Jess D. Facts's Open Salon Blog

I. Am. Job.

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 16:04:49 -0400

I have a job. J-O-B, job. It’s been so long since I’ve been able to say that. One year, two months and eighteen days, to be exact. I have always had a job. Always. I was more excited to get a worker’s permit on my sixteenth birthday than I was to get my drivers license, therefore, one year, two months and eighteen days in an eternity of a gap in my employment history.

When the realization of not having a job first hit me, I thought I would use the time wisely and do something productive like find myself or write a book or keep the house Martha Stewart clean. I figured I would keep a schedule for myself just for the sake of schedule keeping. My imagined schedule went something like this: wake up, see the kids off to school, job hunt online for an hour or two, clean, write, write some more, think deep and wonderful thoughts, bake cookies and welcome the kids back home just in time for me to start cooking in order to have supper ready for my husband when he came home from his job. Sigh, job…such a coveted thing.

To me, my schedule sounded wonderfully doable. I thought by keeping time somehow it would keep me in the loop of life. So, on my first day of underemployment, I thought I might take it a bit easy. I got up, saw the kids off to school, revamped my resume, posted it on several, several job boards and took a nap. I was asleep before I could even catch The Price is Right, a show I associate with daytime relaxation. Waking up around noon, I mentally kicked myself for wasting time. In that two or better hours I could have had the kitchen deep cleaned or realized a hidden moment of my childhood that had been knocking me around for the past thirty-something years. Since I was groggy, I figured a pot of coffee was in order to jump-start me into my schedule. After three cups, I spent the majority of the remainder of the day in the bathroom. My first day was wasted.

The next several days were spent listening to a new voice in my head. I found a new side of myself on day two and she was a horrid bitch. She tore me down, chewed me up, spit me back out and left me feeling like what ever is found underneath dog poop when it gets stepped on. I was an emotional wreck. So much progress and only day two! I went from a decently happy, productive person to a greasy bed-dweller in a matter of twenty-four hours. What the hell? I have always been able to snap back. But then again, I’ve always had a job to pay my bills and support my family. Images of emaciated children swept through my head like storm clouds. I even wondered if my husband and I could fit comfortably in a refrigerator box while my children would each have their own stove box to call their own just to give them a sense of luxury.

How could a multi-billion dollar company lay me off just to save themselves a few thousand bucks when so much more was really at stake? I lost every bit of self-pride I had. I saw my value as someone who was always able to provide for my family and now I was a serious burden. My job provided wonderful insurance, a decent paycheck, and a huge chunk of my identity. I felt bald and naked without it. I clothed myself with self-loathing and the covers of my bed. I cringed at the sound of each car passing wondering if it was the electric company coming to turn off the lights since I was now waiting to the very last day to pay the bill rather than paying it almost as soon as it came in the mail just to ensure food on the table. I made beans for supper almost every night and made my kids tell me, in detail, what they had for lunch at school just so I could imagine something other than the taste of beans. I was almost jealous of school food.

After my husband had gone to work and the bus farted my children off to school, I brought my laptop to bed with me. I was determined to find a job similar to what I was doing but soon realized that not very many companies were hiring for the position at which I was so experienced after having done my job for over eleven years. Sure, there were jobs out there, but the jobs were either way over my little skill-set head or way beneath me. Some of the job descriptions were so detailed and demanding of this specific thing or that, that I felt panic attacks coming on since I knew that I was no where near qualified for what these people were asking. I applied for every job anyway. I think, at last count, I applied for four hundred, thirty-three jobs, some of which I applied for multiple times. Out of those jobs, I had three phone interviews, one pre-interview, which was a face-to-face, and one real interview where after seven weeks of deliberation, I actually got the job.

I started my job last week. After finding my inner self-degrading bitch, I was shell shocked to be out of the house for more than just grocery shopping. That’s all I did outside of the house for over a year since I couldn’t afford to do more. I haven’t been around people other than my family and a few friends every now and then and now I’m the boss of seven people. I find, now that I’m back in the real world, I have not only lost my sense of self, but I have also lost my sense of humor. I don’t think anything is funny anymore since I’ve just spent the last bit of too long taking things way too seriously. When, and if, I laugh, I find the feeling so shockingly foreign that I stop, confused at what my body was doing.

