Deborah Burand

My Mother’s Hair

The first time I saw my mother wear a wig was the summer of 1970. We were on a family vacation, driving from Indiana to Colorado and back again. One night my nine year-old brother ran into the motel lobby where my father and I were waiting and loudly announced to everyone sitting there, “Mom’s wearing her wig, and it doesn’t look half bad!” Moments later my well-coiffed mother walked into the lobby. Unaware of the announcement that had preceded her arrival, she smiled graciously at the people who were turning in their chairs for a look. I suspect that my father told her later what had happened as I don’t recall her wearing the wig again for the rest of our vacation.

Forty-one years later, my mother and I leafed through wig catalogues that I had brought home from the beauty salon. Each wig had a name. There was a Bridgette, Ashley, and Grace. Choose me, the wigs seemed to be saying, and you too can become someone different -- someone who is not sick, someone who is not dying.

We renamed the wigs when they arrived. There was “Sporty” wig and “Lady” wig. We thought that my mother would wear Lady the most as it more closely resembled her hairstyle before the chemotherapy treatments started. But Sporty, with its pixie cut and short bangs, was the wig she reached for most often after her head was shaved.

My mother was of the generation that made weekly visits to the beauty salon for a wash and set. Then each night she would carefully wrap a strand of toilet paper around her head and pin a net over it so that the style would not be mussed. As a teenager I wondered, but never dared ask, what my father thought of sleeping with a woman whose head was encased in toilet paper.

It was a missed beauty salon appointment that alerted my father that his wife was very sick. One Friday morning in March, when my mother decided that she was too tired to go to the beauty salon to get her hair done, my father called the doctor. Concerns about a possible case of pneumonia gave way to more alarming worries when her doctor spotted a shadowy mass at the bottom of an x-ray. An oncologist confirmed our worst fears – stage four ovarian cancer. My mother was asymptomatic but for a missed hair appointment.

Buying yet another wig seemed a necessary extravagance. The hair that had grown back after her first round of chemotherapy ended was beginning to molt in patches from the radiation treatments that she now was enduring to address a new diagnosis of brain cancer. And so I again brought the wig catalogue home from the beauty salon. This time my mother chose a wig that she renamed Spiky after the golden shafts of hair that veered from its crown. Spiky soon became her favorite.

One night, after everyone else had gone to bed, I carried my mother’s two wigs to the bathroom. I tied my shoulder-length hair into a tight ponytail and then pulled Lady over my head. The wig fit tightly, perhaps too tightly. I worried that my big head might be stretching it out of shape. I positioned its two points of webbing in front of my ears, and then looked at myself in the mirror. I did not recognize the red-eyed woman looking back at me. Was she an older version of me, a younger version of my mother, or someone else entirely? I turned my head in hopes of glimpsing a more recognizable profile, looking for a familiar tilt of a nose or fold of a chin. Sporty was no better. It was as if I was staring into the mirror of Snow White’s stepmother and its black magic had conjured an image of not the most beautiful woman in the world, but the saddest.

The next day I debated over telling my mother about my late night wig-fest. I felt ashamed as if I had been pilfering her lingerie drawer. But there was no more time for secrets between the two of us. I could not afford to wait for a couple of months and then, as in the past, off-handedly mention my odd behavior while passing it off as a joke of sorts. And so I confessed, saying in a rush of words, “Mom, I tried on some of your wigs last night. I hope you don’t mind.”

My mother looked up from the couch where she was resting. She smiled, then said, “They’re pretty, aren’t they?”

“Yes, very pretty,” I agreed.

Several months later when the doctors decided to stop all treatments, my mother grew depressed for the first time since her original diagnosis. Although her hair was now growing back yet again, I made one more wig purchase. This time the wig came, not from a beauty salon catalogue, but from an offbeat shop in Boulder, Colorado where I was attending a conference. If this wig had been named, I think it would have been called “Candy” for it was the color of pink cotton candy, but shiny like raffia. It was trimmed in the shag style that was all the rage in the late 1970s.

I gave the pink wig to my mother when she came for her last visit to my home in Michigan. She put it on immediately, and then wore it around town. In her shockingly pink wig, she resembled something between a clown and Phyllis Diller at her wackiest. But it worked. She smiled and those around her smiled, even as they said their last goodbyes. To paraphrase my brother, Mom was wearing a wig. And it didn’t look half bad.

