Memoir Blast 16: They Did Not Bounce Back

 

MEMOIR BLAST 16: They Did Not Bounce Back

I’d forgotten this memory — which doesn’t surprise me. That whole era was a storm. Man Friday had just started working away, so every week seemed to end with me in A&E, clutching Molly while the emergency doctor (OR OUT OF HOURS DR) tried to decode what I already knew in my bones. Her convulsions had begun. Nine months old. Too small for that kind of drama, but there we were.

“The same day Derek — my biological father, though never a real dad — died, she had her first convulsion. It felt like he’d pinched her in her sleep, passed something on, jinxed the wiring. I know that’s not how biology works, but that’s how memory works for me: everything connects, everything echoes, everything becomes a pattern.”

And the pattern was this:

No one listened.

Not then, not for years.

By the time we reached the medical people, the temperature had dropped, the symptoms had shifted, or my words had tangled. Too many words, too much emotion, too much urgency. I was always “too” something, and always too late.

Somewhere in the middle of all that chaos — after Molly was born but before the convulsions took over — my curls disappeared.

Just… left.

One morning I looked in the mirror and the ringlets that had been my signature, my softness, my familiar self, were gone. Replaced by a limp wave that didn’t belong to me. I didn’t understand it then. Nobody talked about postpartum anything. Hormones were a mystery, not a map.

The advice I got — from a dodgy hairdresser, naturally — was to cut it all off. “They’ll bounce back,” she said, like curls were obedient pets. So I did it. I trusted the uniform, the scissors, the authority.

They did not bounce back.

What I got instead was a blunt bob that didn’t suit the shape of my grief or the shape of my face. I didn’t mind short hair — that wasn’t the issue. It was the betrayal of it. The lie. The way I’d acted first and learned the facts later, which was the theme of my entire youth.

I tortured myself for months, waiting for the curls to return. They didn’t. Not until my hair grew long again, years later, when life had settled just enough for my body to remember itself.

Looking back, that haircut was the beginning of something I didn’t have language for then:

the shift from trusting everyone else to trusting myself.

Because now — in this version of me — I get the facts before I take the action.

Back then, I took the action because someone in a chair with scissors told me to.

Did I learn the hard way?

Of course I did.

It’s the only way I ever learned anything that mattered.