So, now it is time for me to jump back into the world that I have been hidden from, dust off my personality (the inner bitch had me questioning if I’ve ever really had one to begin with), and grasp at those non-existent bootstraps that everyone likes to talk about. I can do this. I can go back out into the world and redevelop my sparkle, or at least fake that I’ve got some shine deep down inside of me. When you apply your wrinkle cream, think of me since I just might be the one that is making it for you. I used to make the products you buy better but now I make you prettier.

When I was Human Bubble Wrap

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 11:04:17 -0400

Oh the joys of having teenaged girls. Whoever thought up the concept of having multiple bathrooms in a house should be canonized. My girls, I love them, I do, spend all of their spare time in those bathrooms primping and preening and popping. Yes, popping. They will stand in front of the mirror and examine every square centimeter of their faces looking for the enemy pimple and attack it with a vengeance. They use their faces as one might have when playing Space Invaders. My girls stand in front of the mirror and wait for the next zit to appear so they can squeeze the ever-loving pus out of them and then walk away from the mirror feeling victorious.

Sometimes, the times I hate most, my girls come to me with a blemish that is especially stubborn and ask for my help. When it comes to parenting, I have to admit, I’m virtually hands-off. I hug, I snuggle and I kiss but that’s all I want as far as it comes to touching these girls. But then they beg, they bride, they almost burst into tears as they ask me to please obliterate their enemy. Most of the time I give alternate solutions to these pressing pimple problems. I tell them to do a spot treatment that I spent a jillion dollars on, I tell them to wait for it to go away, I tell them anything I can think of just so I don’t have to pop their pimples. I don’t want to pop them. I seriously can’t believe that they come to me and ask me to do this for them when I used to do the exact opposite when I was their age.

When I was in the eighth grade, the pimple factory fairy came to me and sprinkled my forehead and temples with a spattering of zits that had they been freckles they would have been cute. But, since they weren’t freckles, they were disgusting. I had a colony of little angry, red bumps littering my face that I just wanted to hide. Rather than cut a set of bangs to let flop over my face, my mom insisted that I keep my bangs long so I could keep the least amount of oil from coming in contact with my problem-areas. The logic behind it was admirable but I still felt like I had the world’s worst Braille billboard on my face just asking for a teasing.

My mom did her best to help me with my acne. She bought bar after bar of Neutrogena soap that I used every morning and night with a silent prayer. When the soap didn’t work, she brought me to a dermatologist who prescribed me smelly ointments that felt even oilier on my skin than what my skin felt on its own. When that didn’t work my mom liked to think she took care of the problem for me. She popped them.

I say that like it was so calm and mild, but in truth, it wasn’t. It was more like she chased me around the house with her fingers at the ready position in front of her making her look like a demented crab with claws ready to pinch its next victim. Once she had me cornered, my mom went at my forehead with relish. I could hear my skin breaking open as she got zit after zit of spill its guts to her. The look in my mom’s eyes as she was doing this to me was somewhere between calm and crazed. She loved popping pimples. She would stand in the mirror of her bathroom and examine her skin and squeeze anything on her face or shoulders in hopes of the white gold she was looking for. Sometimes, as her knee was holding me down, she’d give commentary to what she was doing. “Oh, that was a good one. It came squiggling out like toothpaste.” Gross. I felt like my mom’s personal flesh-toned roll of bubble wrap.

