A House-Trained Yak

Hair has become a way of life

I’ve been contemplating hair today. I spent a good chunk of the morning trying to clean it out of our vacuum and it’s been quite the challenge. As one who tries to maintain cleanliness and order in the house, I usually look at hair as a threat, an imposter, something that needs to be tolerated. It clogs up the drains in the bathroom, it litters the floor, it sticks on my clothes, it wraps itself tightly around Maggie’s wet fingers, it settles like dust on the couch.

Growing up at home, my brother insisted that I clean all the hair off the bar of soap in the shower. I laugh at this now – how sensitive we were to a few strands of hair! – how pristine our awareness! Getting married was the first step to changing all that – my hair tolerance has been pushed far beyond what I ever imagined.

I view my relationship with hair in four levels of intensity (so far. I don’t know how many more stages there will be.) Growing up with my brother was stage 1. We both had close-cropped hair and my mother cleaned our house regularly and well. Since he and I were the only ones to share the same bathroom, we lived a relatively hair-free lifestyle. (our older sisters had their own bathroom.)

Stage 2: living with a long-haired wife. This is the stage where you accustom yourself to finding clumps of hair lying on the floor. You also familiarize yourself with drain-unclogging procedures and become increasingly comfortable while “living with hair”. It is not uncommon to occasionally pull long strands of hair off your sweater or coat.

Stage 3: childcare with a long-haired daughter. At this stage you learn that long hair care is labor intensive. As your daughter’s locks grow, you spend more and more time washing, grooming and braiding. Long hair takes a long time to dry. If the hair is fine and wispy, it needs to be combed out twice daily to prevent irreconcilable knots. There are a host of infiltrating agents that thwart hair care efforts: honey, gum, milk, candy – virtually any food. A good game of “let’s play monster by thrusting our heads under a blanket” can completely eradicate 20 minutes of careful grooming. This is the stage where picking hair off things becomes second nature, and third, and fourth. Hair becomes a routine, a lifestyle, a mode of being.

Stage 4: raising a long-haired dog. This is the stage that puts you over the top. You have climbed the hair-care summit valiantly up to this point. You have conceded your obsessive-compulsive cleanliness as much as you possibly can – you have acclimated and adjusted to life with hair – now this! . . . this dog . . . this . . . hairy . . . thing! I will not go into a lot of details here – I feel like I’ve written enough about Dylan. (Let me not discourage any would-be dog lovers.) Suffice it to say that he has placed me in stage four of my hair awareness.

Suddenly, as my oldest sister begins to lose her hair because of chemo – I begin to view hair as less of an imposter. It’s been easy to take it for granted, but hair is a really big part of our identity – it makes us who we are to others and plays a role large enough that when it’s gone, there’s a big emotional impact.

I don’t know what stage 5 will be – raising a house-trained yak? I’m not sure I want to know. But until then I’ll work on enjoying stage 4 and being more thankful for hair, hair, HAIR!