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facts & arguments

Facts & Arguments is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines at tgam.ca/essayguide.

I was a relatively angst-free adolescent and managed to emerge from my teenage years without having given my parents too much grief. There was one scare, however, and it was quite hairy.

I was 15 and spending the summer at a sleepover camp. At some point after too many rainy days had kept us cooped up inside, a friend decided that she would give her two brothers a haircut. Lauren wielded a set of clippers and fashioned each of them an audacious Mohawk cut – bald except for a stripe of hair bisecting the crown of the head.

Now, I'm not sure exactly how the next decision came to pass. Perhaps it was some inner feminist grumbling, urging me to fight the patriarchy with a radical new look. Or maybe it was just the blissful goofiness of summer camp, the only place in the world where the weirder you are, the cooler you are. (The most popular camper had a song-and-dance routine about his asthma inhaler.) But whatever the reason, Lauren and I decided that we too were going to rock the Mohawk.

An impromptu session with the clippers began, with counsellors and campers gathering around to witness the new 'dos. We'd been told to phone our parents for permission, but I knew mine would never understand so I lied about calling them. As the cutting commenced, my own shoulder-length locks were the first to fall. By the end of the hour, 14 people, mostly boys, were sporting Mohawks.

When I stood up from the bench that had served as a hairdresser's chair, someone tossed me a denim vest to complete my new rebellious look. I walked over to a mirror, and smiled. I barely recognized myself and I loved it.

Since I was at summer camp, I assumed I would be sheltered from my parents' commentary for at least a couple more weeks. However, I had forgotten about the secret line of communication they had on me – the camp website.

Since I rarely obliged to write them a letter, they were scouring the website daily for any bit of intel on what I was up to. I was a tad surprised that they didn't simply scroll by my thumbnail image, failing to recognize me in my new style. It must have been parental instinct, because they noticed me all right, my hair stiffly gelled up for the photo op.

Then the first e-mail arrived. At first they were outraged.

"How could you do this?" and, "We are very unhappy about this."

Then they attempted to justify their distress, with questions such as, "What will your teachers think of you?"

With every e-mail, I loved my haircut even more.

I relished the absurdity of some of the comments, reading them aloud to my bunk. "We paid for an expensive haircut, and now you've gone and shaved it all off!"

At a certain point the hysteria seemed to level off, and they started sending messages such as: "Please write us a letter soon. Have you been swimming in the lake? How many inches has your hair grown?"

I have to admit that the Mohawk didn't look good per se. The line of hair sort of flopped down to either side, in a bit of a Pepé Le Pew fashion. But that was precisely why shaving my head taught me so many invaluable lessons.

For 15-year-old girls, there's a lot of pressure to have perfect hair, to spend hours putting on makeup, to do anything you can to fit in. You worry that if you don't look a certain way, you won't have friends, boys won't like you and you will be teased.

Instead, perhaps because I never was particularly high in the social strata, nothing happened to me when I cut my hair. My friends didn't suddenly ditch me and my crush kept on crushing.

Sometimes teenagers can be cruel, but I realized by cutting my hair off that the people surrounding me simply were not. Seven years later, I still rely on that lesson: If I have a bad hair day it's okay, because even if I buzzed it all off, the world would not stop spinning.

My parents, on the other hand, were still very confused. They confronted my older sister, asking if I was becoming a skinhead (highly unlikely for a girl at a socialist summer camp), or if I was a lesbian ("not that it matters!").

When I came home from camp they hadn't gotten over it yet. I insisted there was no real problem – hair grows back. My mom took me to a hairdresser who attempted to fashion my now growing-out Mohawk into a more respectable cut.

Over the next eight months I went through many hairband and bobby-pin phases, letting my hair grow back to its former feminine length. Only when I had regained my ponytail did my parents seem to realize the foolishness of having made such a fuss.

Out of all of the things I could have done to assert my independence, they got pretty lucky that cutting my hair was the route I chose. I wasn't just rebelling against them, but also giving the finger to the beauty standards society places on girls.

If I ever have the pleasure of raising a daughter who wants to shave her hair, dye it green or leave only the bangs and a rat-tail, I will be proud of her for not being afraid to be herself.

Let's hope she isn't embarrassed by matching mother-daughter Mohawks!

Erica Shenfeld lives in Toronto.

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