A Story I’ve Rarely Told Before: My First Bad Haircut

I’ve written before about my dislike of beauty parlors, which dates back to early childhood. I have never been comfortable in salons, even though most of the time the stylists gave me better haircuts than when my mother cut my hair at home.

However, a couple of weeks ago I got the worst haircut of my adult life. Objectively speaking, it probably isn’t that bad. But it wasn’t what I wanted, nor what I expected. Let’s just say there was a failure to communicate between me and the stylist.

Not only was it a couple inches shorter in front than I wanted, but it was sloppy. One ear is more visible than the other. I grant that my ears might not be evenly placed on my head (few people’s ears are entirely symmetrical). But wouldn’t you think a good stylist would minimize that difference rather than accentuating it?

In addition, I’d asked for a slight undercut, to help my perfectly straight hair turn under in its bob. Most stylists can blend the layers very nicely, but this woman left the top layer a very ragged and obvious half-inch longer than the bottom layer. I looked like my hair had been cut with a hacksaw.

All this brought back memories of my worst haircut as a child. That happened when I was three.

Shortly before my parents moved our family to Corvallis, Oregon, around Labor Day in 1959, their friends had us over for a farewell dinner. These friends had two children—a girl who was two years older than me, and a boy my age. After dinner the four children (their two, me, and my soon-to-be-two-year-old brother) were sent to the basement to play while the parents chatted.

As frequently happens, the five-year-old girl (I’ll call her “Leia”) and I played together, and the two little boys played together. Leia and I started by playing beauty parlor with her dolls. Soon she proposed cutting the dolls’ hair.

My mother would never have let me cut my dolls’ hair! But my mother didn’t make the rules in Leia’s house, and Leia assured me it was all right. She had the scissors right there to prove it.

Cutting the dolls’ hair became very boring very quickly. So Leia said we should cut each other’s hair. She would start with mine. And so she did.

That’s about when the parents came downstairs.

“Oh, no!” my mother cried. “What did you do?” She was talking to me. I wasn’t clear why—I hadn’t done anything. I’d just been sitting there while Leia wielded the scissors.

Leia’s mother was extremely apologetic. “She’s never done that before,” she said of Leia. I still wasn’t sure what the fuss was about, but I knew I was in trouble.

The next afternoon, my mother sat me on the picnic table in the backyard, trying to repair the damage. It was a hot, sunny, summer afternoon, and the neighbor lady came over to chat.

“Look at her!” my mother said, pointing at me. “She looks dreadful!”

The neighbor commiserated with my mother, and the two of them talked about the holes in my bangs and the unevenness of my hair in back. Mother had been chopping away at it, just as Leia had.

“I’ll never be able to make her look good,” my mother said. “She’ll look terrible for weeks.”

I can recall sitting there on the picnic table in the sunshine while my mother talked about how awful I looked. Even at three years old, I felt humiliated and ashamed at how she described me. I vowed right there and then I’d never tell my little girl she looked terrible, no matter what she did.

I made many similar vows over the years—things my parents said or did to me that I promised myself I would never do to my children. Most of these promises I broke by the time my eldest was five. But I don’t think I ever broke this vow.

Not even when my daughter got bubble gum in her hair. I yelled at her as I rubbed peanut butter through her long curly tresses, and I think I had to cut some of it out. But I didn’t tell her she looked terrible.

What memories do you have of bad haircuts?