Hair-Raising Trip Down Memory Lane

Naturally, pregnancy has made me nostalgic.   Embarrassingly so.  I have a slide show of my life playing on loop in my head — especially recollections of how my parents raised me — from Dad taking time out of his busy schedule to coach my softball team to Mom subtly pointing out I might want to look into Sally Hansen Facial Hair Creme.

Oh sure, it stung.  But I came to realize Mom may have saved my life with that suggestion, as I was practically just an open Hawaiian shirt away from being a dead ringer for Magnum P.I.

This sentimentality has led to many evening spent thumbing through old family photo albums.  Which has led to much laughter and “Oh no, I di-in’t!”s.  Well, oh yes, I DID — as you can see in the picture I’m about to share with you.  A picture that, I believe, embodies the true spirit of the increasingly popular blog called Awkward Family Photos:

The bigger the hair, the closer to awesomeness

Considering Mom has NEVER had her eyes open in the history of all photos taken of her, that’s actually a nice picture of her.  And this time, I can’t really blame her for closing her eyes because OMIGOD, LOOK AT THAT HAIR OF MINE!  Mom is probably closing her eyes in fear that my hair is going to attack her like a pack of rabid dogs.  Either that, or she’s lamenting how her daughter has single-handedly punctured a hole in the Ozone with the four cans of Vavoom Freezing Spray that were used to sculpt that hair into such a work of art.

It was the early ’90s, okay?  I wanted to be Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman so passionately, that I even bought that polka-dotted dress!  And begged for brown-colored contacts!  And waited on street corners for a hot billionaire to drive up in a Lotus!  (Never happened, strangely, but I did get some lovely offers from middle-aged men in Trans Ams that I regretfully had to decline.)

Lord only knows how my daughter will humiliate herself when she enters the dreaded teenage years.  Like Mom, I’ll just laugh and close my eyes.