An open letter to my hairstylist

Dear Tonya,

I’m just checking in to make sure you’re OK after yesterday.

Not that I think anything untoward happened. After all, we exchanged only pleasantries. I may have communicated firmly, but I know I did so kindly.

It’s just that, as you said, I seem to do a very good job of “pushing you out of your comfort zone,” and so I wanted to make sure that you weren’t too rattled after my second visit to the salon in five days. I mean, you did say to come back if any aspect of the cut wasn’t working for me, and so I did that thing that I am historically so bad at doing with hairstylists and asserted myself.

The cut was good, Tonya, it’s just that, well, I have a shitload of hair. I have, conservatively, about three normal people’s worth of hair. And it is thick, and it is curly, and it does what it wants. And it needs much product as well as a strong and drastic hand in order to be tamed. And you, Tonya, are going to have to be this strong and drastic hand. Even if it does push you out of your comfort zone and cause you to say things like, “Well, you’re definitely the most… different… and… determined client I have.”

It’s OK, Tonya. I can take it. I mean, you’re not the first hairstylist I’ve made uncomfortable. The first 20 years of my life were essentially a quest to find someone who could figure out what to do with my hair. Sure, I had unrealistic expectations. As a kid, I wanted hair like Barbie’s: long, blond, straight. If not Barbie, then I would have happily settled for Cindy Brady hair: those two pigtails in their perfect ringlets. In the early 1980s, I wanted hair that would feather. I was a young Jewish girl who longed for WASP hair, and it wasn’t happening. For a while, I had a good thing going with Al, who wore leather pants and worked out of a salon in Richmond, British Columbia. He managed to coax something like style from my masses of frizz, but then he died of a heroin overdose and I was back to square one. For a while, during the late 1980s and early 90s, when big hair was in, I managed to work out a trick involving a whole lot of styling mousse and a bandanna. By the mid-1990s, I spent hours of my life I’ll never get back flat-ironing my hair into submission and avoiding rain and swimming pools at all costs.

And then, I met Jimi. Jimi, at Coupe Bizarre on Queen Street West in Toronto. Jimi, who had hair EXACTLY like mine. Jimi, who never once used thinning shears — the bane of my existence — but instead sliced away at my hair with a straight razor, carving out great swathes of it. Jimi, who cut out channels of hair directly at the scalp, defying everything anyone else had ever told me about hair in order to thin mine out, make it manageable. Jimi, who cut my hair dry. Jimi, whose cuts lasted a good two months. When he was done with me, he was up to his ankles in hair. “It looks like kittens!” he once said at the end of a cut.

And then I moved up here, to Thunder Bay. Where there was no Jimi. Fortunately, I returned to Toronto often, visits that were planned with a trip to Coupe Bizarre in mind. But, sometimes I needed a haircut here, and as time wore on, I visited Toronto less often, and so the quest to find someone to whack away mercilessly at my tresses with a straight razor, to carve out channels into my scalp, began.

Tonya, you’re at least the sixth person in town I’ve been to. Everyone says that they can thin out my hair, and everyone pulls out some thinning shears and hacks away at it for a while. And I look down at the ground, and there are no kittens there. And I feel the weight of my hair against my scalp, and I know that they haven’t done what I want them to do. And it irks me, Tonya. It really irks me.

And then I met you. And you were game. Reluctant, but game. And you timidly carved a few tiny channels and my scalp. And I pushed you to do a couple more, and you did, and I felt that perhaps I had pushed you far enough for one day. And then, during the next visit, you did a bit more, but still not enough. And then you blow-dried my hair and that made it poof out. I’m sorry that I got cranky when that happened, but I had told you that I didn’t want you to blow-dry my hair because it would poof out, and also I had to pick up my children. And then I came back for another cut on Friday, and I pushed as hard as I could push before stepping out of my own comfort zone, but still, at the end the haircut there was too much hair on my head and not enough on the floor and so I pulled it together and made a follow-up appointment. And I vowed that I would not leave the chair until you had cut channels into my head a centimetre apart all the way around. I wasn’t leaving until there were kittens.

KITTENS, Tonya!

And you did. It went against everything you have ever learned in hair school, but you did it for me.

