Fun while it lasted

All my life I've had straight hair. Really straight hair. It started out course, changed to being fine, but always straight. I had to burn the crap out of it in the 80's with a curling iron to get it to do the tiniest of flips for my Farrah Fawcett 'do. Even then, they would last like two hours. Even with some approximation of hair spray. My mom hated that haircut, she said I looked like a lampshade. I did look something like that tall, thin guy on Fat Albert who looked like he was wearing a lampshade with his eyes poking through. Was his lampshade red? In my mind it was, but that was eons ago, and I have no internet here, so I can't just go and google fat albert lampshade. The unfair (to me, as a teen) part of all of this is that my whole immediate family, aside from myself, has curly hair. My mom has curly hair, my twin sisters do, my dad would if he had longer hair... why was my fate so bleak? Now, clearly, this is a clear case of the grass being always greener, and hardly the end of the world, but as a youth, it certainly felt unfair. For a while I wondered if my parents were really my parents. But then, I saw a picture of my mother at about 6 years old and me at 6 years years old, and we looked like twins. SO that theory flew out the window. My mother, on the other hand, ironed her hair so it would be straight through her youth. Again, grass. Greener. So it was the fall of 2014 and it had seemed to me like my hair was frizzier than usual when i was drying it. Something had changed... so one day i decided to just let it dry naturally, and I kid you not - I had wavy/curly hair! It was amazing. There were some actual curls. My mother pooh poohed it - like oh, it's just wavy. But I knew. And my new curly hair haircutter confirmed it.

It changed my hair life - it took a couple of weeks to not feel like I looked like I was wearing a wig - it's very strange to see your reflection so altered - but after that, it was like hair heaven. I didn't need to wash it frequently any longer. Every 5 days! I didn't need to ever use a hair dryer again. I could go to sleep with a wet head and wake up with curls! I could wake up, spray water on my head. Take one minute to scrunch it and walk out the door. It was, truly, a dream come true. Plus, I really feel like it better fit my personality. With straight hair it was always so prim and proper. Now i had this hair that did what it wanted, and I just went along with it - and loved it.

The funny thing was people kept saying "hormones". And, I thought, no, that can't be. I had recently been through a procedure to freeze eggs earlier that same year, at which point they found that I was unusually fertile and had actually been given too much hormone stimulation, so I knew my hormones weren't dropping off. Plus, all of the people I had known who had their have change to curly, it happened in their early teens once their hormones had kicked in. Again, no bells going off here, no 1+1 = 2. So I went along happily thinking it was just one of those things until all of a sudden this past fall - so nearly a year later - it clearly was straightening again. I went into complete denial. It must be the weather, must be the fall. Must be less humidity. Surely it will come back... and for whatever silly reason, I used Cuba as the final test. Knowing it would be crazy hot and humid here, I figured I would see what it does here. Just to be sure. Well, it is with a very heavy heart that I can report it's over. My hair is back to being straight. I mean, it has some really, really slight wave. But nothing I hadn't already had. Basically, straight. Turns out that my procedure which spiked my hormones literally off the chart, also made my hair curly. I just had never associated people saying "hormones" with an artificial massive increase in hormones. Not sure why... seems so obvious now.

So now, back to my old boring hair self, I wonder - better to have known a year of hair greatness than never to have known it at all?