For as long as I can remember, my mother was a woman of unwavering routines. She believed that predictability wasn’t boring; it was a necessary framework that kept the chaos of the unpredictable world at bay.
Out of all her weekly rituals, none was more sacred to her than her Friday morning hair appointment.
For thirty straight years, rain or shine, sickness or health, she sat in the exact same salon chair, at nine o’clock sharp, with the exact same stylist. It was a standing appointment that outlasted three of her cars, multiple presidents, and even her own marriage.
Her stylist, a warm, loud-laughing woman named Renee, wasn’t just the person who colored her roots and set her curls. Over three decades, Renee became my mother’s confidante, her sounding board, and arguably her closest friend outside of our immediate family. I grew up knowing that Friday mornings were off-limits.
If I was home sick from school on a Friday, I was dragged to the salon with a coloring book and told to sit quietly under the spare hood dryers while my mother and Renee gossiped, debated, and solved the world’s problems over the hum of the blowdryers.
When Mama passed away last June after a painfully brief battle with an illness we didn’t catch in time, a heavy fog settled over my life. The grief was entirely paralyzing. I was thrust into the role of executor, forced to navigate a maze of probate lawyers, life insurance policies, and the heartbreaking task of boxing up a house that still smelled like her perfume.
I canceled her credit cards, shut off her utilities, and stopped her mail. I did everything I was supposed to do, methodically checking off the terrible boxes of death.
But out of all those painful tasks, calling the salon was the one thing I simply could not bring myself to do.
Every Thursday night, I would look at the clock and think, I need to call Renee tomorrow morning before nine. And every Friday morning, I would sit at my kitchen table, staring at my phone, completely unable to dial the number. Canceling the cable felt like administrative work.
Canceling the Friday morning hair appointment felt like I was permanently erasing my mother from the world. It felt like an absolute, final goodbye that I wasn’t ready to give. I kept meaning to call, and I kept not doing it. A month turned into six months.
Six months turned into a year. For fifty-two weeks, my mother was a ghost who missed her appointment. Yesterday, something finally broke inside of me. I woke up, looked at the calendar, and realized it was Friday. It had been exactly one year and one week since she died.
I realized how deeply unfair it was to Renee and the salon. They were running a business, and I had been holding a prime morning slot hostage out of pure emotional cowardice.
