Barnmaven

Failure: I do not think it means what you think it means

I struggle with the way I keep finding myself in the place of being afraid of my own imperfections.

I give everyone else a mile - but not myself.  Somehow I don't think I've earned it.  Or even worse -- its not that I expect more out of myself than out of others, its that I have a fear of being seen failing.  And because failure is such a frightening concept, I do two very destructive things:  I apply the word "failure" to many more situations than to which it actually applies; and I will do practially anything to avoid failing or being seen by others as what I believe is failing.

In 2007, not too long after I moved into this house, I bought horses again after more than a decade of what I think of as the 'years when I wasn't really myself.'  The horse I bought to be my 'perfect horse' illustrates beautifully another one of my more troublesome character defects:  I decide in my head what the perfect situation will be and then proceed to make it happen without making sure the steps I am taking actually match the outcome I desire.

I bought a mother/daughter pair based on little more than the shape of the younger mare's head and the discovery that she shared bloodlines with my old horse.  8 years old, never ridden, not touched at all in at least two or three years.  Sounds like a great prospect for a woman in her 40's who hasn't ridden in ten years, right?

I started doing some work with her only to quickly find out I was really out of my league.  I sent her off for professional training with a wonderful trainer, I took her to clinics, but ultimately she was the horse I could not trust. She would explode for the silliest of reasons, or even for no reason at all.  I grew fearful and nervous of her, and became concerned with the fact that I could get seriously hurt because of her.   The day I realized I could not stand to ride her I cried for what seemed like hours.   After she had a full year off of being used for anything I paid another trainer to put sixty days on her and I found someone who was interested in buying her.  I spent $700 for sixty days of training and let her go to her new home for $300.  (Never ever ask me for financial advice.)

But was it a failure?  Or was it a difficult situation that resolved successfully because in the end both the horse and I got what we needed?  She got trained by someone who helped her lose her tendency to flip her lid and a new owner who thinks she's the best horse in the world.  As for me, I got Bugs, who has done more for my skill and confidence than I would have ever guessed.

Still, I confess I thought of it as a failure for a very long time.  I felt guilty for having let that horse down, for not being the right person for her. 

This week I find myself in somewhat of the same situation. 

I have for quite some time been consumed with thoughts of my dog Lady, who passed away a couple of years ago.  She was a one of a kind dog, gentle and kind with everyone.  I wish I could imbue every family dog with her temperament, because she was perfect with children, perfect with smaller animals, perfect with people.  And I've gotten in my head the idea that I want another dog just like her.  Last fall we adopted a mastiff mix who ended up being aggressive.  After that disaster we waited a little while and then adopted a different mastiff through a rescue.   She was - is - a lovely dog, loves everyone she meets, loves going places, loves lounging, loves cuddling.  But after two months with us she went from being "interested" in our cats to wanting to eat them.  The same day she went after Tucker - he was only mildly hurt, thankfully - she then proceeded to try to eat our little dog Gizzy. 

It isn't hard to know what the right answer is -- its much easier to rehome one dog than it is five cats and a football with legs Chihuahua -- but it has been extremely difficult to come to terms with that answer.  The best answer to me would be the one where we spend a lot of time diligently working with her on her training and she becomes safe for the little animals in the house.  But for that to be very feasible, I would have to become a different person with a different life. 

 Training a problem dog takes a great deal of dedication and effort; I have the desire, but I'm terribly short on time.  If I did decide to give the time, then one of the people or the rest of the critters would have to be deprived of their fair share of time, for who knows how long.  As I write this out I am nodding my head at the inescapable logic; but it is a challenge to get my emotional self to stop telling me what a failure I am for not being the perfect home for this dog.

I can visualize what it would be like to be the person who doesn't take a poor fit as rejection or failure; but I am not that person, not yet.  I think - I hope - that someday I will be.  In the meantime I will continue to repeat to myself what a friend of mine told me what I wailed to her about how badly I had failed as an adoptive home for this dog:  "It is not a failure to do the right thing for your family and for the dog."  Knowing and feeling are so terribly often disparate concepts in this head of mine.

I think perhaps I might be less prone to these scenarios if I stopped trying to take on so much.  Of course, that's another person I hope to be some day -- the person who stops trying to drink the world from the end of a fire hose. 

