goodbye, mom bun

For the past few months, my hair has gotten out of control. When you have my kind of hair, it's not hard for it to get out of control. My hair is thick, it grows in half wavy, half curly and it doesn't take much to get it mangled and tangled. As an attempt to stop looking like I'm filling in for a missing member of an '80's hair band, I started diligently getting my hair trimmed once every three months. By the three month mark, my hair always needs the trim desperately. The ends are always knotted and it's so dried out and thick that it takes me snapping four hair ties before I can find one to hold up my ponytail. Making a promise to, you know, do my hair is always harder to keep when this happens. It takes me forty minutes to blow dry completely and another forty minutes to flat iron. I certainly don't have time for that anymore -- or after the first few weeks of doing it, I realize it's much easier to pull it up in a ponytail and spend that time tackling the laundry that is overrunning our house or catching up on sleep. Still, I've been diligent about my once-every-three-month haircuts because I love the way my hair looks when it's fresh and manageable and not downright frightening. And yet still, a few weeks in I start giving up and end up walking around with my hair like this:

I call it a "mom bun" but I think that's still an insult to a bun, and most days I feel like the only disheveled mom at MyGym classes with what can only be described as a five pound weight sitting on my head in the form of a halfway-but-not-all-the-way-through ponytail. The summer makes it all worse and certainly erases any motivation I have to do my hair, so I was finding myself breaking five elastic bands at a time until one held long enough to get me through half a day with my mangled, matted, messy half-bun, half-ponytail of doom. That was a wake up call that long hair -- my long hair -- just wasn't feasible right now.

As the days leading up to my hair appointment went on, I kept telling my husband I was going to shave my head. "That's it, all of it, it's gone." I was totally kidding but the thought was strangely appealing. As usual, I'm the least fashion conscious person on the planet and told my amazing, awesome, fantastic hair stylist to just cut it all off, but keep it a little bit long enough that I can pull the bulk of it up if I need to but no bangs and thinned out anyway possible, choppy layers being totally acceptable and welcomed. Yeah. Still, despite my obnoxiously tall order, my hair stylist pulled through as usual. For the first time ever since I was a kid, I have short hair. And I love it.

If you could have seen the hair that came off my head -- not just from the length cut, but the bulk of it during the thinning out process -- you would understand completely how much better I feel. My hair doesn't feel like I'm balancing a bowling ball on my head anymore and hair bands? Forget it, I can even bobby pin it back if I need to wash my face. I'm totally a convert and proud new member of the short hair club and, you know, it's nice to feel halfway human again.