“You only like it because it looks like that Jesus guy you’re obsessed with. It’s not good. Not good.”
That’s my mom. My son decided to grow his hair out and I had sent him a Pinterest photo of a hairstyle I liked — longer, tousled, cowlicky— and for whatever reason, he showed it to her. You’d think he’d announced he was joining a cult.
“That greasy mess? You think that’s nice for your own flesh and blood?” she said to me. Then came the closer: “I told him if he shows up like that again, he can find another grandmother.”
“He’s in college. He’s in charge of his own head. What are you going to do?”
“He’s not going to look like Jesus, you know,” she hissed.
“That hair was in a magazine. In a watch ad. It’s not greasy or evil. It’s on Pinterest because people like it and want to share it. It’s hair to envy.”
She made that sound — the tsk/grunt combo that can teleport me to my 15-year-old self in under three seconds. “It’s his face they’re looking at, not the hair. He’d look a lot better with a clean cut. Like George Clooney. Now there’s a man who can sell a watch.”
I reminded her that my son has had a George Clooney haircut for years. In fact, he brought Sports Clip girl a photo of a salt & pepper George at the Academy Awards as inspiration. When he was 7. He knows what he likes. But hair has always been her battlefield.
Hair -A Quest For Symmetry & Control
Hair is where my mother’s control issues, beauty standards, and unresolved trauma come to life. My hair, her hair, strangers’ hair — no one is safe. She used to cut mine — which is a generous way of saying she took out her frustration through scissors. My childhood photos are a tragic timeline of increasingly shorter bangs, casualties of her quest for symmetry and control.
Once, she tried to Vidal Sassoon me into Mia Farrow from Rosemary’s Baby for a Sears photo shoot. “It was so cute,” she reflects. No, Mom. It was not. I looked like a budget Moe from The Three Stooges.
Then came the Ricky Schroder Little Lord Fauntleroy cut. Translation: “I wanted a boy.”
The Farrah
When I finally grew it long, Marcia Brady-style, she was not satisfied.
“You need bangs,” she sniffed. “Marcia Brady is not real! She’s an adult!”
By 1980, I wanted feathered hair. Farrah Fawcett. I had a vision. The beautician at Ruby Begonias Beauty Parlor begged me to reconsider. I refused. It looked decent — until I washed it. The layers flipped under instead of out, and a rogue cowlick appeared like a vengeful demon. I locked myself in the bathroom with a blow dryer, sobbing, desperately trying to recreate whatever magic happened in the salon. Unmoved by my suffering, my mom suggested cutting it even shorter for manageability.
“And anyway,” she snarled, “you need bangs.”
Then karma struck.
She chopped off her own beautiful, blonde, bang-free hair to go “Rocky Mountain natural” style” after we moved west. My little brother took one look and cried.
“You’re not my mom! Go put your hair back.”
Honestly, I related. She suddenly looked older, mortal. Even with freshly cut bangs.
The Mod Rod
A new beautician was… let’s call her uninspired. And Chip. Freaking. Collins. He got a good chuckle and said I looked like Rod Stewart. I had no idea who that was, so I asked my dad. He pulled out the Blondes Have More Fun album. That hair? A crime scene where a comb has gone to die, tragically lost in a spiky meringue of blonde chaos! I immediately staged a stomach flu with the help of Grape-Nuts and tomato soup, successfully avoiding school until my hair grew out.
The Hasselhoff
Then came the perm era.
Mom first. Then she made my dad get one –an unfortunate decision, considering he already had a mustache and thus ended up looking like porn star. “I don’t know you until that thing on your head is over,” I promptly told him. Then it was my turn. I envisioned cascading, beachy waves like Daryl Hannah in Splash. Reality gave me a tight, spring-loaded disaster that shrank my hair to my scalp. I was told not to touch it until it “relaxed.” Relax? (Don’t Do It). I fluffed it up. I had a party to go to, and Chia Pet wasn’t working. Huge mistake. I looked like David Hasselhoff on a bad day. More crying. More school avoidance.
The only person who pulled off a proper perm in the 80s was Cher, in Moonstruck specifically.
All Bangs All the Time
Meanwhile, my mom’s styles cycled through her moods: the blonde beach hair, the copper shag, the Rocky Mountain waves, the short, no-nonsense elementary principal look, the severe bob — the ultimate “controlling personality” hairstyle.
And the bangs. Always the bangs.
“Bangs, bangs, bangs,” she preaches, as if salvation depends on them.
Nice for her — no cowlick. My bangs, however, revolt by lunchtime, revealing the forehead of a woman who’s lived.
“You look so much younger with bangs,” she insists, long before I even knew that looking younger was supposed to be the goal.
She delivers these pronouncements like scripture — half sigh, half judgment — as if my refusal personally offends her. But here’s the thing: bangs don’t work with cowlicks. They just don’t. And no bangs makes me look old—all those lines on my forehead spelling out every worry I’ve ever had.
It never ends. And now, it seems, she’s set her sights on my number one boy.
Jesus, help him.