How to turn the me that is overwhelmed and thinks she's failing into the me who is peaceful and OK with the way the world works, that is the ultimate question. 

 

 

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The first week always sucks

Remember weeks ago when I said SG had a job offer here in our area? The start date finally materialized.  He had to wait until the holidays were over for the HR people, who are located in another state, to get their stuff together and get him scheduled for his background check, a DMV report and a physical.  The DMV apparently is slower than the social security office because after a whole month they decided to just get him started with the DMV report as a contingency.  (They also made him get a spinal x-ray - but no drug screen.  Weirdest hiring protocol I've EVER heard of.)

So he passes all his screens, gets his offer, quibbles over it for a few days, then accepts.  He finally started on Monday of this week.

While the weeks at a time of wrangling life at home on my own was a serious challenge, the upside was is that SG was also home for weeks at a time.  Home to get the kids dressed and fed and on the bus, the animals fed, dinner made, groceries shopped for and household chores done.  If a child ended up needing to be picked up at school due to illness or behavior, he was there to take care of it.  I got used to coming home to dinner on the stove and kids with finished homework every day. 

I was spoiled.  I had a househusband.

About Thursday of last week panic set in.  We had considered that this would mean drastic changes to our routines at home, but until it was staring us in the face we hadn't really thought it out in detail.  Kids going to before- and after-school care would be kids who needed to get out of bed and ready to go an hour and a half earlier than they were used to.  Dinners, especially when we wanted to create time at the end of our day to exercise, would need to be planned and cooked in advance.  Bedtime would need to be pushed up, undoubtedly spawning cries of outrage.  We'd need to plan around guitar lessons, obedience classes, homework and workouts. 

We laid out plans for meals, we bought groceries.  We identified who was responsible for what each morning and each evening.  We were the parenting equivalent of Rocky training for a fight against the seemingly unbeatable Ivan Drogo.

(What was that line of Dolph Lundgren's from Rocky IV?  "If he dies...he dies."  Yikes.)

Sunday night, groceries are bought and stowed.  Dinner has been eaten and put away and the kids have showered and are enjoying computer time before getting ready for bed.  I pull all the meat out of the fridge we will need for the meal plan I've written up for the next few days.

"Honey, there's only one package of chicken in the freezer.  Didn't you buy any?"

"No, I thought we didn't need chicken.  Do we?"

"I don't think four legs are gonna cut it."

Swap Tuesday for Wednesday on the menu plan and forge ahead.  Its only a minor setback, we're still on our feet and swinging.

So far we've dealt with:

• SG forgetting to set out all of his daily supplements and leaving the house about twenty minutes later than he planned and THEN forgetting his phone on top of it, causing him to have to go back to the house after dropping the kids at daycare
• Me forgetting to fill out Race Car Man's medication log resulting in a phone call in the middle of a meeting after I'd forgotten to silence my phone
• SG spending an hour on another day looking for his desk key, which just happened to be in his desk at work.  In the keyhole of his desk at work.
• Guitar lessons being missed
• I forgot to buy the M&M's for Race Car Man's class party
• Wednesday dinner being changed at the last minute from homemade Ginger Glazed Chicken to McDonald's.
• At least three separate instances of me dramatically announcing "I SWEAR I'm going to CUT MY HAIR OFF!"

On top of all of it, the Chihuahua has had diarrhea for three days which has added an extra half hour to each morning of changing crate bedding, cleaning the carpets with my steam cleaner, extra loads of laundry and lots of air freshener.  Because we were out of clean bedding last night we had to let the dogs sleep loose in our room.  Did I mention Zoey's favorite place to sleep is the bed?  Between her insistence on putting her big head so close to my face I couldn't breathe and SG's habit of hogging the covers I finally ended up retreating in a huff to the couch where Iwas then assailed by the cats trying to take advantage of available human real estate to curl up on.

Its only Thursday and I'm starting to feel afraid we're headed for a TKO.  Not to mention its Valentine's Day.  I'm here to tell you its a sheepish thing to give your husband his Valentine's Day card when you've spent the night in a huff on the couch.  To be honest, I didn't actually give the card to him, I just tossed it over onto his side of the bed after I finished getting dressed this morning.  I'm not usually this chickenshit, but I'm just wiped out.

