Season's Beatings

Good day, darlings. If you're even semi-conscious you are aware that yet another Storm of the Century is pounding the East Coast. DC is of course shut down, although to be fair, 20 inches does get in the way of business. Here in Boston we are awaiting about 12 inches, which is a lot but not truly newsworthy. As Jack Palance once said so beautifully, "I sh*t bigger than that."

On the plus side, Grandma Haggis did manage to get out of DC ahead of the storm and arrive this morning, so Bambina is very happy. On the Scottish side, in my mother's true style, she sat down at my breakfast table and said just sweet as pie, "What possessed you to get such a short haircut?" So delicately put, as always.

Allow me to fill you in on my most recent haircut. The one that prompted my child to say "Mama now has Dada hair!" The one that could not have come at a worse time for me, being that my face alone weighs 14 pounds from prednisone. The one that coincided with me feeling the most acute depression about perhaps never getting off prednisone and being giantly fat and disfigured, not to mention immune-suppressed--for the rest of my natural life. I mean, it was a seriously bad time for me to walk into my usual salon, to my usual person, and say, "give me the usual!" without then actually describing what that meant. 45 minutes later and I'm looking at a buzz cut. At first I thought it had just been styled differently, but when I got home I could no longer avoid the truth: bitch had shaved my head.

So: couldn't have happened at a worse time emotionally and psychologically. But then again, as I selected which hats I would be wearing when in the presence of other humans for the next two months, I wondered if perhaps it hadn't happened at the perfect time after all. Because in all honesty, sometimes we need a little reminder that all the stuff we think is important: our appearance, our hair, our ass size, our face size--really actually truly isn't. I can sit around and cry about my mortifying haircut, or I can say, "Fuck it! It's just hair--and hair grows." I can bemoan my huge ass, or I can--as the beautiful and sweet and darling BBDD advised and insisted--just go buy bigger pants. I can get all worked up about all the stuff that sometimes feels like it matters so much, or I can realize that doing so will only take me away from all the stuff that actually does matter: helping out at my kid's school, seeing my friends, hanging out with family, getting our home ready for Baby Sister. That's the stuff that matters, that's the place my head should be, and it wasn't. So--if it took a bad haircut to strip me of my pretensions and get me back on track--then maybe it wasn't such a bad thing after all.

That said, bitch still shaved my head, and if I ever figure out which car is hers, it's gettin' a keying.