstances.
They are not central, exactly.
But they notice.
They know small things. Your coffee order. Your fear of bangs. Your tendency to say “just a trim” when you mean “please intervene.” They remember the children when they were small, but they do not require you to still be the mother of small children. They remember an older version of your face, but they do not make a study of what has changed.
They simply carry a little bit of the record.
There is something merciful about that.
Before you became the woman who now sits in the chair and says, “Please don’t make it too blonde,” you were the woman who wanted everything brighter, shinier, more dramatic, more transformed.
Now I want something subtler.
Still me. Better lit.
That may be the whole brief at this point.
Not reinvention. Not transformation. Just careful maintenance. A little warmth removed. A little brightness added. A few dead ends taken off. Enough to leave feeling restored, but not unrecognizable.
When I left yesterday, I looked like myself again.
At this age, that is not nothing.
There is something unexpectedly moving about a woman standing behind you with scissors, looking at your reflection with the calm expression of someone who has seen every era and is not especially alarmed by this one.
Twenty-eight years.
Four appointments a year.
Give or take the odd missed season, the emergency trim, the questionable bang decision, the global pandemic, and the years when the roots got away from me.
That is more than one hundred times I have sat in that chair.
More than one hundred times she has run her fingers through the evidence and helped me decide what to keep, what to soften, what to cut away.
No wonder I felt sentimental.
Or perhaps it was just the toner fumes.
Either way, I booked the next appointment before I left.
The Midlife Syllabus
Lesson #28:
Always book your hair appointments on a Saturday and make evening plans.
Beauty, Grace & Daily Artistry
A small, imperfect pleasure:
I went to the MAC store after my hair appointment feeling all nostalgic and wondering if they still made that shade of lipstick from my Gwyneth, Meg, Winona era.
They do.
And it still smells the same as it did then.
What I’m Reading, Watching or Listening to
Reading
Look Homeward, Angel
One of my favourite things about James being home is rediscovering my English literature reading lists along with him.
~ Danielle