Hey, we're still in one piece.  No one's lost a finger or gotten left behind at the grocery store, at least at the last head count.  

I'm sure we'll have this down in a week or two.  I just hope to God the Chihauahua's butt dries up.

 

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It was bad but its getting better

Since my optimistic post about med changes for Race Car Man a lot of things have happened.  Things I couldn't write about while they were happening not because they needed to be private but because I was too mental to be able to talk about them.  All is better now, but I needed a few days of perspective in order to move beyond being completely inchoate and albe to construct full sentences.

Race Car Man had to be escorted home on the bus for a seoncd time,  had to be picked up before the end of the day twice, got suspended for a day and had to have his meds tweaked.  We had one emergency IEP meeting and one bitch-autism-mom discussion with the school district's transportation office. (Parents, know your rights and what's in your IEP.  Bus drivers are NOT allowed to independently suspend services specified in the plan.)

Probably the worst day was the day the kids missed the bus because it was early, the bus driver told SG when he dropped them off at school that she wouldn't transport my kid, then the school called me to tell me he had to go home and couldn't come back without a full IEP team meeting and behavioral plan, and when I called SG to go get him kind of lost my temper when I found out somebody (not mentioning any names but it wasn't me) forgot to give him his meds and then we kind of had some ugly words and by the time I got off the phone with him I was on the phone to my EAP for a behavior therapist referral AND a marriage therapist referral.  The following day of the new dosages, my ex gave all but one medication in the morning and asked me when I was dropping off the meds at school to give it to him then.  Except a change in routine was too much for Race Car Man with everything else that was going on, and I had words with his teacher when she insisted I continue standing there and trying to get him to take the medicine even though I'd been trying for a half an hour and I could tell that we weren't going to be successful and he was starting to get really upset which was not the best way to start his day.  Not to mention I was already two hours late for work.

Not a good week.  No. 

By Friday, though, he managed to make it through a full day successfully and ride the bus home and get all his rewards.  That was followed by a decent weekend for all of us.  SG and I made up, the kids mostly didn't kill one another and we even made it to church AND over to my parents for an afternoon to make Gingerbread houses. 

This week he has done pretty well -- not spectacular, but pretty well.  Work was insanely busy with our annual inventory and so many meetings that I haven't had time to be worried about waiting for the other shoe to drop.  I guaran-damn-tee you that by next Tuesday I'll be all settled in, convinced that this time we've hit the right combination for sure and Mr. Race Car Man will never have another bad day at school ever.  Except of course at some point, he will and once again I will tumble down the slope into a pit of abject despair.

I am astounded by how often I am caught flat-footed when life throws a monkey wrench into the engine that I feel I have finally gotten to run smoothly.  Its a constant thing, why does it always seem to upend me so?  I should be used to it by now. 

Tonight is the company Christmas party, and SG and I are going to go eat some good food, drink some great wine, dance our asses off and enjoy adult conversation with our friends.    I will gratefully put the past two weeks behind me for a few hours and I can predict with modest assurance that tomorrow's breakfast will require at least two mimosas before my head feels right again.

 

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Being Girly

Sometimes I think I write too much about dealing with my kids and their issues.  This morning, for instance, could have provoked yet another thousand word essay on the joys of trying to get out of the house on time and why it never ever happens and how I'll never qualify as Mother of the Year because I keep losing my temper and my son hates me because he doesn't get TV, DS or laptop time tonight.  But...his medicine got in him.  So I assume his teacher will have a better day than my morning was.  But this isn't about that.

This post is about being a girly girl.  Or being not a girly girl.  Or about being both all at the same time, and reconciling the picture of who I am in my mind with the reality of me.

With all due respect - and apologies - to the ultra-feminine among us:  I have never felt I was one of you.  I was the girl who wanted to get the most offensive rebounds in the basketball game, not cheer the team on from the sidelines wearing a tight sweater and a skimpy skirt.  I was the girl who collected snakes and dug clams and spent most of her weekends on or around her horse and who only wore dresses if threatened with death or disinheritance. 