Once, when my sister was in the ninth grade, she had a pimple on the bridge of her nose that wouldn’t go away. She had that thing there for months. It wasn’t a huge zit or anything. It wasn’t like that pimple made my sister look like Rudolph, but that blemish bothered my mom so incredibly much. Every night my mom would chase my sister around and try to pop that pimple. I know it embarrassed my sister to have this one-on-one time with our mom since I went through the same thing on an almost daily basis. My mom would squeeze until her arms were shaking with the strain of the pressure she was putting on herself. My sister would stand there and wait for it to be over because it was easier to endure the physical pain my mom inflicted rather than the nagging begging of “please let me just try, come here and let me just try,” that would otherwise go on all night. My mom put hot compresses on the bump on my sister’s nose and then try again. When my sister walked away her nose was white from the blood being squeeze away from the area and her pimple still intact.

Months after my mom started trying to pop my sister’s pimple, my dad finally had enough of the nightly routine. He told my sister to come to him. Gently he pushed on the pimple. First he pressed down on the top of it, then on each of its sides. He put his hands behind his back and looked my sister in the eye. “I’m only going to squeeze it once,” he said. My sister, being the perfect teenager, rolled her eyes in response. My dad placed his thumbs on either side of her pimple, but much further apart than my mom ever had done. He pulled the skin up and off her nose and quickly squeeze. Pus flew everywhere and my mom stood behind him in disbelief. She was jealous that my dad was able to pop that thing and she couldn’t. To this day, over twenty years since that has happened, she says that she would have given him the house in their divorce had she just been able to get that pimple instead of him. A house for a zit, is that a fair-trade in a court of law? In my mom’s law book it is.

So now, when my girls beg and cry for me to pop a stubborn pimple so they can look more human than freakish (their words, not mine) I begrudgingly oblige them. I don’t do anything that my mom did. First, I make them sit down and I look at the pimple. If it’s not ready to be popped, I tell them so rather than squeeze until they want to cry. I examine the pimple like how my dad did so I can see exactly where the pus pocket is. Then, I squeeze their arm to show them exactly how hard I’m going to do it and I tell them how many times I’m going to have to squeeze. Because of the torture and abuse my mom inflicted upon me as a teenager, I have become something of a zit-ologist. My girls know that I’m good at popping things but they also know that I’ll only do it as a last resort as opposed to my main source of entertainment.

I’ve become very leery of popping pimple for my girls because once, after my youngest daughter complained of a pimple hurting her when she brushed her hair since it was on the top of her head, I examined the bump and gently (seriously very gently like barely touched it gently) pressed on it, the thing EXPLOEDED all over my glasses, which I was so thankful to have been wearing. I stopped after the first geyser but after supper my daughter begged me to finish the job so again I pressed very softly and the thing exploded all over again but this time it reached the ceiling. Gross. I think because of my resistance to this infatuation they have with their skin they’ve resorted to going monkey on each other. They primp and preen each other as though they were looking for lice. I swear to god if I see either of them squeezing and then putting their fingers to their mouths I’m going to rip their fingernails for their meticulously groomed nail beds. And after writing about all of this, I'm really regretting that banana I had for breakfast.

Teaching the kid how to Kegel

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 15:03:50 -0400

Last year I got a call from my daughter’s school secretary. The woman’s voice was sweet and soft and full of concern. “You need to bring your daughter some fresh pants and panties,” the woman told me. Oh. My. God. She started. Poor baby, I thought, to have started when her mommy wasn’t around. I thought of it like she had died in an empty room. I rushed around the house getting my daughter’s stuff together mentally chastising myself for not having the house more organized for a situation like this. The phone was jammed between my cheek and shoulder as I gathered the things. “Please remind my daughter that we have her just-in-case bag in her backpack,” I told the secretary. The secretary was quick to correct my thinking. “Oh no, no, no, she didn’t start her period, she was having a little too much fun in math class and wet herself.” Oh.

I remember the first time my daughter drenched her britches in a fit of laughter. I’m the one that was making her laugh so hard. Since the situation was both funny and embarrassing to her, we decided to say that she “inked” herself, which brought on a new fit of giggles for the both of us causing me to clench my legs together and bolt for the bathroom. We were just being silly since it was just to two of us at home. We were sitting in my husband’s chair together and making our hands appear to be yodeling. It might sound lame, but in reality it was hilarious. In reality, she didn’t wet her pants. She wet her little white leotard, which is what she chose to wear to bed that night. The entire scene was ridiculous but made a lasting memory for us both.

