Sunday Newscape Magazine

When I reach the Pearly Gates, and I am allowed to ask one question, I already know what it’s going to be. Why, Oh Lord, did you give me my dad’s hair? This may seem to you like a ridiculously shallow question to be asking at such a moment, but that’s because you have not had to spend more than four decades attached to a stringy substance that has resisted my attempts to mold it into something attractive. You, my friend, have not had to live with my father’s follicles.

Now, those faulty follicles have not been a problem for my father. That’s because he is a man and, on top of that, he’s a HIM (hair-indifferent man). A HIM does not care about his hair. A HIM spends even less time thinking about his hair than he spends wondering if his jeans make his butt look big. If you have problem hair that just lies slouched across your scalp as sluggish as a teenager in the summertime, being a HIM is a real blessing.

Being the daughter of a hair-challenged HIM, however, can be a curse if - like me - you are unfortunate enough to have inherited his calamitous coif. And if - like me - you have a mother with thick, beautiful, bouncy hair who dropped the genetic ball, so to speak, at your conception and allowed your father’s lackluster gene to beat her healthy-hair gene to the punch, you may have enough Oedipal issues to keep any therapist happy (and wealthy). Personally, I plan on skipping the shrink’s couch, though, and eventually just taking the matter up with the Creator himself.

In the meantime, I have to confess I understand why all those wealthy divorcees demand thousands monthly in alimony for personal upkeep. If I could, I’d spend that much on my hair alone - perms, cuts and coloring, along with expensive styling products with French names that will surely make my hair look better just by virtue of being French. Of course, given my follicular disability, I would also need a full-time stylist to fix my “do” every day.

The hairy truth is that stylists know things we mortals just don’t know. Whenever I have my hair done at a salon, and my normally limp locks are temporarily looking good, I feel like I’ve beaten the genetic odds. Strangers on the street treat me with more respect. My co-workers ask if I’ve had a face-lift or maybe some liposuction.

“No,” I say. “It’s just that my hair looks decent for once.”

So decent, in fact, that after my last salon visit, people were still talking about my hair a week later, even after I’d gone back to my familiar flat-as-a-pancake look. That should have made me happy, but instead I was melancholy. It was like getting a glimpse of the Promised Land and then having to go back into the wilderness. I’d tasted life as one of the hair fortunate. It was a bitter pill indeed to return to my helmet-hair existence.

“Can’t you learn to make it look good yourself?” my HIM husband asked.

I patiently tried to explain that hairdressers are like golf players. What they do doesn’t look hard, and yet, try it yourself and see what happens. Even using the same products and appliances, I simply cannot get my hair to look the way it does when my stylist does it. The only solution is to get a divorce and spend every penny of my alimony to keep a hairdresser at my beck and call.

I’m just kidding, of course. Really, dear, I’m just kidding. I should have been born a HIM. Thanks a lot, Mom.