It wasn't that I didn't want to be pretty.  I did want to be pretty, oh so very much.  But I knew that I wasn't.   I knew, deep inside of me, that I was never going to earn peer acceptance for being cute or petite or having a feminine voice or a sweet laugh.  I could only be good at certain things, and those weren't necessarily the things that purchase a pass into the world of beautiful girls.  And I liked the things I was good at, even if they weren't considered truly feminine pursuits. 

I sailed along through high school and college mostly feeling like Marmaduke trapped in a china shop.  Eventually, finally, I started figuring out that I had assets that went beyond being able to beat the average guy in an arm wrestling match, and more importantly, learned to enjoy making the most of them.  I would guess its taken me about twenty years altogether to become more at ease with the woman inside me who wants to look pretty.  I finally had to understand that pretty and smart don't have to be mutually exclusive.  I finally get it, that I can change the oil in my car by myself and that doesn't disaqualify me from putting on a pretty dress and some makeup and a dab of perfume on my wrists and being attractive in a more conventional way. 

I've learned that there is NOTHING WRONG with wanting to look attractive.  And the most interesting thing about it all is that I reached a point in my life where I don't do it for anyone but myself.  I don't get dressed up to impress a man, I get dressed up because I want to.  And I dress down because I want to.  Dressing down doesn't make me a dirty mom.  Its just one aspect of who I am.

And to clarify, "attractive" to me doesn't mean looking like Angelina Jolie or Grace Kelly or any of those skanky Jersey Girls on television.  It means looking like me, all dressed up.  Beautiful is the way you see yourself, beautiful is the way love sees you.  Likewise, ugly comes from inside too.  Ugly is the way some people act, not the way they look. 

I don't worry what people will think of me in the grocery store if I've been on my horse and I'm covered in dust and hair and I'm wearing my boots and I have hat head.  Go right ahead and stare at me disapprovingly if you must, I don't notice it and even if I did you lack the power to make me feel bad.  The flip side of that coin is that when I make the effort to dress up and look pretty, I don't need you to approve of me for me to know I look good.  That comes from me, not you.

One physical trait that I've always not liked about myself are my fingernails.  The women in my family of origin have very sturdy, very strong hands.  Functional hands. But - terrible nail beds.  Short, wide nail beds, not the nice long oval ones I so admire.  The nails grow out splayed and split and not so very nicely.  I am also not good about caring for my hands.  I never wear rubber gloves when I'm cleaning house or doing dishes.  So I have these short fingernails and they're always getting broken and cracked.  They're ridged, my cuticles are an embarassment.

I have mostly accepted that these are the hands I have, but I don't necessarily have to like them.  And it does feel strange when I go and pay for a pedicure and come out of the shop with lovely toes and newly de-calloused feet in sharp contrast to the mangy cuticles and chopped off nails on my hands.

I have talked myself into and out of artificial nails for years.  I had them briefly in my twenties.  I even bought nail polish the exact shade of my red Nissan Pathfinder.  But they didn't last, I split one painfully due to my clumsiness, I was terrible about getting fills done.  And then with my current lifestyle, horses and dogs and cleaning stalls and all...it didn't seem like something I could - or should - do.

Except I have this one index finger where the nail is splitting.  And it won't stop.  Its been split for over two months now, and as it grows, it just keeps splitting.  I've tried polish, I've tried special plastic "bandaids" just for fingernails, I've tried acrylic nail polish.  I've tried nail treatments.  In the end, I just keep cutting it back farther and farther and no matter how far down to the quick I get it, it still splits and the edges of the split catch on things like my saddle pad or my shoelace and it splits farther and more painfully every time.

So I gave it some thought.  Artificial nails don't have to be long nails.  They can be as long or as short as I want them to be.  Even if the nail technician thinks they should be longer, it doesn't really matter.  I'm the customer, I get to ask for what I want.  And yes, artificial nails are harder than hell on your real nails.  But my real nails are complete crap anyway, so honestly, does it really matter if they get thin and brittle and crack?  They do that anyway!  Artificial nails require maintenance.  I'm notoriously bad at taking care of myself.  So now I have a compelling excuse to go take some time for myself and spend it on something that looks nice.  Artificial nails look fake.  Yes, but even fake looking nails look a thousand percent better than the ones God graced me with.

Wow, I had an argument with myself and I WON. 

Lookie here:

Girly hands. 