So far this school year, my husband and I have had to rescue my daughter three times for leaking at the most inopportune time. The first time it happened my daughter called my husband since I was at work and asked him to bring her some pants because she peed. Since he was only asked to bring pants, that’s all he did. He neglected to bring underwear so my daughter went commando that day. He called me on his way home from my daughter’s school to tell me the unfortunate events of her day. It was only then when I asked him about underwear that it had crossed his mind at all.

The second time my husband was summoned to my daughter’s school for the same reason, he brought her a pair of shorts, checked her out of school, went to Wal-Mart and bought her a new pack of underwear, and then brought her back to school. He was trying to be thorough. He was covering all of his bases, just not in the exact order I would have chosen. The third time I was the one my daughter called and brought the appropriate supplies so she would be fresh and (hopefully) dry for the rest of the day.

The other night I was making chicken and dumplings for supper. I hate deboning chicken and asked my daughter to help so the tedious task wouldn’t take as long. Reluctantly, she agreed. I could tell she was bored of the task as well so I suggested to her that we pretend that we had our own cooking show that was just about deboning chicken. She looked at me with her eyes that were in mid-roll so I started in on the opening dialogue.

“Welcome to the Deboning Chicken Show!” I hollered out into the mostly empty kitchen. “Today we will show you how to debone chicken. Again! If you will notice my method of taking the meat off the chicken, it is called the ‘fork off method’ and here to my left Ann is using the ‘fork you method’. We together are deboning chicken!” I smiled brightly into the kitchen. My daughter was giggling and was starting to get into her job.

After the chicken was finished and put back in the stock, we started throwing the dough that would form the dumplings into the pot. Schdunk. Schdunk. Schdunk. Soon our rhythm was in complete unison. I told her it sounded like we were throwing marshmallows in a lake. Suddenly, she stopped laughing and her eyes got really big.

“You shall speak of this to NO ONE!” she commanded me.

I was confused. Then I looked down. I just mopped the floor that day so of course she would take the opportunity to pee on it.

“You shall speak of this to NO ONE!” she commanded me again. Her voice almost sounded demonic. Then it softened to the voice I knew to be my little girl’s. “Um, could you please bring me a pair of pants? I think I have some sweats in the dryer.”

Obligingly, I brought her some pants and left the kitchen so she could strip and clean up after herself. Once the floor was clean and dry, I finished supper solo.

The fact that my daughter has such little bladder control bothers me so yesterday I sat her down and had “The Talk” with her.

“So, um, yeah,” I started out embarrassed and not knowing how to pull the talk off. “You know when you’re peeing, um, yeah, ahem, can you stop the urine from coming by pulling up on some of your muscles?”

“Sure, Mom,” she said looking at me out of the side of her face.

“Well, um, honey, can you do that right now even though you’re not using the bathroom?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Oh, great!” I said probably too enthusiastically. “That’s called a Kegel exercise and it’s so useful for women. Women are encouraged to do a bunch of those every day to strengthen their bladder muscles but it’s useful for a lot of different things.”

“Like what?”

I wasn’t about to tell her it would make sex better for her since she’s only twelve so I pushed on in a different direction. “Well, like after women have babies they need to do a bunch of Kegels because the baby stretches out some muscles and that’s a good way to get them back in shape. Right after I had you, for instance, I went on a trampoline for the very first time and thought it was a blast until the third jump when I realized that each time I landed I was peeing a little.”

“Really? Gross.”

“Yeah, well no grosser than peeing on a freshly mopped floor. But I thought that maybe if you did those exercises, your bladder would get stronger so you wouldn’t leak when you laugh.”

She raised her eyebrows at me like I had given her some glimmer of wisdom she hasn’t had before. All I’m hoping for is less laundry and a clean floor. Oh, and it will save her the embarrassment of wearing a sweatshirt tied around her waist until I can rescue her too, I suppose.

