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Sometimes I think I’ve marked the milestones of my daughters’ lives through their hair, from their wispy, angel-haired babyhood through the thickets of adolescence to their misguided bangs-curious periods.
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My daughters are adult women now, so my hands-on brushing and braiding days are over, but last week the memories came flooding back. My younger daughter, Beatrice, got married in London, where she lives, and had hired a hairdresser to come over on the morning of the wedding. There was a makeup person, too. These professionals would work their magic on Beatrice, her sister, Gwyneth, and my wife, Ruth.
I wasn’t going to tag along at first — it seemed a time for mother and daughters — but I’m so glad I did. After all, I’d seen Beatrice through her elementary school hair wrap days, her middle school Spirit Week “Crazy Hair Day” days, her “I’m-going-to-dye-my-hair-blue-in-the-sink” days.
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Her wedding day hair was just her next phase, her most adult phase, the time when she was going to wash that man right into her hair. (Gabriel is his name. I introduced them, which is a whole other story.)
One of the first columns I ever wrote — back in 1997, years before I officially got this column — was about how I was a dad who did hair. “I suppose if I had two sons I would do … I don’t know, scabs or something,” I wrote. “But I have girls, and so their hair is part of my universe.”
Back then, Ruth left for work before the rest of us were up, making me the morning’s primary hairgiver. I never achieved more than a baseline competence, able to manage ponytails and simple braids, but never mastering French braids, which always looked to me like braids that you do from inside the skull.
I can’t say the girls were ever too impressed with Daddy’s do’s, but there’s value in learning to be disappointed by a parent at an early age. Ah, the follicles of youth.
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Growing up, both of our girls had veritable waterfalls of luscious, brown locks. Their hair cascaded over their shoulders, down their backs and — eventually — into the bathtub drain. My daughters were raised on maximally tressed Disney heroines, but you never saw the Little Mermaid or Pocahontas crouched in the shower and emptying a bottle of Liquid-Plumr. Just around the river bend? More like, stuck behind the U-bend.
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And so, when Beatrice was 16, I taught her how to snake a drain.
“It’s important that we teach our children that actions have consequences,” I wrote in a column back then. “So, too, does inaction. The consequence of failing to religiously clean the little rubber hair trap in the bathtub is a clogged drain that can be ignored for only so long.”
I showed Beatrice how to unscrew the drain grill, uncoil the wire snake, then feed it down the pipe, rotating the snake housing when she met resistance. When the snake could go no farther, I instructed her to reel it back in.
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“I told her to be alert,” I wrote. “I told her there might be splatter. I told her I was moving a few steps back. I told her that no matter what happened, Daddy loved her.”
I’ll never forget the shriek Beatrice gave when she pulled what looked like a drowned capybara from the drain.
The night before the wedding, Beatrice checked into a hotel room. It was in this hotel room that we all gathered: the four Kellys, Beatrice’s friends Zach, Regina and Vivian, and Andrea (makeup) and Liv (hair).
At one end of the room, Andrea unpacked an impressive collection of brushes and pencils, eyeliners, lipsticks and artificial eyelashes. At the other end, Liv deftly juggled curlers, crimpers, flatteners and dryers.
Beatrice is more than her hair, of course — she’s an accomplished, professional woman — but as she settled into the chair, I was reminded that the hair can be a window into the soul. As in hair, so in life.
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Beatrice has always known what she wanted. On the day she married, she wanted a classic hairdo, parted in the center, softly framing her face and raised slightly at the back. It was a modern version of a Swinging London style, borrowing from the past while looking to the future.
Every parent knows that the past and the future are a blur. Somewhere in the attic there is a lock of Beatrice’s hair, snipped at her first haircut, tied in a ribbon, taped in a baby book. The wonder of life — the mystery of it — is that I’ll see that baby forever, however gray my hair may get.
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John Kelly’s Washington
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