I can still beat you at arm wrestling, though. 

On love, blended families, and housework

 

Last year SG and I were a happily dating, newly-in-love couple.  Valentine's day, on my night without the kids, was so romantic.  Being an old-fashioned kind of fellow, he thoughtfully brought me a lovely box of candy and a bouquet of flowers.  So sweet.  As I recall, I gave him a book on some kind of tantric-sex thing.  (And now you know why he loves me so much).  We had a lovely dinner at a local Italian restaurant and listened to a local couple playing guitar and singing ballads.  We played footsie at the table and we stayed up way too late doing things I can't mention in public. 

A year later, we're married, parenting a blended family, working the kinks out of who's responsible for what, and marveling at how, amidst the chaos, we manage to find time for lovely kisses and murmered promises for later after the kids go to bed.  And we do.  Find time.

He's home right now, getting ready to leave for six weeks on a road job, and then starting a new job in town after that. 

We have discussions about the housework and what's a fair split of chores.  I feel that since I'm the one working full time, while for now he's home, 90% of it ought to belong to him.  He doesn't disagree, but frankly he's not the most efficient housekeeper I've ever had.  And reluctant to boot.  I don't blame him, if I have the time to do other things, the last thing I really want to do is clean toilets and sweep floors and fold laundry.  I think we both have frequent wet dreams about when he's home from this next job and working full time and we win the lottery, having enough money to maybe pay someone else to come in and do the cleaning. 

Until then though, SG is the one who's supposed to be doing the bulk of it, but frankly not getting much of it done.  Last Monday I thought maybe making him a list of the top priority items would help. Six days later, Sunday, and about half the list is still waiting to be tackled.  I did not mention, and likely do not need to at this point, that efficiency is not SG's greatest strength.  There's always a Mises Institute lecture to be listened to, people on Facebook need to be argued with, and Words with Friends (and him being beaten mercilessly by my sister) beckons alluringly.

I went off to go on a lovely trail ride late Sunday morning and then ended up doing errands and not getting home til dinnertime.  I hoped - truly hoped - that I'd come home to dinner and a clean house.

Not so.

My house was a disaster, SG was completely frazzled and chaos abounded.  "I don't know how you manage it when I'm not here," he says, "every five minutes there's an interruption.  I just lost a whole hour!  Race Car man wanted a sandwich so I was in the middle of making that and then Amazon Girl sliced her finger open and there was blood everywhere and while I was in the middle of taking care of that T-Bone managed to steal the half-done sandwich off the counter and then Race Car Man threw a fit about not getting his food in a timely manner!  I'm exhausted!"

Heh.  Welcome to my world, babycakes.  I tried not to be too obvious about the laughing.

Its not too often he gets left with them for the entire day.  And to be truthful, not every single day is THAT chaotic.  But those days are far too frequent in my house, and when we have them, it IS exhausting.  Poor guy, after that he ended up staying up almost all night working on his paperwork for the road job that was due first thing Monday morning.  I got up at 3 am and he was still struggling getting the scanner to put the 60 pages of required information into one document instead of 60 documents.  (As an aside, if you want to work in the nuke industry, be prepared to provide exhausting details about every place you have worked in the last ten years including exact dates and addresses, every place you've lived for more than three months in the last ten years, your shoe size, IQ, everyone you've ever slept with or dated or even looked at sideways on the bus  and whether or not you hate your mother. Those people give a whole new meaning to crawling up your ass with a microscope.  One thing's for certain, I don't believe I'd ever be able to get security clearance at the plants he works at.) 

I felt bad for him, so I got up and helped him get everything scanned and sorted and emailed out.  We crawled back into bed at 4:30 AM, me to get one more half hour of sleep and him to get two hours before he needed to get the kids ready for school. 

There's just no time, sometimes.  And now its Valentine's Day, and its my week with the kids, so there will be no romantic date at a nice italian restaurant with live music.  There will likely be food on the walls, children being loud, dogs barking at everything that walks by the window, cats knocking things off counters.  But there will also be stolen kisses and Valentine's Day flowers and footsies under the dinner table and an early bedtime for the youngsters so us old folks can have some adult time. 

This year is certainly a far cry from last year.  But honestly?  I think its way better.

 

 

Things that are short

My nails.

