Hair on your pillowcase in the morning is one thing. Hair on your keyboard is quite another. I’m getting a buzz cut.
All along, my daughters have been waiting with itchy clipper fingers to jump in and create fun and strange designs with my hair. They’re getting their opportunity this afternoon, with Marci’s supervision, to play Beauty School Dropout with my head as the victim.
What they deign to leave — which hopefully is just a buzzcut and not that freaky Airbender thing Taylor keeps talking about — will fall out soon enough anyway. I know this now due to some amazingly candid help from cancer buddy Jan Lovell, whom I used to work with at the Detroit News. Jan had a full beard and a thick head of hair into his sixties which he lost about a year ago, then grew back. He was laid off too. Yeah, we have some commonality.
But the craziest part of all this is I hear guys have a tougher time emotionally with the hair loss than women. How is that possible? Person after person I speak with say female cancer patients seem to have a quiet reserve and are fine with the loss whereas they typically see guys going all to pieces. Women who pride themselves on long, luxurious locks seem to handle it better than guys like me with haircuts left over from the 70s.
It just goes to reinforce one of my long-term core beliefs that women are stronger than men. My ladies are proof positive of this. They have a tremendous power within them to handle this cancer talk without getting too freaked out or worried about the future. And yet they seem to know when it’s okay to let go and be scared, (don’t you ladies?). Even my Mom, who’s been here daily because she can’t be anywhere else, openly shares her fears but also her fierce Rodney advocacy continually.
With all the crap that’s been handed our family this year, there’s also been a lot of equal and opposite reactions to that crap. In that respect, Skye’s been going around quoting Sarah Silverman, “When life hands you AIDS, you just gotta make Lemonaids.”
Sick, yes. Funny, definitely.