So, yes. I am determined. I am perhaps even different. And thank you for not saying it, but if you think I’m difficult, so be it. You’re stuck with me, and I sincerely hope that you are not fond of heroin, because we are going to make this WORK.

Love,

Susan

Fear, vomit, post apocalyptic YA, Jewish mothers & aliases

Friday is brought to you by dirty emoticons, my fantasies about post-apocalyptic science fiction, vomit, Jewish mothers, coddled children, and Shani Mootoo. To wit:

• A while back I tagged Emma Waverman and Tanya Gouthro to write blog posts about their writing processes. Read what gets them motivated (hint: fear and vomit).
• My post this month on VillageQ is a fantasy about a fantasy – thoughts on Patrick's Ness's More Than This and how we might deal with homophobic bullying in high schools.
• At Today’s Parent this week, I muse about rescuing my children. From what, I'm still working out.
• I also wrote about my mom's overinvestment in my own education. For chance to win a copy of Rachel Ament's anthology, The Jewish Daughter Diaries: True Stories of Being Loved Too Much by Our Moms, leave a comment here.
• And! Thunder Bay locals: this coming Tuesday, June 10, is the annual Thunder Pride Literary Evening, featuring headline reader Shani Mootoo (who has told me that she used to use the alias Susan Goldberg – for reals.) If you were as blown away as I was when I first encountered Mootoo’s writing — her novel Cereus Blooms at Night was so overwhelmingly lush and beautiful — you'll want to be there. If you haven't encountered her writing before, now's the time. See you at the Mary J. L. Black library on Tuesday at 7 PM

Giveaway: Jewish Daughter Diaries

  The phone rings.

“Good afternoon, Bliss!” I answer, in my best friendly-sales-clerk voice. I am winding up the last of my sales shifts at the now-defunct Bliss Weekend Wear, an overpriced women’s clothing store in the Bayview Village shopping Centre in a Toronto suburb. It's the summer after Grade 12, and in a few weeks I will fly to British Columbia to be a counsellor at Camp Hatikvah.

“Your report card arrived in the mail.”

I flip immediately into primal defense mode.

“DON’T OPEN IT!”

“But…”

“I said, don’t open it! It’s mine! It’s private! It’s addressed to me! You have absolutely no right to open it and if you do you’ll be breaking the law!”

“Susan, don’t be so dramatic!”

“I’m not being dramatic. I am telling you not to open my report card!”

“But you’re not going to be home for six hours!”

“I don’t care. You’ll just have to wait.”

“Susan–”

“If I see even one corner of the envelope lifted…”

“Fine. You’re being ridiculous.”

“Goodbye!”

I hang up. Esther, the older woman on shift with me, is staring at me open-mouthed.

“That was my mom,” I explain. She just nods.

I write about my mother at fairly regular intervals here. These posts tends to be of the “grab some Kleenex” variety — all the cancer, and death, and grieving, and the bittersweet of everything she was, everything she’s missing.

And sometimes, less often, I write about the quirkier things, like that time she bought me that black PVC outfit for my 25th birthday. But today I’m thinking about the quirky things, because ten years later, there’s more room for them. And while there is no denying that my mom was a saint (a saint! And if you say anything to the contrary, I will shiv you), and an unobjectively wonderful person, she had her quirks. And one of those quirks was a tendency to be over-invested in my academic life.

I’m not talking about garden-variety questions like, “Where did you lose the 2%?” or “How did everyone else do on that quiz?” or “Was yours the highest grade?”, although those were certainly common questions in my household. I’m talking about scenarios like the following:

