Rejected by Locks of Love

My hair is going to drive me insane, if my kids don't beat me to it.

I am chronically lazy about regularly scheduled haircuts so I end up with a shaggy, mousy blah hairstyle every year. It gets to a length where I start to consider doing something noble like donating it to locks of love. Only you need 10 inches of hair...and my hair grows at a snails pace.

Undeterred, when my sister Renee decided she was going to donate her hair in honor of her daughter Grace, who suffers from alopecia areata (hair falling out in places from time to time), I decided I would be charitable and donate as well. It seemed to take forever to barely get to 10 inches but one September morning, I was there...at least the longest few hairs were. I printed off the donation instructions, grabbed my ziploc bag, and headed to a nearby beauty salon. When my stylist found out I was donating, she had this haughty, sniffy look like "THIS hair?" but she took a look at the picture of the cute Meg Ryan post-donation cut I was going for and adamantly vowed she could pull it off.

One ponytail shorn off, and many clippings later, she started in to the layering, then mega amounts of product, then blow drying. All the while, she is murmuring how cute this is going to be and how she loves this cut, yada yada. She finally pronounced that she was finished and spun my chair around and asked those dreaded words, "How do you like it?"

There, staring back at me, was the largest Bump-It space helmet hair bouffant seen since the beehive met its demise. I mean to tell you she had backcombed the crown of my hair to within an inch of its useful life and I could have had a career on Trinity Broadcasting Network (if I added in copious amounts of costume jewelry and eye makeup...and an unnatural shade of pink lipstick).

I lied...like I always do to hair stylist when the cut doesn't match the photo and I figure I can go home, re-wash, and bring my hair down from the heavens...and said, "It's quite something!" Then I remembered I had driver's license photos later that day and scurried home so that this horrible haircut would not be recorded for the next 10 years (picture below was after getting home and "fixing" the damage).

I already had that "lingering bad hair" experience in first grade when my oldest sister Beth gave me a home perm. Well, actually, it was two home perms. She thought the first one didn't take but really it was like priming the pump because the second perm took enough for both home applications. And since I thought the curl would come out if I combed it, I ended up with hair that looked like the clown wig sans the rainbow coloring.

But I digress....

I did send my paltry ponytail in to Locks of Love with a delivery confirmation attached. I was chatting with my sister Renee several weeks later and she mentioned that she had gotten a thank you note from Locks of Love for her hair donation.

Yeeeaaahhh...they never sent me a thank you. And the delivery confirmation came back complete so I know they received it. I realized my mousy thin, pathetic hair was REJECTED by kids that don't even HAVE hair.

How do you like them apples?