What would YOU do for a date with ME?

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 21:03:40 -0500

Once upon a time (this is a true story but I wanted to start out with “once upon a time” for more panache) somewhere between the time frame of my first and last marriage (there have only been two so don’t lump me in the multiple marriage category as Elizabeth Taylor, okay? Thanks.) my dad set me up on a blind date. The reason that this blind date is so fantastical is because my dad lives up in Wisconsin where he freezes his butt off nine months out of the year and I live in Louisiana where I sweat my ass off nine months out of the year. My dad wanted me to be happy since my first marriage was a complete disaster. He thought he could show his little girl what a good relationship looked like (this after coming out of a 25 year marriage to my mother due to an affair and then getting engaged to another lady while still living with the woman of the affair, well, we all have our faults).

My dad looked through his old college yearbook, or maybe it was an alumni magazine, and found someone that lived in Louisiana. This person had a son that was roughly my age. When I say “roughly” I mean that the son was fifteen years my senior. I was twenty-seven preparing to go out with a forty-two year old. When my dad told me what he did, I knew I should have been thankful and grateful for the support he was showing his now single daughter but I couldn’t help but roll that number around in my head. I remember waking up to forty pink flamingos in the front yard when my dad turned forty. I was in middle school. Back then I thought forty was just a few steps away from the grave.

Now, granted, I had changed my views on the age when I turned twenty-five since a lot of the people that I worked with were well into their forties and fifties. Oprah herself said that forty was the new twenty (or was it fifty was the new thirty? They both translate to the same thing, right?) so I thought I was kind of hot stuff for being set up with an older man. Because my dad thought to set me up with this particular person, a person that he didn’t even know mind you, meant a lot to me. This meant that my dad finally acknowledged the fact that I’d grown up. This meant that he would let me have a glass of wine the next time we sat down to dinner together. This meant that he knew I wouldn’t drop my panties at the drop of a hat. Finally I was grown up in my dad’s eyes.

How my dad got his old classmate’s son (I’m assuming it was a classmate and not a professor that my dad contacted) to buy off on going out with a complete stranger is beyond me. I’m hoping no money was involved because that would make me, well, that wouldn’t make me anything since I wasn’t the one that got paid and nothing like that happened. Maybe this guy got paid, maybe he didn’t. I think he was finishing up with a messy divorce that had no children involved but something more precious. Money, lots and lots of money that she ended up getting leaving him with nothing except the shirt (and hair) on his back. Oh, he also got a date with me.

My dad gave the guy my number with my permission and told me that this guy (we’ll call him Moe) was going to call me within the week. As soon as I hung up with my dad my phone immediately started ringing. It was Moe. Moe was pleasant enough for being thrust into something I’m sure he didn’t really want to do in the first place. He explained that my dad gave me his number (I didn’t know if I was supposed to play dumb to this fact to I just went with it and acted surprised that my dad would do something so thoughtful for me). Moe said he would love to take me to dinner if I wasn’t busy any time in the near future. I used to hate it when guys asked me out and didn’t give me a specific time they had in mind so I would always feel obligated to say, “Sure, I’m not busy for the next, oh, I don’t know, sixty years so when ever is good for you is good for me…”

I told Moe that I’d go out with him and asked him what he had in mind. He wanted to spend an afternoon in New Orleans getting to know me and then we’d have drinks and “maybe dinner if things went well”. Okay, thanks for maybe making plans with me and leaving yourself with a bail out plan. You know, just in case I suck.

“Is Saturday okay with you?” I asked him feeling like I was supposed to be the one who decided when this whole thing was going to happen.

“How about the Saturday after next?” he suggested. Why would he want to schedule a date so far in advance? Weird.

“Um…let me see if I’m busy…” I rustled some pages in a magazine around so it sounded like I actually had a calendar or date book or something important to check. “Nope, I’m free.”

“Great. This Saturday would have been okay but when my dad asked me to take one of his old buddies’ daughters out I decided to have a little, ahem, procedure done.”