• My mother sent back my midterm report card in fourth grade. SENT IT BACK, like one would send back an overcooked steak in a restaurant (although my mother would never send back an overcooked steak because to her, no steak, no matter how grey and leathery and juiceless, could ever be overcooked. I don’t know where I get my love of tartar from, but definitely not from her). She sent it back to my fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Fenn, told him it was unacceptable, and asked that he issue a new one. Her reasoning? That he was grading the entire class low so that our June report cards would show improvement. Our family, however, was moving across the country, from Toronto to Vancouver, over the Christmas break, and she felt that a fourth-grade report card that did not reflect my true (and substantial) achievements would hold me back. From what, I’m not quite sure, but I remember Mr. Fenn walking up to me in the library and handing me, in front of my friends, a heavily stapled replacement report card. And my mother was happy. And I was mortified. (I just told that story to my dad, and he laughed and laughed – and has no recollection at all of the episode.)
• Three and a half years later, we moved back to Toronto from Vancouver. My father worked for IBM — the joke was, of course, that the acronym stood for “I’ve Been Moving” — and Big Blue saw fit to torture me by uprooting me not once but twice from all my friends and asking me to settle into a new social circle. The eighth-grade girls at my North Toronto junior high were vicious, but hey! I got material from that time and that’s what matters, right? The point of this anecdote, though, is that even though my mother knew that I would be moving across the country in time to start Grade 8 in Toronto, and even though we had already sold our house and purchased a new one, she still signed me up to write the entrance exams for not one but two prestigious private schools in Vancouver, just to see if I would get in. (I did.) And she was happy. And I was puzzled.
• Also, just in case we didn’t move (like, you know, if my dad as the sole breadwinner at the time of our stalwartly middle-class household decided to, say, quit his job to find himself) and therefore we could not afford the prestigious private-school tuition, she registered me anyway at the out-of-zone public high school in Vancouver she thought I should go to (likely because Jews went there) rather than the public high school I was zoned to attend. In order to convince school officials that I actually lived within the boundaries of the desired school zone, she had friends of ours install a second telephone line, in our name, at their in-zone home. Where I lived, obviously, with my pretend adoptive family.
• What else? Oh, yes: the PSAP. In sixth grade, I was chosen to participate in something called the (cough) Project for the Study of Academic Precocity. It involved me and a seventh grader from my school writing the SATs. I don’t know why. All I remember about the test is that I had a bad cold and was spooked at the thought that I wouldn’t be able to pee for three hours or leave the room to blow my nose. I have no idea how I scored or what those scores would’ve even meant. But my mother, bless her, knew EXACTLY how I scored and would often quote those numbers to dinner guests. For years afterward. When it came time to write the SATs for the purposes of actually getting into university in the United States, I outright refused.

I’m thinking of my mother’s glorious overinvestment in my brain today as I read The Jewish Daughters Diaries: True Stories of Being Loved Too Much by Our Moms. Edited by Rachel Ament, this anthology is full of stories — full of mothers — like mine. Mayim Bialik’s mom is convinced that anything that goes wrong in her daughter’s life is because, “Everyone is jealous of you.” Abby Sher’s mother adamantly denies that her daughter needs a nose job ("You're beautiful!") until Abby breaks her nose during a game of Ultimate Frisbee. “Well, since it’s broken already… .” Lauren Greenberg’s mom sets up a JDate profile for her and then impersonates her on the site in order to get her married. (To my mom’s credit, she never stooped to the, “Find a husband at all costs,” Jewish mom stereotype, which in retrospect is a good thing, because she would have been very frustrated. The first time she met Rachel, though, my mom did exactly what I thought she would do in an effort to make my girlfriend feel welcome: she reeled off a list of every final thing in the refrigerator that Rachel might possibly like to eat and offered to get any of those things for her. “I told you,” I told Rachel. “Everything will be just fine.”)

Rachel Ament was kind enough to send me a copy of the book, and I’m giggling away as I read it. The list of contributors reads like a Who's Who of young Jewish women in media today: Wendy Liebman, Mireille Silcoff, Iliza Shlesinger, Rebecca Drysdale, Kerry Cohen, etc. I don't think it's coincidence that so many of the writers also happen to be stand up comedians: I mean, it seems like a perfectly reasonable outlet with mothers like these. I also have no idea if these anecdotes are truly Jewish in nature, or if all of us with mothers have mothers like. I suspect a little bit from Column A and a little bit from Column B.

But! You tell me, after you read it: I am offering a copy of The Jewish Daughter Diaries to one lucky reader of this blog. Leave a comment below in order to be entered in a random draw to win it. Bonus points (in terms of my reading pleasure) if you tell me an actual Jewish mother anecdote (and no, you and/or your mom don’t have to be Jewish to win). I’ll announce the winners on Monday, June 9.

Till then, there’s some nice tuna in the fridge.