My hair.

My time.

Number three naturally leads to numbers one and two.  One and Two keep three from being as short as it otherwise might.

Sometimes I look at women with long, manicured nails and I feel a stab of want.  I'd love to have hands with long, oval nail beds that naturally grown the perfect nail.  You know, the nail that looks awesome with polish on even when the nails are short.  But then I think of all the things that my hands need to do -- all the things that my hands are capable of doing -- and the envy washes out with the tide. 

I try to imagine what my life would be without the ability to saddle my horse, build things, play my guitar, roughouse with my dogs, bathe my kids, and I can't. 

I run my fingers through my short hair, growing out a bit now and unruly in its desire to curl up and around my ears and go the wrong way on the right side of my forehead.  I can grow it long if I want.  Sometimes I do want long hair.  And other days I look at it short and I think that it looks perfect just the way it is.  I remember how long it took to dry it and try and tame its nonconformist spirit.  I think of the other things I like to do with my time -- not the least of which being sleep. 

My hair is short.  My nails are short.  And because they are short, other things can be a little bit longer. 

Time with my children.

Time with my horse.

Time with my dogs.

Maybe I don't look as feminine as I could.  Maybe I don't look quite as polished.  I'm perfectly OK with that. 

Short suits me just fine.

Time is against me

Ever since I got back from my trip a few weeks ago it feels like life is out of control.  As if while I've been out of Adderall, my life it appears, is on a double dose and I'm left scrambling to keep up all the while feeling as if my brains are scrambled.

My prescription arrived day before yesterday.  Thankfully.  Work is a haze of meetings that continue daily to cause me to be even more behind on the things I was already hopelessly behind on, and with appointments and parenting schedules and Things That Need Doing I'm surprised if I can find a moment to breathe.

You know its bad when breakfast AND dinner for all of us has been the kids' cereal more times than it has not.  I haven't seen my boyfriend in days, and my horses seem surprised when I come out to feed them -- "Hey, we know you.  You used to come talk to us a lot.  You don't like us anymore?"  "Hey, at least I'm not giving YOU cereal for dinner."

Finding time to write is challenging, and unlike those organized bloggers who have half a dozen spare posts written up and neatly tied with ribbons, ready to be published in just this kind of instance, I got nothin'.  And so my only bright idea is to write a post complaining to you about why I don't have time to write a post.  That's working for me, right?

I assure there's a bright side to this.  I'll try to think of what it is as soon as I have time.

 

 

The price of contentedness

Sometimes you can be too happy.

Sometimes you can forget that there are things you must still pay attention to, no matter how much you might be settling into the warm, snuggly feeling of liking someone.  And when your focus strays, you must eventually deal with the consequences.

The eyebrows that you normally maintain with meticulous focus -- they might very well have started a concerted effort to join in the middle.  And spread out to other parts of your face.

The new pair of jeans you got that were already starting to feel a little loose in the hips, the button and the buttonhole might resist your wish to meet easily.

While you might not appreciate that there will be consequences to staying up til nearly midnight several days in a row, your body will remind you that indeed, there are. Usually about halfway home from work, when you might learn the hard way why there's a rumble strip on the side of the highway.

You might suddenly realize that you have a week's worth of laundry to do.  Immediately, in fact, if you'd like to have something to wear to work tomorrow.

There might be dust bunnies the size of Rhode Island lurking under the oak hutch.

 

Be warned and beware.  THIS COULD HAPPEN TO YOU.

 

But its worth it.

 

Don't move, he's holding scissors

April 24, 2007.

I remember this date, because its the day before I boarded a plane with my mother-in-law and my children to fly West to begin a new life.  J and his dad had already left a couple of days earlier in our minivan with the dogs.  The kids and I would fly to Seattle, spend a night at my parents, then drive to Eastern Washington to our rental house. 

I'd spent the last couple of days having farewell drinks with just about everyone I could fit in (I think my liver is still mad at me for it, too).  The day before we were to leave I decided at the last minute to go get some highlights and get my layers evened out.  There's nothing like a good haircut to give you confidence on the first day of your new career, right?  Right. 

I walked into the [famous department store styling salon] at the Ocean County Mall without an appointment, as usual, guaranteeing myself the lowliest of the stylists.  I'd never really had a bad cut there before, I had no reason to believe today would be any different.

