Good Hair Day

April 2016

Seriously, my hair looks really good today. I spend the requisite seven minutes to blow it dry and style it and darn if it didn’t turn out looking pretty good. So then, I think, well I might as well put a little extra effort into my face. I rarely spend much time on my makeup (although I do wear some every day), but this time I really pay attention. Nice work! I look in the mirror and, thanks to the poor lighting in my bathroom, I think, I don’t look half bad! I have somewhat successfully diminished the depth of the purple under my eyes, and I've done a fair job covering up what we now more gently refer to as sun spots (that sounds so much better than age spots) and even the tiny pimple starting to appear on my chin. Why, I’m practically glowing!

Then I get dressed in my usual uniform, which almost always, unless it’s very hot, begins with a pair of jeans. Ripped, especially. I don’t know why I prefer a pair of distressed jeans over a nice new-looking pair, but I do. I’m forty-eight years old and I love my ripped jeans. Maybe it’s a not-trying-too hard look I’m going for because who wants to look like they thought for three hours about their outfit? Oh, haha! This old thing? I just threw it on. My knee is sticking out of this pair, but there’s no fabric flopping around, so it’s all good. I put on my new tee-shirt featuring a graphic of Marilyn Monroe’s face. I think it’s from an Andy Warhol painting. It’s pretty cool. Then a cardigan. I have a bunch of those because where I live pretty much every day is a sweater day. Wait, nope. That’s going to be too hot, so I trade it for my black fringed poncho. I feel cool in that. And then finally, the one deviation from my uniform: heels. I grab a pair of high-heeled, slingback studded clogs that I love but never wear for fear of a broken ankle. It’s almost always flat shoes for me, but clumsiness be damned today! I’m wearing high heels! I notice what I get out of wearing heels: being taller makes you feel skinnier, which feels good right now since there are at least 20 pounds I could lose and still not be especially thin. Plus you get a different view from four inches up. If you’ve never tried it, you’d be surprised at the difference!

I grab the dogs and head out the door. My first stop this morning is the groomer. I manage to walk the 20 steps to the door and deposit them without incident. It’s a good start to a day in heels (which, by the way, will spend every minute at home OFF my feet). Then I get back in the car and look in the mirror. My skin looks kind of luminous today and my hair still looks good. Damn, girl!

But those vertical lines between my eyebrows are working. They are working HARD. I try to relax my face, but it’s really difficult. I feel a headache brewing behind those lines. Confession: Once I even tried botox on those but found out my muscles up there are “too strong.” Yay, strong frown muscles! I don’t care about wrinkles, but I don’t want to look like I’m frowning all the time. Oh, well.

And there it is, a small but powerful sign of how I actually feel inside. I am overwhelmed with sadness at the duality. I imagine somebody looking at me from the outside. My five-year old luxury SUV has finally gotten properly cleaned inside and out and now looks like a shiny new car instead of the filthy family- and dog-mobile that it actually is most of the time. It’s a nice car, but it really just gets us and our stuff around. It really is a UTILITY vehicle.

I think I look pretty put-together, maybe like my newly-detailed car. But I don’t feel remotely put-together on the inside. I feel like I’m about to crack. Those frown lines on my face are like a gate holding back a massive breakdown. I feel the pressure. It doesn’t feel good.

This morning was rough. There was anxiety and frustration and anger and sadness and miscommunication and even kind of a fight. A typical morning with Maddie (no, she didn’t go to school) ended with some tension between me and my husband (not surprisingly, parents with special needs kids are more likely to get divorced, so we’re beating the odds). And now I’m feeling low. My life feels unmanageable. There is a lot of futility in what I do every day. But I do it. I try to maintain a calm inner self, and I do that pretty well, although I maintain my calm outer self much better. Today is like that. Good on the outside! Pretty shitty on the inside!

I’m trying to breathe. You know how in yoga you are supposed to breathe into parts of your body to help those parts relax? How do you breathe into your forehead? I’m not sure. I’m going to think about it, though. Not so much for how I look, but for I feel. There is so much tension up there. No wonder I get migraines.

I’m thinking about this now: how the inner life of a person is truly their inner life. Unless they say it out loud. Who knows what lurks below the shiny surface?

Yesterday I was in line at Whole Foods and the woman in front of me kept looking the groceries I had put on the conveyer belt and then back up at me. It was very noticeable. I thought maybe she didn’t approve of my purchases. Not one head of kale in the cart! No almond milk or herbs for aiding digestion! Bagels and cheese, though!

As I was trying to figure out where to look to cope with this uncomfortable moment, my eyes settled on something in her section of the conveyer belt. Lobster juice. I could barely complete the thought “Huh, lobster juice” before she spoke up. She was buying it for her cat, who has been unable to eat and has been losing weight. She hoped putting lobster juice on the kibble would encourage eating. She and her husband had taken the cat to a nearby vet school for care and after spending thousands of dollars already, they were faced with choosing whether or not to proceed with exploratory surgery, after which the two possible diagnoses required extensive and expensive treatments. She is torn.

I wasn’t sure what to say. Fifteen years ago the best cat in the whole world became very suddenly very ill, and not expecting anything but a solution, we spent $3000 on overnight care at the local emergency pet clinic, taking him back and forth for the night, and eventually allowed the vets to perform exploratory surgery to figure out the best solution. In our case, there was no solution. His intestines were disintegrating and there was nothing to be done. So we had put our poor dying cat through all that misery, spent all that money, and had only a dead cat three weeks later. It was terrible. We were heartbroken that he died, and I was even more heartbroken that his last few weeks were so miserable.

So, I wondered, do I say that out loud? I remembered when my aunt was diagnosed with cancer, and everybody told my mom (her sister) about how someone they know had cancer and then DIED. Good intentions gone awry! How about you know somebody who beat cancer? Or how about, “I’m so sorry.” Or how about shut up?

I felt like she was telling me all this for a reason, though.

“Been there, done that,” I said. “Our cat had exploratory surgery and then it turned out they couldn’t do anything. We spent $3000 and ended up with a dead cat.” I was kind and sympathetic in tone, not angry, just relaying the facts.

She looked strangely relieved, as if I had give her permission to make the hard choice. Her cat is ten years old and she’s not sure she wants to give it chemo. I nodded. We understood each other.

For two minutes, she had a new friend, a sympathetic ear, a person who knew her most painful dilemma. I wouldn’t have given her a second look if she hadn’t been strangely eyeing my groceries and then finally spoken up about the lobster juice.

She paid for her groceries and said to me, “I’m sorry about your cat.”

“Good luck with your cat.”

We nodded at each other. And then she was gone.

And there you have it. We all have our stories. Some of our stories are camouflaged by fancy cars and good hair. Some of them hide in the plain view of the grocery store, if only we can see them. Or hear them. Or feel them. Or imagine them.

What is your story? Message me to share!