It began with the hair at the nape of my neck.

I don’t actually typify myself as a control freak. I can’t say how other people see me. But for sure, I like order. When I look back on my life, it’s easy to see that I always have preferred order. Even as a teenager when Mom complained about the messiness of my room, it was an organized messiness. I knew where every single little thing was. Well, at least I did until, in a fit of passive aggressive aggravation, she threw every single little thing all over the backyard. There were a few things, jewelry items mostly and some achievement pins, that I never did find.

I don’t always do well in the moment when things start to come apart; when chaos asserts its ugly little head. But I eventually find my way back to equilibrium. I’m resilient. When I look back on my life, I see that I have always been that way also.

But there are some things that tend to vex me from time to time no matter how I might try to change the way I think about them. One of them is my hair.

I like my hair to be neat and tidy. I should say, really, that I used to. It’s an ongoing process.

For most of my life, my hair was perfectly straight. It hung neatly and predictably no matter what length it was. I could rely on it to be what I expected it to be.

Somewhere in my late fifties, that all started to change. There was a curl in the hair at the nape of my neck. Because I was wearing it quite short … what they now call a pixie cut … the curl was a problem. I cut my own hair and the curl made getting the hair at my nape neat and tidy almost impossible.

Then at age 65 I had a major health problem. A horse had tried to kill me and I spent three weeks in the hospital getting anticoagulant shots every day. There are five factors that contribute to hair loss that are not genetic:  trauma (had that), stress (had that), major surgery (had that), malnutrition (developed that) and certain drugs (like anticoagulants). So more than half my hair fell out and most of it never grew back in.

But more significantly, the hair I still had started growing out curly. Not neatly curly. Randomly curly. In patches and weird directions. Think multiple cow licks.

The whole thing was a disordered and unruly mess.

And then my eyebrows got in on the action.

It has all made me look at my life differently. You might say, shoot, it’s only hair. And that would be true. But it goes to the root of the problem. It’s about how you see yourself and how others see you. Or how you think they see you. Hair is a big part of that. Just ask any man or woman who spends more than five minutes getting their hair ready for the day.

Unruly hair isn’t really chaotic. Embracing chaos is more of a metaphor for letting go of expectations. But the title is what came into my mind when I first had the feeling that I might finally be making peace with all the disorder in my life.

And yet, I still have some trouble when Bernd puts something uniquely “mine” back in the wrong place and I can’t find it immediately. I get bothered on an emotional level. Shades, I’m sorry to say, of my mother.

There is still work to be done. There will probably always be work to be done. But hey, I’m coming close to making peace with the hair on my head. So that’s something.

Well, maybe except for my eyebrows.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock and It’s All You Boo, respectively.