Day 21: Split Ends

When the doctor lifted me up, plucked away my umbilical cord, cleaned me off, and tucked me into my mother's arms, I had a full head of hair. It was dark brown and matted against my tiny head. Two months later, my body temperature rose to 110 causing all of my hair to fall out and the doctors to discover that I was born with a kidney disease. Being the only one in my family with this genetic disorder was as unlikely as my living past infancy, but somehow I survived and my hair slowly grew back. My mother tells stories of how she would clip barrettes in my slippery strands and I would rip them out and throw them to the sidewalk beyond my carriage. From an early age, my hair was an object of contention between my mother and I.

Growing up, I always wanted long hair. I was envious of other girls in my class at school whose hair reached to the waistband of their pants. As soon as mine seemed to get close, my mother would take me to the hairdresser to have it trimmed. When I was ten, my father fell backwards from the top step of a six foot ladder, breaking his back in three places, causing him to lose his job as an HVAC mechanic. My mother decided she would become a hairdresser to supplement the disability checks that sometimes took months to arrive in the mail and were hardly enough to feed a family of four. Once she was a hairdresser, she kept my hair shoulder-length-short until I decided to grow it out in high school.

By the time I was a senior, my hair hung in a dark-blonde blanket more than mid-way down my back. My mother convinced me to let her trim the split ends. As I sat in the chair on our back porch, the smock wrapped around my shoulders, my mother cut off six inches so that my hair barely brushed my shoulders. A month later, I struggled to slip it in into a bun for my last dance recital. In defiance, I grew my hair out and let the ends go jagged for nine years after that. "Your hair looks terrible," my mother would say, picking at the ends every time I saw her.

After growing it our for nine years, I'd finally achieved my childhood dream of having hair that brushed my butt, however, I soon grew tired of it getting in the way of everything. It would spin around my jump rope at the gym, stick to the back of my neck in the yoga studio, and strangle me in my sleep. Although I caved in to having it cut, I didn't go to my mother. Instead, I walked to a shop two blocks from my house and had 13 inches clipped away, bundled, and donated. A little more than a year later the ends had already started to dry out and split.

I have been studying Buddhism for several years now and there is one Zen story that I recall whenever I feel myself becoming too attached. Here is the story: Two monks were walking together when they came to a river. A woman asked if they would help her across.  It was against their order to touch a woman, however, the senior monk carried the woman to the other side of the river. Once on the other side, the two monks continued on and the junior monk voiced his disapproval. At the end of the day the senior monk responded, "I left the woman at the edge of the river. You have been carrying her all day."

Today, I asked my mother to trim the split ends from my hair.  She did as promised and only clipped the dried out tips. Had she snipped my hair up to my shoulders or chin I wouldn't have cared. After all, it's only hair and will soon grow back. I allowed the weight of anger to drape down my back and hold me down for far too long.