Remember when I whined about my hair last month?
Well.
After writing that post, I did something that might make you so embarrassed for me that you’ll squirm in your seat and scrunch your nose and hide your face.
I CALLED the salon in Utah and said, “Hi, I’m looking for Brittany… she works there…”
“She’s not in right now. Can I take a message?”
“Yeah, sure… uh…” and all the time I’m talking, my voice was echoing back to me for some reason and I couldn’t make very good sense of what I was saying, “I came in last year… 2011.. with the A New You group. Brittany did my hair… she wrote it down, and I have the card she wrote on. I just need to check with her to see if she got the colors right when she wrote it down.”
“I don’t understand,” the lady on the other line said, “I don’t understand exactly what you’re wanting. I don’t think we’ll be able to help you.”
“Can you just have Brittany call me?” I asked, trying to block out the echo in my phone, “My number is…”
And a few hours later, as I laid sick in my bed writing a Primary Program, my phone rang.
It’s Brittany.
Please keep yourself from ending that sentence with a swear word in your head. Thank you.
Thankfully there was no echo this time as I explained what had happened.
“What did I do to your hair?” she asked.
“It was a subtle red color with highlights…”
“I remember you. Alicia, yeah. I use that formula all the time now. It’s my signature fall color.”
BAM! It was a MIRACLE!
We talked for a bit about what had happened. It turns out she HAD written the color down right.
“Have you dyed your hair between now and then?” She asked.
“No,” I answered.
“Okay, you need to call the salon back. Make sure they used the right formula. Schedule an appointment with a master stylist. Get it fixed. You don’t have to live with it like that, especially if you spent the money on it.”
And so.
I strapped on my big girl pants, and I called. I got an appointment. Yesterday, I WENT to that appointment and I was a little scared.
You have to understand that I never send anything back: a $5 sandwich, a $20 pizza, a $200 dye job.
I was scared. I crawled into the chair and sheepishly handed my card to the master stylist. She immediately saw a problem for which I will forever be grateful.
“No,” she said, “Your hair should be a warm copper… Oh my gosh. How are we going to fix this?”
Having learned my lesson the LAST time I sat in a salon chair, I held up a picture of how I looked at the retreat last summer and I said, “THIS is what I want. If I can’t have this, then I’d be happy to let what I have grow completely out and come back later and start over fresh… I can just take a discount on the job, or something. I don’t expect it to get fixed today. I just want to figure out what went wrong because I LOVED my hair last year. And I pretty much hate what I have. I’m getting maternity pictures and family pictures and hospital pictures done, and I want to like my hair for them.”
I don’t think the stylist heard ANY of that. She was too busy thinking… she had on the same face I wore as a junior in high school when I tried to solve trig equations.
“Hold on,” she said, and disappeared.
She reappeared with a girl named Tyler (I just love that name for a girl. Someone push it on my husband, quick!) and Tyler had pretty copper-ish hair. Turns out someone had messed Tyler’s hair up and my stylist had fixed it.
“It’s going to take a couple of sessions, but we can do this,” she said.
“Okay,” I said.
And my son was the best behaved little man in the world for two hours while I was color stripped, painted, washed, rinsed, colored, washed, rinsed…
And just as Tyler was blow drying my hair, the stylist who had caused this mess in the first place walked by.
“What are you doing here?” She asked, genuinely concerned.
“I just had to get the color adjusted. I called the girl in Utah… the formula was right… I guess the salon recently did some reformulating…”
“Whatever, so long as you get the color you want. That’s what’s important.”
She then started asking about my pregnancy and telling me to watch, “What To Expect When You’re Expecting.”
And then she walked away.
“Aaaaawwwwkward,” Tyler sing-songed near my ear as she blow dried.
She also happened to say, “This looks SO much better” about 90 times while she ran a round brush through my copper locks.
SO much better!!!!!! It’s still a lot darker than I like, so I’ll be going in for one more treatment later in the month. For free (and the crowd goes wild).
But really. I’m so much happier!
I realized yesterday as I snapped a few pictures to text to my concerned husband (who has really caught the brunt end of this whole hair fiasco) that while my hair looked not-so-copper, I wasn’t taking any pictures. I didn’t do it conscientiously.
But I guess I wasn’t as eager to hop in front of a camera with my kids or with my husband, or anything.
It’s important to me to do that -not because I’m vain -but because I want to force myself to be IN pictures. Mothers often leave themselves out, and that’s all good and fine… but what about the kids? When they get older, they WANT to see mom in pictures! They want to know what kind of clothes she wore when she was a young mother, a mother of teens, an empty nester -what her hair looked like, if she painted her nails or her face…
And so I try to capture these kinds of things. But when my hair looked like it did, I didn’t.
Right now the red is so dark it looks almost Halloweenish, but I WILL TAKE IT. It looks much, much, MUCH better!
And yesterday, even though it took me two hours to get to this point, I was a much happier person. I was more patient, more attentive to my kids. I laughed easier. I smiled more. I FELT good -even though I’d woken up sicker than a dog.
So.
As much as I hate that I spent so much on my hair (both time-wise AND financially)… IT IS WORTH IT.
To me. It is.
My hair is my thing. For some women, it’s their nails or their baseboards or their shoes.
For me, it’s my hair. If it doesn’t look good, life just doesn’t go as smoothly as it should… or as smoothly as I KNOW it can be.
Just that morning as I was getting my daughter ready for her very first school picture day, I sat her in the sink and waved her hair. If her hair didn’t look good for pictures, I wouldn’t be happy. And since I was paying for the pictures… I made sure to spend some time on her hair.
She hated it. Hair isn’t her thing.
“YOU’RE GOING TO BURN ME!” She sobbed.
“THIS IS SO BORING!” She continued to sob, tears rolling down her face.
“I HATE THIS AND I WANT TO BE DONE!”
Finally I said, “I am NOT going to burn you. You are going to be FINE. YOU ARE getting your hair done and if you want to cry that is FINE, but DO NOT SAY ONE MORE MEAN THING TO ME. GOT IT?”
“Yeah…”
And the minute I finished waving the last strand of hair, she looked in the mirror and smiled.
“I’m so fancy!” She cried out in glee.
I sighed. She bounced out of my bathroom and I gritted my teeth and tried to hide the scream. I didn’t do a very good job.
“She’s FIVE,” my husband said, gently.
“And we’re getting ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE?” I asked.
He held me.
Somewhere a few miles away, my mother is reading that story and rejoicing. Because I’m pretty sure I put her through it when it came to doing my hair.
BOYS, on the other hand, are easy unto me.
Especially mine. He’s the cool kid playing angry birds at the salon and hauling his mama’s purse around because he was SURE she wasn’t capable of doing it herself. Surely, she would mess Purse Carrying up.
I rewarded his exceptionally good behavior with a Slushy. As we were driving down the road, I heard him groan in frustration.
“Argggggggggggg,” he said in the backseat.
“What?” I asked.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” he said, “I just snocked my drink up ALL OVER MY PANTS.”
“Snocked?” I asked.
“YES! SNOCKED!”
I still have no idea what “snocked” means. All I know is when we stopped, he had pink lemonade slushy all over his khaki pants, and we got a good laugh out of it.
If anyone figures out what “snocked” means, will they please tell me?
Just before heading home, the boy took his birthday money and bought something he’s been dying for.
Happiest kid in the world, right there.
And since he has all the garb to go with his Iron Man mask (he actually already HAS an Iron Man mask, but whatever) and he has a Captain America Shield to go with the mask, he’s now working to save for Hulk Hands.
You know those big green hands that kids use to smash their mother’s crystal? I’m excited.
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