When I woke up this morning, I decided that today was the day. Last week I managed to give my husband a decent haircut, using an old pair of barber’s shears and mostly my left – wrong – hand. The cut turned out surprisingly well, given that I’m not a hairdresser, so we’re both very happy with the results.
Our back-up plan had been for him to wear a baseball cap until his hair grew back, even though that’s not his style. Despite that, I was still very hesitant to try to cut my own hair. I’d really only used these shears to trim my own bangs between cuts, and to trim my mother’s hair a bit during all the months she spent in hospital after surgery and then before she died.
If I still had the full use of my right hand, I’m certain that I’d have already tried hacking at it myself. My hair has been short for years now, in a choppy or spiky style that’s easy to maintain, but requires frequent trims. With all of the hairdressers closed down due to the risk of COVID-19 infection, though, my hair hasn’t been trimmed since March.
My husband has laughingly started to call me a Muppet. He means it in a caring way, but in the past few days I’d begun to feel like Animal… the wild drummer of the bunch – because my hair was driving me up the wall. It was time to reclaim my short hair, to stop having it constantly in my eyes.
It’s one thing to cut someone else’s hair, when you can see what you’re doing from all angles. I’d had my sweetheart sit on a chair in the centre of our kitchen, so I could walk all the way around him, snipping from all sides and from above. To cut my own hair, though, I’d have to rely on the reflections in a mirror rather than a full view of what I was doing.
The biggest challenge, though, as always, was Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS). A rare disease that causes chronic pain and a whole laundry list of symptoms. It often renders my right hand mostly unusable – luckily and inexplicably except for my thumb.
That’s how I’d managed to cut my husband’s hair; using my left hand to the long bits, and then using the thumb of my right hand against my palm for the closer snips. Around the ears, the nape of the neck.
I took the same approach to my scraggly hair, and have to admit that I’m absolutely thrilled with the results. It’s such a small thing, a haircut, but it feels wonderful to have something back that feels… normal.
So that’s what I wish you for today; a bit of normalcy. Some small little thing that reminds that you there’s a world outside your door, despite this bizarre pandemic period.
As always, thanks so much for stopping by. You may have noticed that I haven’t had the heart these days to write about any more serious topics. We all have to find our own ways to deal with this pandemic, and mine is to write about more day-to-day activities. To share some of the little moments of happiness and success, that have taken on so much more importance during what feels like a pause in ‘real life’.