Long Hair, Don't Care

            This essay was started during my senior year of college, but it remained unfinished until I rediscovered it in my old files. It is not one of my favorites, and I feel like the message comes across too bluntly at the end, but sometimes in life we need a lesson to smack us right across the face in order to truly understand it. Finishing this essay was the smack in the face I needed. For me, a perfectionist and planner, I know one of my opportunities is to relinquish control and allow life to just happen. Ultimately, I know that God is in control, so there should be no other choice but to take each day as it comes, live it to the fullest, and be satisfied with the result. Hopefully the connection between my long hair and my decision to let life happen is clear to you. Enjoy!

Long Hair, Don't Care

by Kayla Knutson

            I was a chromosome shy from being a Dustin.

When I arrived as a girl, my mom must have thought she was delirious from the drugs. She spent her whole forty-one week pregnancy convinced that her second child was going to be a little brother to Eric. To be fair, she had plenty of opportunities to gain gender confirmation from the doctor visits, but she insisted on keeping that information a secret until I was born. Even after the doctors cleaned me off and brought me back to her wrapped in a soft pink blanket, my mom couldn’t believe her eyes. She cried. I was the little girl she had always dreamed of. In her mind, I was already playing with her ancient collection of Barbie dolls complete with outfits from the 70s and missing limbs, painting my tiny finger and toe nails hot pink, and twirling around in fancy skirts fresh off the sewing machine.

I was her little girl.

And I was pretty much bald. In a vain attempt to proclaim my gender, the doctors slapped a little bow on the side of my head before allowing me to go home from the hospital. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much that my mom could do with my hair for the first sixteen months of my existence – bows or headbands made feigned attempts at holding back my nonexistent strands while blatantly showcasing my femininity. Alas, even the hair accessories and matching pink and purple outfits did not keep onlookers from telling my mom what a cute little boy she had.

            When my hair finally decided to grow, it grew like bamboo shoots. Thick ash blonde curls sprouted from my follicles like fertilized grass. My hair was a combination of my dad’s sun-streaked brown waves and my mother’s dark ringlets – a perfect genetic mix. Recognizing the beauty of the luscious locks that now adorned the head of their once hairless daughter, my parents taught me the importance of hair care at an early age. My mom carefully washed my hair during my baths; my dad told me it would grow faster if I ate all the crusts on my jelly sandwiches. I still don’t know if his words were just a ploy for me to consume the bread edges, but since he had such nice hair, I figured he must be telling the truth and chose to buy in.

By the time I entered kindergarten, my hair had passed my waist. Among my peers with buzz cuts and bobs, I was proud that I had the longest hair of anyone in the class. My long hair did get in the way sometimes, but I made the necessary adaptations intrinsically. I remember needing to gather it around the middle in my small fists when I wanted to drink from the water fountain and pull it out from underneath my bottom when I wanted to use the slide at recess. After one time allowing the ends of my hair to dip in the toilet bowl, I learned to tuck my hair in the back of my shirt until I was a safe distance away from the seat.

            Growing up in the 90s meant that there were many style options and accessories for little girls with long hair: pigtails, French braids, large and small bows, alligator clips, bandannas, barrettes, butterfly clips, and of course the classic ponytail bound by a neon scrunchie. Being the middle child of two brothers, my accessory of choice was usually a baseball cap or nothing at all. In my opinion, accessories only confined my hair from reaching its maximum playtime potential. I loved the free feeling of creating my own wind as I ran around the backyard. My curls would trail behind me, turning me into a superhero with a cape. On the swings, my locks were wings that gave me extra distance as I jumped at the peak. When I got tired and laid underneath the birch tree, I would wrap myself up in a blanket of my hair and curl up in a ball. After a full night of playing, I would come back inside at dusk with dirt caked knees and knotted hair beneath my Little League cap. Bath time.

The half hour right after my evening bath was a special time of night with my mom. Freshly washed and returned to the proper level of cleanliness for a young girl, I would sit on the floor in front of my mom embraced by the curve of her legs around me while she stroked the length of my wet hair with a boar-bristle brush. I loved the feeling of the brush starting at the top of my hairline and slowly tracing a line from my scalp down my back. Closing my eyes would only enhance the experience. With each stroke, I would breathe deeply and crane my neck to feel the full effect of each miniature massager until every hair on my head had been restored from its knotted mess. These evenings were some of the closest bonding moments that I remember with my mom at a young age.

Every night as she brushed, my mom would ask the same question: “Kayla, aren’t you ever going to cut your hair?” She was only joking, of course, since she loved my hair just as much as I did. I’m sure brushing my hair brought her back to her own childhood where her mother would do the same thing. I imagine that if I have a daughter of my own some day I would like to continue a third generation of moments like these. My nightly response to my mom was as expected as the question: “No, Mom. I want my hair as long as a wedding dress!”

Of course I was not thinking about getting married already as a five year old, but my comment was more than just a childish fantasy. With my long hair, I could do anything or be anyone that I wanted: superhero, bird, blanket, or bride. My hair was the ultimate tool of imagination where getting married in a dress of my own locks was as normal as using my separate strands to construct wings like an eagle. When I couldn’t fall asleep at night, I would pretend my hair was one continuous horsetail and mane and silently gallop around my room until I finally started to feel the effects of slumber. During long car rides, I would twist and twirl small chunks until they curled around themselves and pretend that each ball of twisted hair represented a jewel on my crown.

Over the years, my hair endured many stages of evolution. In third grade, I chose a maintenance-free shoulder-length cut that made it easier to conceal under the cap of my baseball uniform. I got my money’s worth out of the first flat iron that I bought in seventh grade; every morning, I woke up an extra hour early to plug in my Conair styler in order to flatten my natural curls into the same pin-straight strands that I would see on the heads of other girls roaming the halls of the middle school. Just before entering high school, and after begging my mom for months, I was finally allowed to get blond highlights in my hair just as I had seen in magazines. As a shy, insecure teenage girl, the last thing I wanted to do was to stand out; as I grew up, I realized that my hair was an extension of my personality that I could control. Rather than opening my mind to the different options and possibilities, I changed my hair to conform and fit in with the crowd.

I distinctly remember the summer after my freshman year of college as a turning point in my life. Although I was grateful for the break from the academic trials, it was the ways in which college tested me as a person that were still weighing heavily upon me: faith, friendships, and future were all on my mind as I settled back in at home. At nineteen years old, I realized that I thought I had life all figured out, when in reality I had a lot of unknowns ahead of me. In a subconscious exercise of control, one of the first things I did after returning home was go to the salon and chop my hair off, and I emerged with the shortest style I have ever sported. My mom told me that she loved it; she said it made me look more grown up. What I didn’t understand was how I could appear so grown up on the outside when I still felt as lost as a child on the inside. As I took the next few years to figure my life out, I decided to go back to my roots and began to let my hair grow...

It’s been four years since my last significant hair cut, and in that time my life has sorted itself out somewhat. My faith is strong and my friendships are valuable, but my future is still very much unknown. After long days at work only to come home to more chores at home, I reminisce about the days as a child when I could fly down the hill in my backyard, long hair flowing like a cape behind me, and collapse into the cool grass at the bottom. It didn’t matter how long I lay there, if my knees were dirty, or if my hair was tangled so long as I made it back into my bed to wake up to another day. Now, as a young adult, I know that life is not about controlling the tangible, but rather about embracing the unknown. When we live life with the wonder of a child, we awaken every day to a new adventure where the horizon is only the beginning of the opportunities we have in store if we believe that to be true. I was blessed with long, curly hair, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t let it grow out to its full potential.