On hair, and email addresses

The past three weeks have brought some changes, and not just in the back-to-teaching and back-to-lessons-full-time type of changes.

Three weeks ago, after approximately four years of growing it, I got my hair cut. Eighteeen inches were taken off. My waist-long hair is now shoulder-length and even wavier.

Now, haircuts usually don't signify that much change. For me, however, the last time I had gotten my hair cut was with my mom. It was September or October of 2009, and we did a girls' day out type of event. She was still 'healthy' then, we had no clue that just a few weeks later she would be unable to drive, and a patient of CancerCare.

That random saturday afternoon was the last girls' day out we had.

For almost two years, I had been saying that I would get my hair cut, must have wrote it into my schedule at least fifty times. But it didn't happen. I had become very emotionally attached to my hair, and not just the hair itself, but the life it represented. A life where I had two parents, where I didn't know the trauma of cancer, or extended grief. Being a person who doesn't always deal with change well to begin with, and having that emotional attachment meant that...the hair didn't get cut for four years!

Cutting my hair was a sort of moving on. And today, while going through my email contacts to find some that could be deleted or revised, I found that I still had my mom's work email as a contact. I hadn't realized it, to be fully honest. Today, my mom's work email was deleted from my email contacts.

Bit by bit, my old life-that of the little girl, basically-is ending. It isn't easy going through these changes at times. Her birthday was this past friday, September 20th, and she should have been 57. In just a few days, we hit the day that she entered the hospital for the last time. And November 2nd is creeping up faster than I would like.

Change happens.