Age 0-8
Mom’s in charge. She’s thrifty, but girl’s got style. Twenty years from now those lace collared gowns and acid washed denim dresses she’s got your chubby baby legs in are gonna make older-you gush. But you’ll want to talk about those bangs. Listen, she’s doing the best she can with what she gave you. Your hair is rowdy! Like a swath of velvet that won’t flow in one direction no matter how many times you smooth a hand over it. No worries. You’re a baby. Babies get away with everything, like having no hair and pooping themselves.
Age 9-12
You’re going to start experimenting, your looks are the thing you’ve learned you can control or at least try to improve upon. This fledgling desire for independence will lead you to taking a brown eyeshadow kit and brushing its heavy smudge over your near-transparent brows. You will look goofy but your beautification choice will also really denote your brother’s seventh birthday party. Eventually you’ll start pinning back one half of your bangs in an effort to look like Wynonna Judd. In fourth grade you’ll graduate to new glasses and switch things up again by separating your banged curly cues straight down the middle. You think it’s a good decision: After all, the curtained coif leads the eye directly to your cool new specs. It doesn’t. It could. But it doesn’t. Because the eye will simply stop the behold the bangs. They look like you have sprouted flaccid red devil horns that curl at the tip. That you have developed a passing prurient interest in things that could send you to said devil is not wholly inaccurate, you hair perhaps a symptom of your starter-sins.
13-16
As this is a childhood pre-Internet, knowledge of coconut oil and best practices for a straightening iron will be the white knight of your college experience, so now you are forced to figure these things out on your own. Luckily, foreheads are hot right now. You make a case with cut-outs from your “teenie bopper” mags, as dad might call them, and collage them into a diary that’s really now a journal (clearly denoted by the word “Journal” penned in something permanent across the front) because only little girls have diaries. Drew, Gwen, Christina. Bangs are for babies, clearly. Bare bulbs, for babes. You, being particularly well-endowed with a five head, decide this is the best route — just grow the bangs out and pull them back with a headband. This look is lukewarmly received by its peers but it makes getting ready in the morning a lot easier, offering five minutes of additional time to spend wiping the rouge mascara off your eyebrow bone and cheeks and vanity mirror and fingers and…
17-29
It’s homecoming or prom or something important your junior year. You have figured out The Swoop. I cannot understate how revolutionary this will be for your life. You have been the cutter, shampooer and stylist of your own hair ever since a brief but raucous run-in with lice in sixth grade, which made you anxious to experience anything close to the kind of humility that is sitting like a wet rat with fleas in a place vomiting fluorescent lighting as, possibly, classmates walk by. But this. All your training has paid off. Something about the way the sweep of strands cover that presumably prize-winning forehead makes you look, dare I say it, kind of hot. The straightening iron and improved proficiency with a mascara wand have also helped, but my dear, we have something great going here. Let’s write it on parchment with our virgin blood and the trimmed toenail of an elfin queen and never, ever stray.
30
You won’t. The Swoop will be your companion through two presidents, four or five boyfriends, seven or so jobs. The Swoop is the steed with which you endlessly saddle your hopes and dreams that today, just maybe, you will good looking. You have learned how to experiment with lipstick and style choices, sexuality and email providers. But never The Swoop. You dare not risk another ginger-tinged failure. That is… until now. Until the New Year’s Eve between your 30th and 31st birthdays. You are bored. You have a lot to look forward to but it’s not here yet. So you are bored. You want to, need to make something feel exciting. And harkening to the lesson you learned a long time ago — that you are the only thing with which you can exert full control — you grab the scissors. You pull your hair forward with a comb because you’re not an animal. You check the Pinterest image twice. You cut. You keep cutting. Oh my god, why can’t you stop! Control, Mantey! The sink is now a battle field of red soldiers, chopped at the knees. You’re afraid to look up, decide to first bury the lost. With one eye and then the other you take a look upon the wreckage. Not too bad. Manageable. You throw on some lipstick (red for distraction), count down to the new year, and agree with all former selves that while bravery in the face of boredom is admirable, may we never stray too far from The Swoop again.
