Julie Jay: My only quibble with Ted’s hair is that he is not a redhead
HAIR has become a contentious issue in our home this week - even more so than usual. Much like that ex-boyfriend of yours who had dreadlocks and spoke of getting brainwashed by fluoride in the tap water, Ted is not a fan of hair-washing or hair-brushing - in fact, he is not a fan of anything that involves interference with his crowning glory. So territorial is he of his hair that I’m pretty sure whenever I attempt a shampooing, the neighbours consider ringing the guards - such is the level of objections coming from our en-suite.
Ted loves hair. Not just his own but other people’s. Ted has become so obsessed with his follicle growth that he is announcing his father’s depleting hair volume to strangers on the street.
"Hello Ted, how are you today?" comes the greeting from the friendly pharmacist.
"My daddy has no hair," Ted replies matter-of-factly, with a tinge of sadness. "It blew away in the wind."
Poor old Daddy is just one more ill-timed comment from Ted away from booking a flight to Turkey and coming back with a Wayne Rooney bleeding scalp. As a result, I have had to ask Ted to downplay his disappointment with Fred’s lack of hair versus his certified pride in his own head of curls.
"Daddy just likes short hair," I tell an unconvinced Ted, who spends most of his time at the beach shouting at me to put suncream on Daddy’s head because "all his hair gone missing".
Ted’s hair is, like his mother's, pretty wild. "We have the same hair, Mammy," Ted reminds me on the daily, and honestly we are getting very close to buying friendship bracelets such is the extent of our unbreakable hair bond.
My only quibble with Ted’s hair - as much as it pains me to admit this - is that he is, devastatingly, not a redhead. I’ve tried to tell myself that in particular lights he could pass for a mini Ed Sheehan, but the truth is his mad mop of gruaig - though magnificent - is most certainly not red but blonde. Yes, the ginger gene has officially bypassed my little man, which causes me a lot of worries because, as any fellow redhead will tell you, like friends who remember your birthday minus the help of Facebook, we are a dying breed.
Having red hair has always been a major part of my identity. It is more than a hair colour and arises due to a mutation in the MC1R gene that fails to produce sun-protective, skin-darkening eumelanin (boo) and instead causes pale skin, freckles and red hair (yay). However, our genetic defect did provide us with one handy advantage: our pale skin produced vitamin D more efficiently from the dim light, strengthening our bones (sing it with me: dem bones, dem bones need calcium) and making women more likely to survive pregnancy and childbirth.
As a little girl, I was told by many an adult never to dye my hair, which to my primary school mind translated as ‘one day a time will come and you will want to dye your hair - this is a given'.
Julia Roberts was the first person who made me believe that embracing my hair colour was possible. As a child, my auntie would have the movie playing on a loop when she was on babysitting duties. Thus for my fourth class end-of-year party piece, I impressively recited the initial conversation between Vivian and Edward word for word. Because this was 1990, nobody questioned a nine-year-old memorising a script which explored themes of sex work and exploitation. Instead, my teacher announced it as 'super cute' and got the rest of the staffroom down to watch my rather strange performance - complete with a man’s tie that I had stolen from my dad’s wardrobe.
As a teenager, the hair dying began quicker than you can say, ‘I thought you had to be 16 to work in a hotel kitchen’. The first purchase any underage female bought in the mid to late '90s was hair dye - preferably grape colour, and preferably when you only had a white towel your mother bought on holidays to hand. I can remember being accosted by my mother for dying my hair in the bath as I attempted to rid myself of what made me, well, me - in a desperate bid to fit in. When confronted with the cold hard evidence. I stood firm and insisted I had always possessed this dark purple shade. The dye trailing down my collarbone told a very different story.
I love that Ted loves his hair and never want him to change it. I’m not sure when that bit happens - the parts of you you love become parts of you that you dislike and need to alter - but I hope Ted can somehow bypass this seemingly inevitable part of growing up.
In , when Julia Roberts appears for breakfast minus her blonde wig and Richard Gere is greeted by her magnificent auburn mane for the first time he announces it as ‘better’, and because I rarely did anything as a younger woman that wasn’t in a desperate bid for male approval, I took note of the life lesson. Maybe the adults in my life were right when they said not to change the bits of myself that made, well, me.
But finding it out for yourself is the trick, and that is why, when inevitably I find a purple-stained bath and my previously pristine Lanzarote towel destroyed beyond recognition, I will be sad at Ted tampering with what, in my mind, is perfection. But I also know part of me will be secretly happy because there is nothing like a stained Lanzarote bath towel which says: ‘I am becoming my own person, and making my own choices along the way.’
And when he does invariably come back to his natural colour a few weeks or months down the line, I too will do a Richard Gere at breakfast, pass minimal comment on him returning to his natural quiff, and gently remind him that tables are not for sitting. Because if we learned anything from , surely we learned that.