Beauty School Dropout

Ruby’s dance recital is rapidly approaching and I am in full panic mode. Not because I think she will freeze or cry on stage. Diva that she is I think she’ll love working that Jewish Center audience. The real source of my anxiety is over her hair. Ruby has extremely curly hair. If I fail to apply the twelve step multi product process that we go through nearly every day to tame it, her hair turns into dreadlocks. Legitimately. It’s like a party trick. We should actually charge to have people come and watch it occur. Now let me be clear: I love Ruby’s hair. I adore it. Her curls remind of my mother’s when she was a little girl. They are an amazing color and are literally exquisite. I just have no idea what to do with them. It’s totally not her fault.

Part of the issue is my own post-traumatic stress over the boy hair I sported growing up. My mother had a thing about keeping my hair extremely short. Until I rebelled in my early 20s (clearly I was a very wild child) and finally decided to keep it longer. If you wondered what I looked like, picture my son. I looked exactly like my 5 year old boy: but with slightly less red in my hair and enormous purple glasses on my face. In fact, I was almost always dressed head to toe in lavender. As if my mother suspected how ridiculously androgynous my hairstyle was and tried to thwart unsuspecting strangers who might think I was a boy with a resounding, “Clearly she’s a girl! Can’t you see regardless of her boy hair that I dipped her in purple!”

But I digress.

My point here is that I grew up having no idea what to do with long hair because I never had it. And now I have this child with the most gorgeous, thick insane head of long hair. And tomorrow is the dress rehearsal. I know I am supposed to bring her with some sort of bun involving bobby pins. First of all, Ruby’s hair eats bobby pins for lunch. Secondly I wouldn’t know what to do with the bobby pins even if that first thing weren’t true. She is also supposed to come in makeup. Did I mention I also have no idea how to apply makeup? Sometimes when I am feeling fancy I apply the Burts Bees Pomegranate Chapstick which adds a reddish hue to my lips. I have been known to attempt applying both the one eye shadow I own and the one blush I have in my possession. Whenever I do this people eye me with suspicion. As if I am suffering from sort of horrific rosacea outbreak.

So here I am on the eve of her rehearsal on Pinterest trying to search “curly hair toddler dance recital.” I tried to pin my first thing and I got an error from Pinterest. Have you ever gotten an error from Pinterest? It is like receiving an error message from the world officially revoking your uterus.

So after crying for a few minutes over my pinning humiliation, I ended up on youtube. There I found a video of two 10 year olds demonstrating how to make the perfect figure skating bun in their parents’ bathroom. It involved 12 thousand bobby pins and a sock with the hole cut out of the toe. Have you ever heard of this? I am riveted. I feel like I am watching brain surgery. I have never been so grateful to these random 10 year olds for teaching me how to be a woman. I feel both satisfied and sad. Tomorrow I will search for their companion videos on how to do laundry and apply nail polish.

I will also search eBay for my uterus and failed womanhood.