Find Your Fancy Hair.

Confession: I bought a curling iron.

It's one of those sleek new kinds without a clip. I think the word is tourmaline? Anyway, I use it. More than I thought I would. If I have time before a dinner out or an event, I plug it in and twirl my hair around and around that long black tube. In the beginning, I burned myself almost every time, but not recently. I've gotten pretty good.

I don't just use it for nights out though. Sometimes, in the morning, I sneak into my bathroom and do it, corralling my often-dirty hair into some kind of coiffure. My friend Heather calls it fancy hair, as in You have fancy hair today! And I like this. The idea of this. The idea of fancy hair.

Why would I do my hair to take the kids to school and park at a coffee shop to write? Because. Because life does not have to be blah. Because I do not have to look like an over-tired mom/writer/questioner-of-everything all the time. No. Sometimes, I can go for it. Just because I feel like it. Just because I want to (or need to) say to the world, to myself: Hey, I've still got it. The glamor (glamour?) isn't all gone.

I took the picture above recently. Little Girl and I had just dropped her big sisters at school and we waited outside for Nanny to come and scoop up my babe so I could scurry off to write. I took out my phone and I held it up and I made the face, the face that says hey there, don't count me out, and my baby? She smiled. Because she was there in my arms, with me, and maybe because I felt good and happy that morning.

Motherhood? Adulthood? Life? They don't need to be somber stories. We can glam it up from time to time. It's up to us, isn't it?

Advice du jour: Find your fancy hair.

Do you think that parenthood/adulthood can be fancy and fabulous? Do you ever get dolled up just because? Have you become more or less concerned with your physical appearance recently? Glamor or Glamour?