Much a-do about hair.

So after the Mother’s Day shenanigans I wrote about last year, I bet both of my readers have held their breath wondering how Mother’s Day 2013 went.  Well, I can report that it was a wonderful day that held none of the bumbling crazy that seems to mark every special occasion in the Lalonde family.  Of course I had thrown out little reminders, looking at my calendar and loudly commenting on how fast time was going by:

Me: "Oh wow, May is just flying by.  This coming weekend is MOTHER’S day and next weekend is already the long weekend!"

Him: "What? No, Mother’s Day is always the long weekend."

Me: "No, they’re trying something new for the long weekend this year, calling it Victoria Day after some Queen or something."

Anyway, the day was awesome and full of great food that I didn't have to cook.  And the lovely thing was that my husband really wanted to show me that he was so much better at gift giving than camouflage and scotch so he put my daughter in charge; which was the right thing to do. 

They (she) picked out a fancy-shmancy hair straightener from a real salon.  This thing is top shelf, man.  It heats up to 450 degrees.  Apparently that’s a really good feature; however I’m not sure if I’m supposed to use it to straighten my hair or to sear a prime rib.  

Hair, specifically women’s hair, has become so complicated and quite frankly I’m just no good at it.  It’s fussy, it’s time consuming and there are all these rules.  Like, apparently you can’t just straighten the front of your hair, you have to do the back too.  Pfft.  You can’t even see the back!  Almost every woman I see out there looks so put together, I mean they actually have a hair style.  My style is called, “This is what it looked like when I gave up this morning.” 

Remember the good old days of hair?  You had two women’s hair styles to covet:  Farrah Fawcett and the blonde chick from ABBA. 

You had two shampoos to choose from: Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific (pretty straightforward on the branding there, I like it) and Agree (someone was asleep at the advertising board room table here).  And remember when conditioner was called Creme Rinse? 

There were no special ‘botanicals’ unless you count the beer in that one stinky shampoo, Body on Tap.  We didn’t even know what botanicals were.  Nowadays you can’t even find anything that’s not infused with yak’s milk and rose hips or some other weird combination for tone and structure.  

A trip to the beauty parlour as it was called in our home town was a big deal.  It was still a luxury for a lot of people to see a hairdresser and therefore many moms doubled as stylists at home using products such as Frost n’ Glow and Toni – the ever popular home permanent solution – which did one of two things, nothing at all (sorry, your Toni didn’t take) or produced a head of curls closely resembling that of Trixie, the family poodle.  “Oh it’s really tight now but it’ll relax.”  It didn’t relax.  The 70s and 80s were dark decades for hair, simple but dark. 

I have no idea who these people are but they rock the perm.

Some women love going to the salon.  I am not one of them.  Why?  Because I am forced to confess all my Hair Sins:

“So, have we been cutting our own bangs again?”

“What? No! … well maybe just the once.” 

“Ok, well you’re using a deep conditioner once a week, right?” 

“Um, yeah of course! Actually no.”

I also hate getting my hair washed, combed or curled by anyone else because I am a wimp.

"You just relax and I'll give you a nice scalp massage while I'm washing your hair. How does that feel?"

"Honestly...like you have staples on the ends of your fingers."

I tried a trendy hairstyle once, the angled bob, where the back is short and the sides are longer.  It looked great when I left the salon.  In three weeks I looked like a basset hound.   So I grew it out and I’m sticking to long, boring and hopefully, straight.  Wish me luck. 

I wonder if Bjorn has nightmares about this outfit.