Thus, it grew and grew; a heavy rich weight of all that I was and all that was becoming. Through pregnancy and marriage, it grew. Through the end of one life and the beginning of another, it grew. Finally, I looked around and hardly recognized the woman before me—the life I was living. One day I was girl child, the next I was mother. One day I was a girl friend—the following a wife.
So, I cut off my hair as a symbolic gesture in my longing to be that self I had shed the fateful day of my Grandfather’s passing. Oh how futile; what fancy. It was never the hair that defined me, but me who defined my hair. My hair was an external illustration of my spirit and still is, though softer now and in many ways, tamed. So in the patient process of growing my hair out, I embrace all that this era of my life embodies. And I accept that my hair must be what I resisted in the past, something for them to hold on to: something for my children to clutch as we descend the stairs of our home venturing out into the great wide world beyond, something in which my husband can entwine his fingers and bury his face to inhale the smell of home and family after one of those long, hard days at work.
I am no longer that girl of my youth. In the slow steady passing of time, I have felt the sting of death and the tingling sensation of birthing new life. And I am kept in the balance of these things, responsible for the past and the present as it extends into the future. Thus, is the state of my growing hair, inescapable and boundless, of me and far, far beyond me—All in a woman’s hair…in this woman’s hair.
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