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Illustration by Nijah Smith
Fatherhood has taught me that saying “yes” is nearly always better in the long run than saying “no.”
Two years ago my then-16-year-old daughter, Claire, offered to dye my hair. The request was unexpected as my hair and its colour had previously never been topics of discussion in our home. Nor had I ever coloured my hair.
I agreed to Claire’s request, assuming her enthusiasm was a passing fancy. As a father of teenage twins, I had long since given up trying to understand the adolescent brain.
However, I extracted a promise from Claire: whatever she did would be subtle. After all, I had no desire to face my colleagues and students at the university, where I am a professor, the following day with a radical new look. Nor did I want to become yet another middle-aged man masquerading as youthful with obviously dyed locks.
Things did not turn out as I had hoped. Claire’s first attempt ended up giving me hair that was jet black. This was many shades removed on the colour palette from my natural salt and pepper.
The most telling reaction to the transformation was our neighbour’s poodle. It was at our home before my hair treatment and still visiting when I appeared from the basement with my freshly coloured and washed hair. When seeing me again the poor animal barked furiously either not recognizing me or expressing deep despair at what had befallen me. I thought canines could not distinguish colours, but I now know for certain this is false. I also have a much greater appreciation of the capacity dogs have for empathy.
Sue, my wife, wasn’t enamoured with the black hue either, so she added highlights a few days later. The resulting shades and streaks had never previously been observed on a human being.
Since then, on a roughly six-week basis, I am conducted to the basement washroom to get my makeover. During the past two years my hair has become a chameleon. Sue experiments with a different shade each time she dyes my hair, such that nearly the entire rainbow has made an appearance. Although Claire treated my hair only once, she provides feedback each time her mother does, from a positive “that’s not bad” to a negative “whoa!”
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Last week, Sue coloured my hair again. After dutifully following her to the basement bathroom and enduring the alchemy, my hair is now a bright yellow that any movie artistic director would select to portray a highly toxic substance. The shade is exactly what I imagine my hair would be like after walking through a decaying but still operational nuclear reactor in an apocalyptic landscape.
Sue says the colour is exactly that of Ken’s hair in the Barbie movie, but my hair is much closer to Donald Trump’s shade than Ken’s. In fact, my hair makes Trump’s look natural.
Sue admits that the outcome of her latest treatment is “not the best.” She tells me not to worry because she’ll “fix it” in a few days, which scares me given many remaining leftover and half-empty bottles of hair colouring chemicals lurking in the basement.
I had always assumed that sudden and dramatic fluctuations in hair colour were the purview of movie stars, or young women. In that regard, Claire gets her hair dyed by professionals, at some considerable cost to her father’s wallet. The results are far more subtle than anything my basement salon has managed.
Reactions to ongoing changes in my colourful locks from family, friends, colleagues and my students range from shocked stares followed by “What happened?” to an effort to appear blasé. The kindest-hearted people are those who say, “There’s something different about you but I don’t know what it is.”
Alexander, Claire’s twin, has taken what I think is the best approach to the ongoing variations of my hair. A quick glance in the general direction of my head when I ascend the basement stairs, followed by, “That’s nice, dad.” The tone of Alexander’s voice clearly conveys he has long since given up trying to understand the parental brain.
Granted, my hair has naturally and gradually (with emphasis on both these words) altered over the decades. As a toddler my hair was blond so that, according to my mother, strangers on the street thought I was a girl. Over the years, the blond became brown and most recently a natural and distinguished mostly grey mane.
More and more I realize that the phrase “love is blind” really means, for Sue and Claire, that “love is hair-colour-blind.”
Despite the trials and tribulations, I know I should be grateful. I have hair and a daughter and wife who take an interest in it. I only wish their attention resulted in less dramatic and colourful outcomes.
Thomas Klassen lives in Toronto.