After a few minutes of waiting and idly perusing the magazine stacks, an elderly gentleman came out from the back and read my name off the checklist.  I had a brief moment of thinking perhaps he was the [famouse department store] Salon equivalent of the Wal-Mart Greeter.  Maybe he was just going to wash my hair for the stylist?  No.  He WAS the stylist.  Dude was eighty years old if he was a day, but I've never been shy about meeting new people and I was determined to enjoy my haircut, so I took my seat in the chair with an air of optimism and innocence.

I love old people.  Really, really love them.  Two of my favorite things about singing in my church choir are Perry and Cora-Jane, our director and his wife.  They don't know it but I often fantasize that they are my real-life grandparents, I love them that much.  Although most won't admit it, we make assumptions about people based on their age.  Don't we?  Of course we do.  What do we usually assume about the elderly?

"Sweet."

"Cute."

'Harmless."

"Oh, such a dear person."

Hmmph.  What a crock of doodle. 

It all started off well.  I told him I wanted some red highlights here and there throughout the crown of my head and I needed my layers evened out. Simple, yes? 

As we looked at color samples and we started the chit-chat that you usually have with a new stylist, things like "Where are you from?" and "How long have you worked here?" and "You're not going to ruin my hair, are you?"  I learned that he was had been a widower for a few years after a long, happy marriage, that he had a grown son who he was close with, no grandchildren.  How sweet, I thought.  We talked about my husband and my kids, and we started swapping stories.

As he began to put the foil in my hair and put the paste on, he started to tell me about how hard it was to start dating again after so many years.  I commiserated, dating isn't easy for young people, it must really be hard for you.  I noticed he was being a little heavy-handed with the color, but I was too afraid to be rude to an old person to speak up.  How bad could it be? 

After I'd been under the dryer for the prerequisite length of time, he rinsed out the color and started to cut.  As he was cutting my hair he started to tell me about a woman he'd been dating recently.

She apparently was a lady who came in to the salon weekly for her regular style and set with another stylist, and he thought she was rather nice looking.  He asked her out to lunch.  He said at first she seemed reluctant to go, but after a few weeks she relented and agreed to have go out with him.  They had their first date and he really liked her. He wanted to ask her out again, except...she stopped coming in to the salon.  I felt so bad for him, his first dating venture after becoming a widower and here this mean old bitch was breaking his heart.  "Well that was awfully rude of her," I said.  "Exactly," he said.  But what he did next?  He asked her regular stylist if she'd heard from her, and when the stylist said no, he played it off like he was worried about her, maybe something had happened, and did she have a phone number to contact her?  No, but the stylist had her last NAME. 

And he went on to tell me how he looked her up in the phone book and got her address and phone number and he called her and asked her out again and she said "no."  So he started driving by her HOUSE.  And he noticed she had a gentleman friend, which he figured out because sometimes there was a car there that wasn't HERS. And that he had called her a few more times but she stopped answering the phone so he thought she might have that Caller ID thingie-ma-bob, so he was going to ask his son if he could borrow his phone to try and see if she would take his calls then.  And as he's telling me this, he's getting clearly more agitated by the recital, and he's cutting more and more of my hair, except I'm afraid to say anything because apparently my hairdresser is a scary STALKER and he's holding scissors.  Scissors!  And all I can hear is the blood roaring in my ears and Freddy Krueger's nails scraping along the wall.

By the end of the ordeal, I'd lost a good three inches of length, and my red "highlights" were a lot more like "fire engine red hair ALL OVER."  And I was too scared to say anything critical to him.  "There, look at it in the mirror!  Doesn't it look nice?"  "Great," I mumbled, "It looks great.  I need to go now."  I paid and got the hell out of there as fast as I could.

Lessons learned:

a) Old people are not necessarily nice people

b) Make an appointment next time. 

c) Don't ever give the salon your phone number. Or your last name. Just say that you'll call THEM when you need an appointment.

d) You don't really need a new haircut to start a new job.  Odds are you'll end up looking like somebody totally different than the person they hired and when you show up for your first day of work your new boss will do a double-take and say, "Wow, that's REALLY, um, RED." 

Impulse