Just the Way You Are
Fran Schumer
Word Count 966
After my mother became too preoccupied with her own ailing body to care about her appearance, she focused on mine. “When are you going to do something about your hair?” Or “Don’t your friends tell you to do something?” Her comments relieved me. She may have been losing some of her faculties, but she was still my mother. And because she was still my mother, for days after our visit, I would look in the mirror and gasp, seeing, as if for the first time, the steely gray and white hairs spiraling out like chicken wire from my own wrinkled and aging forehead. Still, I knew I wouldn’t do the ‘something’ she desired first, because I was cheap and didn’t want to pay a beauty parlor, and second, because if I had a free hour every few weeks, I’d rather ride my bike.
Of course, the real reason I didn’t do anything about my hair was because I had the great good fortune of marrying a man who loved me however I looked. Only once in our 35 years of marriage did he say something that could mildly be construed as derogatory when, after a visit to the dentist, I announced I couldn’t be bothered with flossing. “Yes, floss,” he said. “I don’t want to be married to someone with no teeth.” Other than that, he made me feel beautiful in every way, and his love changed me profoundly. It made up for scars inflicted by the only other person who loved me as well and as deeply as my husband, my mother.
In childhood, she took great pains with my hair. She pulled it back in a ponytail with such vigor that it often caused my eyes to tear. I didn’t mind. I knew the source of her energy was love. My mother was delighted to have me, a girl. She’d already had my brother, whose hair she also labored over, but for reasons probably related to gender and culture, he didn’t care. If she criticized his appearance, he thought it was a joke, a reflection of her more trivial, female-oriented concerns, not of his essential bad-ness. About my appearance and perhaps everything, I took her opinions more seriously.
In adolescence, my hair changed. No longer wavy and lustrous, it turned wild and wiry. For years I tried to alter it. In my teenage years, I slept on soup cans; pre-Keratin and Brazilian blow-outs, I used various heating implements. Hair sprouted on other parts of me as well. "That," my mother said, pointing to the fine dark hairs on my arms and legs, "you get from your Grandma Minnie." As an alternative to shaving, my mother brought me to the home of her friend, Lillian, who introduced us to waxing. "Ouch," I cried, as she pulled strips of wax off my legs with torn sheets my mother supplied. There, half-naked on Lillian’s formica kitchen table, I also experienced pain but not anger. Lillian and my mother loved their daughters. They believed our looking "good" was key to our having a "good" life. I could riff about my mother’s over-emphasis on appearance, and at some other time, I will, but to my mother’s credit, she also reminded me never to trust a man who cared too much about my looks. Add that to the forever-long list of contradictions in her character and, I suppose, in the character of most of the people we know and love.
In terms of my father, she followed her own advice. Even when she wore pin curls at night, my father pronounced her “adorable.” Perhaps because of the confidence she felt as a result of my father’s unconditional love, my mother, who thought of herself as overweight at the time of her marriage, eventually achieved her lifelong dream of being a size six. Did my father care? "I got half the woman I married," he joked. My parents loved each other for reasons that mattered more than looks. Ultimately, this was the lesson I absorbed — mostly.
By the time I got to college, the culture changed. Afros became fashionable and shaving, for some women, became optional. I remember one illuminating moment when I saw a female health care worker instead of the regular (male) gynecologist to whom my mother sent me in New York. Not only did the woman show me how to wield a speculum and convex mirror so I could see my own cervix (a thrill to see one’s interior female parts) but she forever eradicated the shame I felt about hair on other parts of me. "Oh, don’t worry about those," she said when I apologized for the stray hairs around my nipple. Pulling down her shirt, she showed me hers. "Lots of women have them," she said.
Occasionally, I regress. Recently, before a family event, I paid more than $100 to have my hair blow out straight. The results were alarming. "You look fabulous” people said, or “I hardly recognize you.” Did I look so much worse with my hair au naturel, I wondered. The response disturbed me, but in a few days, I recovered. Two, in fact. When it was next time for my semi-weekly swim, into the pool I dove, and down the drain went the $100 I’d spent at the salon. Looking in my rear-view mirror, the heat of my car setting my curls just right, I thought, "Wow, you look fabulous." But then, I never feel bad about anything after my swim.
At 94, my mother, even paralyzed and fading, still complains about my wild and unruly curls, but every time she asks my husband, "Don’t think she should do something about her hair?" he smiles and gives her the answer, he always gives, "I like it just the way it is."
Fran’s poetry, fiction, and articles have appeared in various sections of The New York Times; also, Vogue, The Nation, The North American Review, and other publications. She is the co-writer of the New York Times bestselling Powerplay (Simon and Schuster) and the author of Most Likely to Succeed (Random House). Her poetry chapbook, Weight, was published in 2022. She wrote the Underground Gourmet column for New York Magazine, and the restaurant reviews for the New Jersey Section of the New York Times.