Oh dear lord, I thought, he’s scheduled himself a vasectomy. “Right,” I said trying to think of a really great excuse to both get off the phone and cancel the date that I’d just agreed to. The only thing I could think of to accomplish both things was choke on a sandwich right then and there but I didn’t want to appear to be too Mama Cass because after all I still felt the pressure to impress this guy.

“Okay, well I’ll meet you in Jackson Square around noon, okay?” I blurted out before I changed my mind completely.

The day of the date I made sure to tell several people where I was going and if they hadn’t heard from me by the next morning to send out the dogs looking for me. I even told a couple of my friends what I was going to be wearing and my blood type, you know, just in case. I met Moe in the square at noon. He was nicely dressed and seemed appropriately nervous about meeting me. He had a wonderfully warm smile. The only thing that was even slightly odd about him was the way he wore his ball cap. I’m used to guys pulling their hats snuggly on their heads. Moe’s hat was more perched on his head like an old lady who didn’t want to squish her hair. I let it go and decided that I would make the best of the afternoon.

I actually found that I was having a good time with this guy who I was really worried about meeting because of his age and the fact that I had never been on a blind date before. We took a guided tour of the French Quarter and had several haunted houses pointed out to us. We had lunch at the Gumbo Shoppe and headed over to Pat O’Brien’s for some hurricanes. This guy was sweet and funny, he was a bit more nervous that I was used to being around but it really didn’t bother me.

“So, um, I want to tell you about that procedure,” Moe said as our second hurricane was being served.

“Oh, no!” I said waving my hand in front of him trying to brush away his words before they could spill out of his mouth. “You don’t have to tell me what you had done!” I was already starting to sweat. I really didn’t want to hear about his vasectomy.

“No, I really feel like I should tell you because this date is what gave me a reason to do it. I’d been looking for a reason for years but couldn’t justify it.” I didn’t notice the he took off his hat.

“Really,” I stammered. “You don’t have to tell me anything. I have to get home tonight. I told my friends I’d call them when I got home. I didn’t even bring a toothbrush.”

“I got hair plugs.”

I choked on my own spit. Oh, right. Right. I felt so stupid. Moe bent his head down so I could see his new hairline. It looked like my hairline. I always thought that hair plugs or implants would look like doll heads with the sprouts of hair coming from one hole but Moe’s head looked normal. He wanted me to touch it. Tenderly I reached up and brushed at his hair afraid if I did it too roughly the new growth would come out in my hands. He explained to me that eventually the hair would grow just like normal. I sat back and breathed a sigh of relief.

I thought I was going over board for getting ready for our date when I bought a new thing of blush. Moe actually had surgery for it. He’d been wanting the procedure done for a long time and I’m assuming that doing this gave him a boost of self confidence and I’m all about that. If he needed to use me for the catalyst for a new perspective on life I’m so cool with being the scapegoat!

Hair Today Gone Tomorrow

Wed, 9 Mar 2011 23:03:56 -0500

I have known my husband for ten years now and in those ten years he has only liked my hair once for maybe a day and a half. He, I think, is stuck somewhere in the eighties where women had monstrously large mall hair with hairspray so thick that turpentine was needed to aid in its removal. I’ve tried pleasing my husband with different hairstyles but with every one of my attempts comes a comment that makes me want to shave my head once and for all.

When I first met my husband my hair was way too short so upon first glance, he thought I was a man. This prompted me to grow my hair into a style that I thought was long, flowing and feminine. All he saw was flat. I invested in hot rollers, which gave my hair some oomph for about fifteen minutes and then would fizzle out back to flat again. I had layers cut into my hair in an attempt to fluff up my fine hair only to make my hair look like it was cut with a shoe. I would practically stand on my head when I dried my hair to boost the volume in it. I teased it, curled it, begged it, and bribed it. But, alas, I seemed to have been destined to have flat hair. After one particularly callous comment I went to the salon and had all of my hair cut off. It was a rash decision and I am still regretting it since I’m still in the process of growing my hair back to a feminine look. All of this was done to please my husband since I am not the one that has to look at myself.

