Being Prepared

by John Christmann

There are some experiences fathers are just not prepared for in life. Changing Diapers. Disneyland vacations. Driving a minivan. Purchasing life insurance. Prolonged holiday visits with in-laws. Maturing. Little things.

This doesn’t mean that we are incapable of coping; it just means that we are sometimes confronted with situations that fall far outside our life expectations as grown men. Before I became a father, for example, I never imagined that I would one day be rising before dawn to deal with the hair of an eight-year-old girl.

Sharing a bathroom with my wife and countless hair products over the years, I have come to accept female hair preparation as a part of life. But it happily goes on about me without my participation. The only assistance I provide is to wait patiently and share my appreciation for the final product. Still, I am constantly amazed at the variety of ingredients that can be massaged into someone’s head.

It is my belief that the hair grooming industry has been entirely fashioned by a Madison Avenue marketing maven equipped with a keen imagination and a large thesaurus. In my shower are cleansers that clarify, purify, and bodify. There are conditioners that volumize, moisturize, naturalize, and I suppose, pasteurize. There are professional hair treatments to infuse vitamins, aloe, wheat germ, and an odd assortment of new age, homeopathic fruit extracts which organically reconstruct, restore, and rejuvenate my wife’s beautiful hair. After reading the labels I often feel inspired to burn incense and meditate with cucumbers over my eyes.

I entrust my hair to something called shampoo. I use it each morning to pacify my hair. I moisturize it with shower water. To create volume I use a towel and wishful thinking. To stabilize it, I use a comb. My hair does not hurt, so I blithely believe it is not broken or split. I see no need to add botanical treatments or gentle napalm derivatives to exfoliate my head. And if I am ever concerned about having a bad hair day, I wear a baseball cap.

So you can understand, then, why I am completely unsuited to prepare my daughter’s hair each morning. And why, when my daughter returned from school sobbing the other day, I felt responsible for her misery.
“The boys at school laughed at me,” she bawled, coughing out the words. “They said I looked like Cousin It.”
Her brother was completely sympathetic.
“No you don’t!” he said emphatically. “You look like a Wookie.”

It was then that I sheepishly called in an expert for help: my wife. She explained to me that hair is living and must be cared for. She told me how the ends can become dry and split, and how proper nourishment can impart luster and body to otherwise limp hair. She told me that mistreated hair becomes dull, lifeless, and flat. “Like yours,” she said, holding a mirror in front of my face.

I watched in fascination as my wife prepared my daughter’s hair. From the back she gently gathered the hair, careful to collect every strand. Then, holding the locks in one hand she brushed them endlessly, first from the top, then from underneath, then from the top again until each length of hair was perfectly in line. Next she deftly flipped the hair around in circles until a bow magically appeared around a soft, flowing pony tail. Her fingers moved so fast she could just have easily pulled a rabbit out of my daughters head.

The next morning I tried it myself. I arose at 5:00 AM, three hours before school. I shampooed my daughter’s hair with a magnolia-scented organic clarifier fresh from a box with Jennifer Aniston’s picture on it. I conditioned her hair with emollients extracted from Arabian yeast cultures. I pat-dried her hair and misted it with a natural detangling agent before gently blowing it dry under low heat so as not to damage it. When I finished her hair cascaded in luminescent waves over her shoulders.

Next I combed her hair over and under and over, making sure that I did not short circuit her head by inadvertently crossing strands. I slipped a red ribbon affixed to an elastic loop over my wrist, and combed her hair yet again. Holding her silky locks, I transferred the bow from my wrist to her hair in one continuous motion, then twisted and pulled the long length of honey hair in and around successive loops until the bow was tight against her head.
“Oww” my daughter screamed as I pulled my ensnared finger from the loop, pulling a thick mash of newly deconstructed hair out with it.

I tried it again, combing endlessly. And again, not quite getting the bow in place. And again. And again.

Frustrated, I turned for help. I grabbed my son’s Cub Scout manual and looked up the chapter on knots. I cut a length of red yarn and sang hopefully as I threaded the yarn around and through her hair:

“Lay the bight to make a hole, then under the back and around the pole.
Over the top and thru the eye, cinch it tight and let it lie.”

When I was done her hair was tied back neat and trim in a perfect pony tail.
“It’s called a bowline!” I told my daughter, proudly. “It is useful for tying off sails and boat anchors.” She turned and looked up at me with a raised eyebrow.
“And as a decorative bow for pony tails,” I added.

That morning I dropped her off at school and she ran sprightly to join her friends. Her pony tail bounced gracefully behind her, held tight by a piece of red yarn knotted hopelessly in her head. A boy with freckles and a nasty cowlick came up to her, kissed her on the cheek, and ran away. She and the other little girls chased after him laughing, then disappeared into the mill of children waiting for school to begin.

As I said, there are some experiences fathers are just not prepared for in life.