In March 2020, I stopped cutting my hair. Like many, I wasn’t about to risk a COVID infection for a trip to Floyd’s barbershop. Unlike many, however, I have yet to return to the barbershop chair. I am now 41, my hair falls halfway down my back, and I have almost no clue what to do with it.

I never intended to go four years without a haircut. I teach fourth grade. During year one of the pandemic, in the name of social distancing, our school halved class sizes and moved us into a gymnasium. Suddenly I had 13 students, polished wooden floors, and a regulation basketball net overhead. We ended each day with the Rocky theme song and a session shooting hoops.

If all 13 students made shots consecutively, I told them, I’d go home, cut my hair, and donate it. We graphed their collective progress as a math exercise. In year two of the pandemic, I made a similar deal with my new class. And the next. And again, this past year. You can guess my students’ accuracy from the length of my hair.

As my hair grew, however, I learned that although it had been with me for four decades, I really didn’t know it. I didn’t know how to care for it or style it. I didn’t know how to deal with the escapees that showed up in my shower drain, my keyboard, my headphones, my floor.

My first pandemic school picture day, I made an attempt at presentability with a fine-toothed travel comb I found at the bottom of a bathroom vanity. The result was a frizzy poof with the consistency of high-grade fairground cotton candy. We were in line when a student asked me,

“You’re getting your picture taken like that?”

“What should I do?” I replied.

“Put it up.”

If you flip to the faculty pages of our 2020-2021 yearbook, you will agree that I should have taken her advice.

Hair-care manuals abound. I know because I have borrowed all of them from the McArthur Public Library of Biddeford, Maine. But as a teacher, I know that humans learn best by observing others: parents, siblings, friends, siblings of friends. They teach us, through example and instruction, how to tie our shoes, how to talk to girls, how to roll a joint, and everything else that’s important about growing up.

Because long hair is an almost exclusively female trait in America, the cultural knowledge of caring for long hair is passed down almost exclusively between women. Four of my female students, in 2022, spent an hour every Wednesday in an American Girl Dolls after-school “enrichment” class where they made crafts and styled their dolls’ hair. At 10 years old, these girls had spent more time with doll hair than I’d spent on my real hair.

I arrived at middle age without knowing how to do something as simple as combing my hair without making tangles worse. How do I put my hair back without unsightly strands escaping the elastic? How to manage the frizz? What the hell am I supposed to do with the short wispy hairs sticking up every which way?

“Oh, those are called flyaways,” a friend’s sister told me.

“Fly-aways,” I repeated softly, as if learning a new language—which I was.

I learned how to dry my hair at age 40. I was at a Fourth of July party. A female friend was aghast—no other word can describe her precise facial expression—after I mimed the three-step post-shower process I’d practiced my entire life:

Bunch towel in hands
Place bunched towel on wet head
Rub towel as violently as possible

Turns out this is not the best way to dry long hair. This is the best way to damage long hair. The proper way to dry long hair requires the tender patience you might employ upon rescuing a litter of frightened newborn bunnies from a rainstorm. Pat gently. Squeeze ever-so-lightly with a soft towel. Allow plenty of time to air-dry. Blow-dry if you must, keeping the heat six to eight inches from the fur, to avoid overdried patches.

The French Revolution ushered in a wave of short hairdos with names like La Bastille and La Sacrifice and La Victime. The last featured a close shave to the nape of the neck, then a “shingling” of the hair up the back of the head. It mimicked the cut nobility received prior to being guillotined—hence “The Victim”—to provide the executioner with the best line of sight. The public often accompanied La Victime with a red ribbon tied around the neck—celebrating the destruction of the ruling class. All the popular styles during the French Revolution were short. Long hair was a sign of royalty. Leisure. Excess.

I get it: Long hair takes time. Investment. Practice. Product. Help.

After four years with long hair, I’ve learned a few things. Some activities are less enjoyable (pushups, middle-of-the-night pillow adjustments, walking with wind at my back, driving with the windows down, eating cereal) while other activities are more enjoyable (skateboarding, headbanging, pond hockey, imitating that scary girl from The Ring).

I still don’t know if there’s any grand significance to being a man in middle age with a head of long hair. Some days I see my hair as a symbol of confidence: look at me, unbothered by gender norms, unconcerned with social conventions, comfortable with who I am, grateful for the genetics that allow me to push out roots while I still can. Other days, I wonder if my hair is a blinking reminder of my insecurities: my age, my vanity, my masculinity, my privilege, my desire to be taken even a little bit seriously.

School picture day always seems to arrive a little bit sooner than the year before. By the next one, will I have my fly-aways under control? Will I even have long hair? I don’t know. But what I do know is that my long hair has taught me that, halfway through life, I’m still getting to know myself.