because it was a mindfuck realising that i am, at bottom, a fundamentalist, but also because i was a fundamentalist who could neither pray nor bring herself to cover her hair. i'm doing what i always do after brain surgery: growing what i have out. my hair is more than midway down my little back, and now that the sutures are all closed, i've been able to remove the colour i put in when it got too blonde for my liking, and it's as close to my natural colour as i can get it, and all the tiny blonde baby hairs near my forehead are coming in. it looks beautiful, honestly, shiny and healthy and strong, which i'm finally beginning to feel, too. the thing is, i no longer want anyone besides joel to see my hair. i won't wear it down when i'm out on the street, and i've been thinking about doing the old bethlehem bun and hiding it under a rag altogether, which is another mindfuck.whenever there's a proposition somewhere banning girls from wearing headscarves, i cheer, although not as much as i did when i found out that new immigrants to the netherlands have to watch movies of men kissing before their citizenship is confirmed. i'm a hardcore proponent of laïcité, and the fewer backassward superstitions the populace engages in the better, which means, of course, that headscarves have to go. but here i am wanting one.
there are a few reasons so far as i can discern: now that i have my figure back, i am again being stopped on the street, and my hair is more often than not mentioned. this would be fine if my legs were well enough to run in the event that the inquiries stopped being polite, but they aren't as yet. also, wedding bands aren't the deterrent they were even a couple of years ago, and covering my hair seems a way to underscore leave me alone, i'm married, in a way that a bit of platinum cannot. and the truth of it is, i once liked the attention my hair got me when i was first married. i never cheated on my first husband, but to claim that i didn't like the attentions of strangers would be utterest horseshit. i very much liked the attention. it was a reprieve from how much i hated my husband. it reminded me that men, categorically, weren't necessarily rotten, that they could hit it, without hitting you. but now that i adore this new husband, men are becoming categorically rotten, and for the selfsame reason i once liked them. i no longer have any need or desire for catcalls, even nice ones, and i now take them as an affront, to myself and joel. i actually dislike the nice ones more. telling a man you're taken and having him persist, as he tries to play himself off as polite, interested, is more craven and more despicable than an unsolicited "you wanna fuck?" but a headscarf, i'm supposing, would mean less of both.
although it wouldn't necessarily. i'm thinking of the time i balled a blazer up and put it under my shirt when i was stranded once in an airport, thinking men wouldn't hit on a pregnant woman. i was wrong. i got less attention generally, but managed to elicit the notice of a supercreepy perv who not only thought, but told me, pregnant women were hot, and asked me if i wanted to go to the bathroom with him.
i don't know if i should trust the headscarf. i haven't tried it yet. i'm shopping now for big square scarves that will cover all my hair, and have found a host of sites that serve the modest. there are heaps of them, all, more or less, equally horrifying, although it's funny to note how slutty the mormons are, comparatively. there aren't, to my knowledge, any secular plain dress sites, and i don't know why, but i'm sure it has everything to do with the fact that, in the absence of chatter about the sanction of god, what modesty is really about: women are, and ever were, nothing more than a species of property, objects of exchange that circulate among men, through an accident of birth.
saying i'm taken, much as i love joel, as freely as i've chosen to be with him, is another way of saying i've been had.
