Photo: Kristen Aspevig
People are complimenting my hair. This is new for me. ?Thank you!? I exclaim every time. ?I got it cut at Melonhead!? Then, they laugh and make the same joke: ?Did you sit in the princess car/rocket ship/Thomas-the-Tank engine"? (Melonhead is a chain of kids’ hair salons). But I don?t care because I’m just so goddamn happy to have good hair. Not just good hair?the best hair of my life.
The last time people complimented my hair was probably three years ago, before I had two kids. Since then, my hair has been thin from postpartum hair loss and lank from lack of styling time. I considered it a lost cause. But, even before that, I had problematic hair. Extremely fine. Frizzy in some places, straight in others. Fans of The Office might recognize it as Pam Beasley hair. Top that look off with a bunch of cowlick whorls all over my head, inherited from my mother. I actually have good hair for one month a year, in the peak of Toronto?s muggy summers, when the air is as thick and smoggy as mushroom soup. Only then is my hair uniformly curly and full thanks to the humidity. There seemed to be no lasting solution to my bad hair. None of Sephora?s pricey dry shampoos helped at all. My ponytails were puny so I tried buns, buying one of those fake hair donuts to plump it up?but my hair was too thin to cover it, the shiny silicone gleaming through the meagre strands of my up-do. I was excited when I saw that ?Don?t Care Good Hair? was having a moment...