Bald and Tattooed

One summer a few years ago I went on a trip to Napa with girlfriends. It was relaxing, warm and I was full of wine. When I came back home to my husband, son and then 15-year-old daughter, everything seemed normal. My husband was working long hours on a show and the kids basically did whatever they wanted to do. They were both teenagers, so it wasn’t as if they were toddlers running amuck. My husband’s parenting style is quite a bit more relaxed than mine, making me the nag, the taskmaster and the bad cop. I sometimes wonder if he notices what they are doing at any given moment or if he just chooses to ignore it.

After being home for a day, I noticed that my daughter was wearing a beanie or had a hoodie up over her head while in the house. It seemed odd, but she was a teenager so I didn’t think much of it. On the second hoodie wearing day, I confronted her and asked to see her head. She pulled down the navy hood and showed me her shaved head… shaved head! I was shocked, but had to admit that she had a beautifully shaped round head and it didn’t look awful. My husband never noticed.

She was totally bald at birth and stayed that way for at least a year. Her head was perfect, pink and flawless. Tiny blond peach fuzz peaked through showing off her bright blue eyes. Bald was beautiful.

They were several girls in her crowd that had shaved their heads, so she was not the first to go bald.

She had already surprised us with a giant Buddha tattoo on her forearm at 14 years old as well as some small random designs on her legs and arms. MOM was on her calf and RICK, her dads name on her fingers. Guess we should be flattered that we were included in her body art. I encouraged her to stop and said, “you have years and years to mark up your beautiful body, just slow the hell down!” I told her about the guy I saw in my dermatologist office with bandages up and down his arms. This big manly man told me that getting a tattoo was painful, but getting them removed was a hundred times worse. I videotaped him and sent it to my daughter.

Her hair eventually grew out, but in her senior year of High School she shaved her head again. She said her hair bugged her and she couldn’t stand it. It didn’t look quite as good now that she was older, and I knew the growing out process would be brutal. Going bald 2 weeks before senior portraits was bad. But worse yet she tattooed my last name in script on the side of her head.