My Combover

You know the "combover." That deplorable practice of balding men wherein remaining hair is grown long and then combed over a bald patch, fooling no one but the comber. I now feel that I understand these men to a degree most women do not.

You'll recall that I lost a bit of hair last year post-chemo. Albeit in random places and certainly not in any way rendering me bald. But hair was sacrificed regardless. Now, I'm not of the generation who thinks that a woman's hair is inherently intertwined with her femininity or "womanhood." I've seen too many completely gorgeous women with extremely short--or no--hair to believe that you have to have Farrah Fawcett's mane to get a man; or that you must have a certain type of hair in order to be a feminine woman. It's for that reason that I never got too wigged out (pardon the pun) by my hair loss. I wasn't too psyched that it looked weird, in the sense that it was random and bizarrely-patterned, but that was more my neatnik issues than my coiffure issues. I never once looked in the mirror and thought, "Oh my god, you look so ugly because your hair is falling out." I just thought, "Why can't it fall out totally or at least in some semblance of order, for heaven's sake?!"

All the same, as the hair grew back in I decided that I would grow my hair long. Partly because I have to sunscreen my entire body every time I leave the house and short hair just creates more neck/ear real estate to worry about. And partly because I didn't want to do the expected "cut your hair short when it's falling out" thing. I had long-ish hair before the transplant and I wanted to just get back to normal after the transplant.

Well, I realized a few weeks ago that my desire to grow my hair long was actually a desire to hang on to the hair I have, rather than to actually have long hair. This is the very definition of a Combover Man. A person losing hair, and who therefore can't bring himself to cut the hair he still has. How did I come to this conclusion? Because I wear my long hair in a pony tail every damn day, my friends. And because--fashion alert--I don't look that great with really long hair (just as no man looks good with a sheet of hair wrapped around his head). Or, rather, I look good with long hair if I spend some time blowing out, curling, gelling it. But on a daily basis in this house, you know that is just not going to happen. And so what you get is me in a ponytail. Every day. The additional issue is that I do have to wear a hat when I go outside to shield my face from the sun. My current hair situation then requires a ponytail so that I don't end up with constant hat head.

So today I'm getting my combover cut off.

I'm not going too short. The days of me being 102 pounds and carrying off that Natalie Portman-in-V-For-Vendetta look are waaay gone. But I'm going chin length and funky. I definitely don't want a classic "I used to be sick" haircut, and I definitely do NOT want a "mom" haircut, which leads inevitably to wearing "mom" jeans and seasonal sweaters. Those are the two things I think I have been fearing and which had been keeping me committed to having long hair. I have told the BBDD to seriously smack me out of my mental state if I ever come home looking like this:


But with any luck--and a little vigilance--that shouldn't be necessary. In any case, I'll post some before and afters later today. And maybe I'll throw on a reindeer sweater with light-up santa earrings just for kicks.