why is every day a bad hair day?

It’s not that I don’t try. 

In a year, I get my hair colored about ten times, plus once for highlights.  I get it cut about six. I have a keratin treatment once. And I buy the best products.  Yet still, my hair almost never looks good, except for those occasions when someone else takes over.

And now that it’s summer, my hair looks particularly bad.  It’s short and frizzy and looks unhip and unstyled.  I like a windswept look but mine just looks messy. I can still hear my father.  “I’m not going to say anything, but let me just ask you a question.  Do you really think your hair looks good like that?”  Comments like this caused our biggest fights growing up.  

And I believed then, as I do now, that my hair looked good.  Here’s a picture taken in Florida in 1972.

But were my father to ask me that same question today, I’d probably break into tears and scream, “No, I don’t think it looks good.  It looks awful.  I hate it.”