Hair. Long or short? When you have short hair, you want it long and flowing like a Timotei advert and when its long, you want to whip out the scissors and create an elfin look.
Coincidence or not after having both my boys I decided to go short. I would love to say it was because I never have time to get the blow drier out and straighteners and use a million products. But its not, I never did any of that anyways! I was always lucky with the fact that I could turn my head upside down and blast it with a drier and it would just fall nicely into shape with hardly the stroke of a brush.
For me it is about feeling better, feeling new. Feeling like I could take time to do something with my hair, time that I so crave just now. Shorter hair needs attention, you cannot just tie it up in a knot, pull it up into a pony tail and scoot out the door. Now I feel I can justify my ten solitary minutes in the bathroom.
Shorter hair also needs more regular trips to the hairdresser to keep it in shape. I do believe that is another hour every 4to 6 weeks in the bag. However finding a hairdresser to trust with this job is another ball game altogether.
As a person who stammers, that first appointment can be painful. They ask you your name, where you live, what you do for a living, its worse than a police interview. All the things you KNOW you will stammer on, no matter how good a day you are having. And so it can go one of two ways. The hairdresser is cool, a mature person and gets it, doesn’t act completely freaked out as you can bet they will have never had a conversation with a person who stammers (did I mention women who stammer are in the minority of a minority, as its 8/10 people who stammer are male), as its a pretty rare case to get more than a few of us in any one town! On the other hand, she (or he) will have seen The Kings Speech and now become a speech therapist with many hints and tips as they also had a granddad with ‘a bit of a stoppage’. They will try to finish every sentence, usually wrongly and give you tea when really you wanted coffee but it just seemed easier for you both if you get what you can say straight out.
So you go hairdresser to hairdresser until you find one that doesn’t cut your hair they way they want because they think its what you want…
I have found a great one. And she comes to my house. She does eyebrow waxing, tinting, all sorts. I had heard about the ‘mobile hairdresser’ but was never sure if I liked the idea. So far we haven’t mentioned the stammering thing, but there has been no need. She chatters away, asks stuff but in a nice way that doesn’t feel like a Spanish inquisition! So on appointment two I say the words, ‘I think I am going to go a bit shorter this time, like to my shoulders or just above.’
And so she snips away, and before long there is hair all over the floor, and I am always amazed by how this looks. It always looks like so much, and this time it looks so long, but I shake my head and I feel lighter, I mean so much lighter. Looking in the mirror I am pleased, and start to plan a trip to Boots in my head for a new colour and some nice products. I am going to make the most of that extra ten minutes in the bathroom in the mornings! I get to pay attention to me again. I get that it might be a bit of a drastic way to get ten minutes to yourself each day but for me it is a start, a start at making more time for me, this way it feels like a necessity, not a luxury. Almost guilt free. Almost.
Mum-atron At Work 