Snip, snip, snip

 Don't cut your own hair is a basic rule I've been violating ever since Covid made hair salons seem dangerous. Here's how it's going so far. Photo by John Denniston.

When I couldn't reach the back of my head to cut it myself, I called for help. My friend Linda did a pretty good job.  Photo by John Denniston.

“Fie, for shame!” said aunt Glegg in her loudest, severest tone of reproof. “Little gells as cut their own hair should be whipped and fed on bread and water, not come and sit down with their aunts and uncles.” (Chapter 7, The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot)

When Maggie Tulliver, fed up with nasty comments about her unruly, tangled hair, goes upstairs and simply cuts it off, she doesn’t understand the immensity of her deed. The shock runs through the entire family gathering – her mother is shamed, her aunts condemnatory, her uncle jokes that she should be sent to jail, and her brother says she looks like the village idiot.

Until a few months ago, the idea of imitating little Maggie was unthinkable. There’s a rule somewhere – as Eliot understood – that you do not take scissors to your own hair. I’ve always followed it, even when annoying bits and pieces cried out for self-lopping between regular haircuts.

 But there was the hair salon up the street with its dangerous Covid vibes, and here was my hair, relentlessly growing. It looked like a long time until the twain would meet.

And so, I began with a few tentative snip-snips to get the hair out of my eyes. Such a relief. Then, inspired by a friend who’d done the same, I tackled the hair over my ears, the “wings” that push out sideways like the Flying Nun’s ridiculous headgear. The result was a little ragged and unbalanced, but the wings were gone.

As the Covid numbers flourished and the hair salon looked farther away than ever, I began feeling something I hadn't experienced since a childhood effort (not successful) to grow my hair long. When I turned my head quickly, I could feel a swath of hair following behind, a kind of unsettling rearguard action. I now had a mullet hairdo – business in the front, party in the back, as the saying goes.

Which led, one day, to my hanging my head over the back of a park bench, and my friend Linda, masked and armed with my little nail scissors, cutting the hair at the back of my head. If this was fiction, it would have been a disaster. In Maggie's case, for example, Eliot describes how tantalizing it is to go overboard with scissors: "I speak to those who know the satisfaction of making a pair of shears meet through a duly resisting mass of hair. One delicious grinding snip, and then another and another. . . ."

But Linda has a sense of restraint, as well as a natural eye for this kind of thing, so it was fine. By the time she was done, the back of my head had some shape again. The mullet was gone.

In Eliot's  novel, Maggie was forgiven for her hair-cutting, especially by her father, who always took her part. But the local hairdresser, Mr. Rappit, was severe, “holding up one jagged lock after another and saying, ‘See here! Tut-tut-tut!’ in a tone of mingled disgust and pity, which to Maggie’s imagination was equivalent to the strongest expression of public opinion.”

I don’t know what my own long-time hairdresser will say when I finally see him again. But the hair-cutting taboo has been broken, and from now on, I’ll be much more willing to snip away at stray annoyances as they arise. Hair, Covid has taught me, is not as sacrosanct as I’ve always thought. And, as Maggie found, even mistakes will eventually be forgiven.

The scissors: Tempting and taboo.