i’ve had a love-hate relationship with my hair for a really long time. It’s fine and curly and has about ten cowlicks in it. When I’ve got a good cut, it’s pretty manageable, but when I don’t, it seems like all hell breaks loose on top of my head, and there’s no taming it. And more often than not, I don’t have a good cut.

Oh, things usually start out fine. The first couple of times I go to see someone, I’m usually pretty thrilled with what they’ve done. I come out with shiny, tamed locks, tresses that perfectly frame my face. They round-brush it into submission, and I want to sleep on my face for three days so I can keep it.

Inevitably, it has to be washed. And then my hair seems to unleash its unholy powers, and my relationship with a new-found god or goddess seems to fall apart. They give me advice about what kind of brush to buy, they sell me goo, and then when I ask them to help me out here, and do I have to straighten it every single day, they say “of course not,” and scrunch and diffuse me until I look like a refugee from the 80s.

This time around, I’ve decided to get the agony over with on the first visit. I “broke in” a new stylist a couple of months ago, after a disastrously expensive experiment with color made me want to kill the previous one, and so far it’s working out. She actually wrinkled up her nose when I said the word “scrunch”. And she convinced me to ditch the round brush and buy an iron. And here, my friends, is where all the difference begins.

I always used to laugh at pictures of Jennifer Aniston and think “she irons her hair, who does that?” Man. It has made my life so much easier. I straighten it out, and that’s it. It’s good for three days, give or take. I still love the curly, but this is a nice change.

I just can’t believe it took me 20 years to discover this.

I remember getting my first real “styled” cut, when I was around fourteen. Until then, I’d had your usual little-girl long hair – it reached my bum at one point, and my mom would braid it at night so it didn’t get tangled. I did it in pigtails, ponytails, you name it. I loved my long hair. Then the 80s came along, with mousse and volume, and changed everything. All my friends had big bangs (bigger than usual – it was Saskatchewan) and layers. I kept up with the long locks, and then one day, in the eighth grade, I decided to hack them all off. The stylist? A big fat guy named Chuck, who looked more like he’d spend his days fixing cars than fixing hair. He layered, finessed, moussed and gelled, and I left the salon with a helmet of hair worthy of any teenager growing up in the 80s. Throw in some big earrings and a pink sweater, and my school picture that year is emblematic of the decade.

Ever since then, it’s been a struggle. I think the only time it hasn’t been was when I tried a pixie cut, and my hair was only an inch long. I kind of loved that cut at the time, but when I see pictures of myself now – I was at my heavest – I don’t think I look particularly hot. Two girls in my office told me they hacked all their hair off because they thought I looked so good with an extremely short cut. I wonder if they cursed as much as I did when they realized they had to cut it every three weeks.

Previous to that, there was The Accidental Mullet. I went in for a little layering here, a little texturing there, and left with one of the worst atrocities ever witnessed by the human scalp. It was awful. I remember wandering around the mall afterward, looking for a hat. But worst of all, I remember everyone at work telling me I looked like David Cassidy – a true blow to the feminine ego. If I had to look like a member of the Partridge Family, why not Shirley Jones?

Luckily, things have never been that bad since. Sure, I’ve had some ragged cuts, some that look terrible after a week or two, but never anything as bad as that mullet. Which, I suppose, is something to be thankful for. Looking a litle matronly now and then is never as bad as looking like a male sitcom star from the 70s.

But now, since my recent Iron Awakening, I’ve come to realize that having one fewer thing in life to worry about is something to be very pleased about. And if that one thing is my hair, then so be it. Shallow? Sure. But I’ll take what I can get. And if what I can get is out of bed without wishing I could put a hat on or, even worse, shave my head, then that’s fine with me.