Letting Go of My Long Hair, and All That it Carried
After turning 45, Vanessa Mártir ushered in a new phase of life with a serious chop.
For much of my life, I had long hair down past my ass.
When I was still in my single digits my mother made me swear that I’d never cut my hair. More than a promise, it was a pact, a sealed form of control. “Júramelo.” Of course I said yes. Mom was the sun. I’d do just about anything to make her love me.
La belleza de la mujer es su pelo.
I heard that my whole life. But if my hair was my beauty, why did mom yank me by my hair whenever I did something that riled her up, leaving my neck aching for days? Why did boys and men pull it to get my attention or show me who was boss? This has been happening since I was in daycare. Why did a group of women throw gum in it once at a nightclub in my 20s, so it took me days to take it out, using every method I read—ice, baby oil, patience?
When I was still in my single digits my mother made me swear that I’d never cut my hair. More than a promise, it was a pact, a sealed form of control.
For the first year of the pandemic, I wore my hair in a top bun. It was too much to take care of, and with so much happening, and being sequestered at home, why bother?
I’ve watched long-haired super heroes slay their enemies and fight for justice, effortlessly, with their hair swaying in the wind. I’ve always thought: Nah, that hair would be tied up immediately.. That’s just unrealistic. How can they do that when I can’t even repot my plant babies without tying mine up?
In my freshman college writing class, one of the assignments was to create a word. I created swallair: that strand you swallow somehow, that goes so deep down your esophagus, you feel the tickle when you pull it out. My professor, a graduate student, had thick, long hair. She gave me an A.
I wanted to cut my hair for so long. Why did I never do it? Because I’d internalized that shit about my beauty being tied to my hair.
La belleza de la mujer es su pelo…I heard that my whole life. But if my hair was my beauty, why did mom yank me by my hair whenever I did something that riled her up, leaving my neck aching for days?
The first time I cut off my hair, I was 33, my Jesus year. It’s said you’re reborn around that time. I certainly was. In the five years prior, I’d suffered a devastating betrayal that led to the loss of an important social group and marred my already tenuous trust in people, moved three times, become a mom, left my baby daddy, become a single mom, quit corporate America to pursue a writing and teaching life, landed a job as an editor at a nonprofit and got into a writing program that would become my lifeline for years to come. Talking to my brother one day, I revealed that I wanted to cut my hair, but there was that promise I’d made to mom, to which my brother said: Are you serious?
A few weeks later he took me to his friend Joseph’s house on the upper east side of Manhattan. A beautiful queen of a hairdresser with a coveted rent-controlled apartment, Joseph cut my hair into a bob. I loved it. When my mother saw me days later, she sneered: ¿y que de tu promesa? For months she gave me shit about it every time she saw me.
In early 2021, when my wife and I bought a house in the woods of upstate NY, I was ready for the big chop. It was a symbolic new beginning. I was 45, and felt more grounded and self-assured than ever. I was doing good work in my writing, teaching and mentoring, and finally felt worthy of everything I’d accomplished and the blessings that were coming my way.
In early 2021, when my wife and I bought a house in the woods of upstate NY, I was ready for the big chop. It was a symbolic new beginning. I was 45, and felt more grounded and self-assured than ever.
I read that each strand chronicles every sickness, setback, and trauma we’ve experienced. How much experience was I carrying in all that hair that fell past my waist?
I did it in the middle of the night on the first full moon on the land; the snow moon, appropriately named since there was so much snowfall that winter. We had to change our move-in date twice when a storm brought 28 inches. Days later, six more, and so on for weeks.
The moon woke me, shining on my head through the blinds. “Now,” it said.
I got up and braided my hair, praying as I plaited. I thanked it, said I was ready to let go of all that it and I were carrying. I thought of everything I’d experienced since my last cut—another heartbreak, the unraveling of relationships with women I once called sisters, the suicide of a dear friend, the death of my beloved brother, finally acknowledging my greatest pain: my Mother Wound, and naming what I’d felt I was for so long: unmothered.
I should say I’d also had some beautiful wins, like meeting and marrying my love, breaking the unmothered cycle with my teenage daughter, and fulfilling a long-held dream of living in the countryside, but the shearing of my hair was about shedding the grief and pain I’d been carrying that no longer served me.
My wife and daughter were stunned when they woke to find me with uneven hair that didn’t touch my neck. I kept cutting throughout the day, and praying, whispering: thank you, thank you, thank you. That evening my wife buzzed my head.
I read that each strand chronicles every sickness, setback, and trauma we’ve experienced. How much experience was I carrying in all that hair that fell past my waist?
It was exhilarating. Then the grief knifed into me. I cried for three days. We carry so much in our hair, and I had just let it all go.
In numerous cultures around the world, hair is ceremoniously cut in rituals from birth to death. In native teachings, many tribes cut their hair when mourning, or when choosing to make a major life change.
I remember the images of Britney Spears shaving her locks in 2007. The tabloids said this was evidence that she’d gone mad. Now I see homegirl was just trying to get free. Aren’t we all?
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The way they called Britney Spears crazy when she shaved her head was a violence I felt very deeply even though I’d never do it, myself (I don’t have the head shape for it). As the daughter of an Ecuadorian mother, I got the same lecture about “your hair is your asset.” I was like, really, not my intelligence or my resourcefulness? (Sometimes when someone says something so obviously stupid it’s a gift!) if I had the money to get my hair cut every month I’d have short hair for sure.
I’ve had such a complicated relationship with my hair, from hating it and myself, to loving it and hating myself for cutting it, to finally just being okay with it being hair. But in all my fantasies of running away and starting over, one of the first thing I imagine myself doing, is shaving it all off. How else would one get a fresh start.