He wants me to get a perm put in my hair. The last time I had a perm was when stirrup pants were all the rage. I ended up with split ends so bad that I had to have my hair cut up to my ears in order to bring it back to life. I’m not putting my hair through that torture again but yet by not doing it I’m seemingly torturing my husband. Well, he’s just going to have to live with it. My hair is what it is and that’s that. You don’t hear me complaining about his hair, do you? Well, not yet, but I’m about to start.

When I met my husband, his hair was one of his features that attracted me to him. I was twenty-five at the time and the fact that he had little bits of grey in his jet-black hair was sexy since that meant I was dating an older man. Recently I pointed something out to him that he’d been oblivious to before and I don’t think that he’s forgiven me for it yet.

Whenever he gets a haircut, my husband makes me order it. I know what he likes since he’s been getting the same haircut since he joined the Army in 1985. He likes his hair to be cut with a number one on the sides and a number two on the top with the two lengths faded together. Granted it looks clean cut when first done, but it also accentuates his large nose and sticky-out ears. He feels this haircut is not only fashionably acceptable, but also easy on the checkbook since he only gets his hair cut every three or so months. His haircuts don’t depend on looks. It doesn’t matter if his neck is hairier than a gorilla or if he’s got pointy hair wings on the sides of his head. He claims he knows when it’s time for him to make a trip to the barber when his ball cap doesn’t fit anymore.

For the past five years I’ve been gently suggesting different hairstyles for him to try. I give not-so-subtle hints when I see a haircut that I like. I’ve pointblank told him that it’s time to retire the high and tight. I’ve bought hair products that have probably gone bad in the tubes from lack of use, brushes for him to experiment with that have been passed down to the dogs, and men’s magazines with pages dog-eared for him to look at. Until recently he has refused all of my suggestions.

The last time he needed a trim I finally got my way. For the past several months I’ve been noticing the top of his head isn’t as lushly covered in hair as it once was. At first I thought he had a wild cowlick that was becoming ever more unruly with his lack of hairstyle. Gradually that cowlick got bigger. It started out the size of a dime, and then moved to a nickel. Quickly that nickel went to the size of a quarter and then a half dollar. Now that cowlick can’t be considered a cowlick any longer. That cowlick is a big old bald spot on the back of my husband’s head. I knew that he didn’t notice it because he never checks out what the back of his head looks like. I thought I could get him to notice that spot by himself so I wouldn’t have to be the one to break the bad news to him. Whenever I would walk behind him when he was sitting down I would kiss his scalp through his thinning hair. He didn’t notice it. That spot was obviously bothering me more than it was him since he didn’t know about it.

When he went to the salon I was with him. The woman that cuts his hair knows to ask me what my husband wants since he’s been going to the same person for the past few years. Despite knowing what he’s going to ask for, she still asks me first. It’s like we’re in some lame play where everyone knows their parts perfectly. This last time I threw everyone for a loop and improvised my lines.

“How are we cutting him today?” Brandie asked.

“Something to cover that damn bald spot,” I replied.

My husband thought I was joking and pretended to pout, “I am so not going bald.”

“Yeah, you are,” I told him.

Brandie nodded with a grim look on her face. My husband still thought we were pulling his leg. I looked at Brandie, “Can I borrow you’re hand mirror?” She handed it to me slowly, unsure if she was doing the right thing.

I held the mirror up to the back of my husband’s head so he could see the reflection of the hand mirror in the main mirror. When he saw the bald spot that went through all the coin currency he blanched at the spot that was now the size of a dollar bill loosely wadded on the back of his head.

Now, rather than a high and tight he has a faux comb over. He uses the expired hair gel to paste his hair in place. He uses two different kinds of brushes to make sure his hair is just so. I think he’s even secretly looked up old photos of Donald Trump to see what he’s been doing for the past twenty years in order to get his comb over so full looking. Now, after all these years of trying to please my husband with my hair to no avail, he understands what I’ve been going through. What goes around comes around in the form of a comb over.