My Mother's Hair Combs

Donating My Mother’s Hair Combs: On Reconsidering

I rummage through the cardboard give-away box 

to retrieve the tortoise shell hair combs 

with bronze grape vines wrapped 

above the chipping plastic teeth.

I cannot give them away. 

Memory sharp as finishing shears:

twenty years ago, my mother styling her hair.

She was in her forties. I’d just grown breasts and

sat on a dusty bathroom stool, watching her 

pull her rust-colored, just-dyed bangs back

with her prize hair combs that we bought together. 

She looked in the mirror, 

angled them thirty degrees from her ears, 

pinned them at her temples.  “What do you think?” 

I touched the cup of her curls. “I love them.”

Now, I pluck the hair combs from the donation pile,

place them on an altar in the woods.

I set them on top of each other, like praying hands.

I bow to the hemlock stump and remember 

the color of her hair dye: red ash.

REFLECTION:

My mother had beautiful hair. Before she lost it to chemo when she was 44, she wore it curly and long. She colored it different shades of brown—sometimes hickory, sometimes chestnut, sometimes ash. I liked it best when the brown had a red tint to it. In the sun, the strands shined like newly minted pennies.

Throughout my childhood, I remember sitting by the sink next to her, watching her rubber-gloved hands massage the color into her roots. She would set the white kitchen timer for thirty minutes to let it set and we would tell stories while we waited. Sometimes she let me rub away the dye to see if her hair had taken the color. After she showered and blow dried it, we would ohh and ahh in the bathroom mirror. I always thought she looked like a Madonna, her a hair a halo.

We loved this ritual. 

Then—and every morning—she would style her hair with small, plastic combs. She clipped her long bangs up and out of her face with them. They framed her small, round face, and gave her an extra inch of height. She almost never used hair elastics. Just combs. The two-inch long, tortoise shell, utilitarian combs. There was always a set or two next on the TV stand, or her bedside table, or the kitchen counter. She had a small, clay dish in the bathroom for this exact function—to house her hair combs.

On special nights when she would go out with my father, or go to dinner, or attend an event, she wore her “dressy combs.” They had bronze grapevines wrapped around the top of them—the bundles of grapes the size of my pinky nail. We had picked them out together, at her favorite gift shop. I must have been eight or so, and I remember her asking the clerk to take them out of the glass display case.

“Can I see those?” she asked, pointing.

The clerk handed her the combs, the small white tag dangling below them.

Instantly, I loved them. They were so adorned, so unlike her usual sets. The tiny, metal grapes shimmered under the store lights.

“Let’s get them,” I said, wide-eyed. “They’re so fancy.”

She turned the tag over and swallowed. “A different time, sweetie.” They were expensive, indulgent even.

But I could tell she loved them by the way she turned them over and over in the palm of her hand before she set them down on the counter. We left the store without buying them, but that night I convinced my father to go back and get them for her. That she—we, in retrospect—needed them.

*

After my mother died, my father and I boxed up all her jewelry and accessories. It was too painful to go through them, or to look at them, and certainly to part with them. I knew they were just accouterments, but they also seemed like extensions of her—small remnants of a half-life.

Just a few weeks ago—fifteen years after her death—I found the box in the far corner of the attic. I was decluttering. I knew the box was there, but I also knew how difficult it would be to go through. I’ve been avoiding it for a decade and a half.

I sat down on the plywood floor and opened the top. Hundreds of thousands of pieces of jewelry sat inside the storage container. My mother was a kindergarten teacher famous for her earrings, pins, and hair clips: she had something to match every occasion: angels, ladybugs, leprechauns, snowflakes, Celtic crosses, apples, Easter bunnies, moons, Hershey kisses, rainbows—you name it. Her five-year-old students knew what they would learn about each day based on what accessories she wore. 

My father had organized everything before we packed it away, so I went though the holiday accessories, and Kindergarten trimmings, and costume jewelry quickly. I was prepared for this level of departure: no one in my family, including me, wanted these pieces.

I sorted her fine jewelry into a small leather box to save.

I picked a few silly necklaces give my daughter.

I debated the pin collection but decided they were so outdated no one would wear them. 

I reached for the last clear container—the one my father had labeled, “Hair Combs.” I picked it up, turned it over in my hand, and popped the top off. 

In the bottom sat the tortoise shell combs with the grape leaves wrapped around the top. 

There’s always one thing that bowls you over. Takes your breath away.

I turned the combs over and over in my palm, the way my mother had done at the gift store. They were smaller than her everyday combs. One of the teeth was broken off an end. But the grapes had not tarnished. Even in the attic light, they gleamed.

I could almost smell my mother’s hair after she dyed it—that acrid, hair salon, metallic smell. And her powdery Jean Natte spritzer that she sprayed on her torso after a shower. I could hear the hairdryer and the sound of the hair combs scratching against her scalp as she placed them. I could feel the soft tips of her curls. I could see her smiling in the hand mirror she held up to see the back of her hair, where the hair combs sat. 

I could taste my longing. 

With all my senses, I ached for her. 

I did not know what to do with the hair combs. I knew I would never wear them, but I did not want anyone else to, either. I told myself that I was beyond needing tangible objects to connect with my mother—that this was a matter of “spiritual maturity.” Of course I should give them away. I was not in a place of holding on to things to assure the memories didn’t vanish. They were just clutter at this stage. After much debating, I put them in the donation pile.  

But the next morning I woke with a start. I could not let them go to Goodwill. These hair combs, they were still so alive to me that, even if I never did anything with them, I could not cast them away. There were less a leftover accessory and more an extension of my mother’s beauty—her life. Her legacy. 

Sometimes it is too painful to re-lose someone, piece by particular piece.

I put on my slippers and went to the trunk of the car before dawn. I rummaged through cardboard box and plucked the combs out. I walked straight into the woods, to a small altar on a knoll behind my house. They needed to be honored. To be grieved. 

On a thin slab of hemlock trunk, I placed the two combs on top of each other. I took a deep breath, letting the memories and smells, nostalgia and sadness, resistance and acceptance flood over me. I sobbed. I pumped my fist against the dark, wet Earth. I howled into the morning. I never wanted my mother to die. I never, ever wanted to find her grape leaf hair combs in a box in my attic after years and years of having no mother. 

And yet, so it is. “Here we are,” my mother used to say.

Like each wave of my mother’s hair, these sorrow-filled moments come back, often prompted by something external, and then they leave. They are just visitors if I allow them. Even more, they are gifts, connecting me back to lost aspects of my own life.

Alone in the woods, I cried until I felt dry and brittle. When I was finished, I picked up the combs and put them in my hair, angled just above my ear, the way my mother used to do. I wore them down the forest path, into the house, up the stairs, and into my office.

I stood in front of the mirror, considering. I loved those hair combs—the connection and intimacy they represented in our relationship. They reminded me that there are still aspects of my mother I can choose to embody. That it is the choosing of a particular thing—rather than the need to cling to everything—that brings a sense of freedom through curation. And curation, when it comes to parting with a beloved one’s things, connects us to the essence of the experience or memory that we wish to save. It does not tether us. It frees us.

I took the grapevine combs out of my hair. I turned them over and over in the palm of my hand.

And then, I kept them.