[THIS NEXT ESSAY WILL BE INCLUDED IN PART THREE OF THE BOOK, WHICH TAKES PLACE AFTER MY MOTHER DIED]

Navigating Fog

For all of our drive north, my father held the steering wheel, and I, his 56-year old daughter, sat next to him in the front passenger seat. Maps and travel guides littered my lap while empty water bottles and coffee cups rolled under my feet.

This seat and this role, part co-pilot/part garbage collector, were relatively new to me. This is where my mother would sit on our family drives until she, no longer comfortable sitting up straight for long rides, opted for stretching out in the backseat under a light throw, and I took her place next to my father. She had been teaching us, my father now says, showing the two of us how to navigate together as a team while she moved slowly but inevitably offstage.

The May rain had been with my father and me for most of the day, shadowing our path as we drove north from Saugatuck to Traverse City, Michigan. It paused just long enough to let us to drive most of the seven-miles of the Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive without the distraction of windshield wipers swiping to and fro, cutting the scenery into frames like a spool of unwinding camera film.

This was our first trip to see the Sleeping Bear Dunes. As the car rolled through the scenic drive at 20 miles an hour, my father grew increasingly animated. His hands, no longer at ten and two on the steering wheel, began sweeping toward the landscape around us. “Just look at this,” he exclaimed every few minutes, pointing to the forest filled with stands of beech and maple trees and the rich canopy of leaves overhead that turned the drive into a tunnel of green. His running commentary ran from the informative to the awestruck to the spiritual. Then he said “your mother would have loved this,” and we both grew quiet, newly aware that there was no gentle body resting on the seat behind us.

We left our umbrellas in the car when we reached the scenic drive’s outlooks nine and ten. As we shuffled up the dune to the ninth outlook, a thin layer of rain-dimpled sand, browned to the color of bread crust, broke under each footstep, revealing the drier and whiter sand below the surface. On the boardwalk that topped this part of the dune, we stood with other damp tourists and peered down 400 or so feet into the waters of Lake Michigan that lapped below. The colors of the lake water on this overcast day resembled the shades of a pigeon’s breast, gray tones shifting to blue with a slight rim of green denoting its shallower parts.

After we returned to the car from our dune wanderings and dusted sand from our shoes, my father lowered his voice as if to confide a secret. “Your mother often told me that she loved how I helped her see the nature around her.”
“I know, Dad,” I replied as I shook still more sand from my shoe. This was my cue, a chance for me to say something like “and I love it when you help me see nature too.” But I didn’t, for I am setting new boundaries in our father/daughter relationship. I won’t become a surrogate for my mother; however, I fear that I am missing chances to let my father know how loved and treasured he is, still.

When I was a little girl of five or six, I started asking my father who he loved most - my mother or me. And he would tell me, “I love you both.” Unsatisfied with his answer, I would ask again and again, until finally my father would add, “I love you both the most – but differently.” It is that difference that I am trying to locate and hold onto now.

Our hotel in Traverse City was on Sugar Beach. Rain followed us there, but our hotel room, facing the bay, had a covered patio where we could sit and watch the changing waterscape without feeling even damp. I uncorked a bottle of red wine and watched a deep fog steal our shoreline panorama.

I tried reading the bay view like I would read a painting, starting in the left high corner and then tracking to the right. But the picture was changing too fast. By the time my eyes returned to the left, the fog had moved, erasing new bits of the waterscape and revealing others. Moored boats appeared and then disappeared. Piers thrusted into the bay and then vanished. Even the beach chairs near the water’s edge wobbled in and out of view.

Not only did the fog blanket our vista, so too did it muffle the sounds around us. No bird cries pierced the cloud that was enveloping us. Even the lapping of waves stilled as if the water had receded from the shore.

“Honey, just look at this,” my father said, breaking the silence and holding both hands open wide as if to embrace the whole of Sugar Beach. “Man oh man. See how the fog is creeping onto the beach? Isn’t it beautiful?” He was giving me a second chance, another opportunity to let him show me the beauty of the nature around us.

I nodded my head in agreement. “Beautiful,” I echoed.

“This,” he continued, “is how I’m experiencing your mother.” He gestured to the ghostly outlines of boats that bobbed in the shallows of the foggy bay.

I put down my glass of wine and looked at him, but his eyes were still peering into the cloud that now nearly obscured the beach.

“She’s here,” he said pointing out to the bay. “I can’t see her but I know your mother’s here. Just like I know those boats are still out there even though I can’t see them now.” I heard his voice grow hoarse and I sensed, rather than saw, his tears.

“Thanks, Dad,” I said. “Thanks for showing me.”