High Pony
The power of a hairstyle you can no longer pull off
The bodies of the college girls staggered me. Long sculpted legs, passing on my left. Smooth honey-colored skin, not a ding or divot visible anywhere, not on their arms or faces or thighs.
Maybe you would have lingered on their legs or chests, exposed in sports bras and extra-short racing shorts, as the girls strode up the hill together, breathing evenly and talking fast, conducting air with their hands. My gaze settled on something different, something thick and shiny that followed behind each girl, swinging side to side with muscularity and grace.
There’s a reason it’s called a ponytail, not a horsetail. No one wants a horsetail hanging off the back of her head. Ponies have thicker, fluffier tails than horses. Horsetails are long, but they aren’t known for fluffiness. Ponytails don’t age into horsetails, either, because as cowgirlmagazine.com is getting tired of telling us, ponies are not baby horses. They are a different kind of equine altogether.
My eldest daughter has a majestic, commanding ponytail. At 12, she is almost as tall as me, so I have to stand on the stone ledge at the base of our fireplace to get purchase on her dense mahogany mane when she asks me to put it in a pony before school. It is work to capture it all between my hands and brush it and lift it and pull it through a rubber band. Some mornings, I start sweating, standing on the fireplace ledge, grappling with all of that hair. I’m worried that I’ll miss the bus to work if I can’t get this done on the first or second try, worried that my daughter will get bored with my effort and shake me off — “Never mind, I’ll wear it down, Mom” — and slip out of my hands, back toward her bedroom and her books and her earbuds.
Other mornings, I manage to corral her hair into the style we both like, a high pony, cinched in a rubber band at the spot where the top of her skull starts to curve toward her spine. Squeezing all of that volume through the rubber band’s small opening is like forcing a wild river through a crack in a dam. The result is pure energy.
As we walk together, my daughter talks to me in movie quotes and snippets of conversations she’s had with her middle school friends. Her ponytail moves on its own behind her — a shining, flexing, fibrous muscle sprouting from the back of her head. She quotes from “Avengers: Endgame” and tells me the thing that her friend Aspen said and quotes from “Spider-Man: Homecoming” and tells me the thing that her friend Sylvia said, and I try to pay attention. But I can’t help but focus on her swinging ponytail, its golden tips drawing a huge semi-circle in the air behind her, left to right, back and forth.
A few months ago, I was sure I was losing my hair. It was coming out in bigger clumps in the shower. When I gathered it into a ponytail before a run, it felt like a handful of straw, short and brushy. I asked my stylist Molly — who at 31 has cascading barrel curls that shimmer under the salon lights —if she had noticed any thinning. She swallowed once before answering evenly, “Our hair does go through changes,” and my stomach seized up a little.
Molly sold me special thickening shampoo with a fake French name that cost $40. I browsed the Rogaine website but didn’t buy anything. I stopped flat-ironing my hair so much, and I vowed to stop washing it every morning. I thought about posting a wisecrack to Facebook about this new (to me) indignity of middle age but thought better of it. Without even thinking hard, I can list four women I know who lost all of their hair to chemotherapy. I bet you can, too. If you’ve reached your mid-40s and don’t know anyone who’s had cancer, you’re not lucky. You’re not paying attention.
My younger daughter’s pony is not as arcing or muscular as her sister’s, but it is equally glorious. From root to end, her light-brown hair is tinseled with gold from playing hours of soccer under the glaring summer sun. Watching my girls’ ponytails bounce and glisten, I feel a prick of envy. I think that they waste their ponies, unappreciative of their splendor, heedless of their expiration date. They often opt out of ponies entirely, high or low, to wear their hair loose and lazy on their shoulders.
If I had their hair, I would wear a high pony at all times. I would wear a high pony to client meetings and to the chiropractor, on the bus and in the car, to Starbucks and the grocery, to one daughter’s soccer game and the other’s school play. I would become an eccentric fixture in my neighborhood, known simply and proudly throughout Hillsdale — nay, throughout Southwest Portland — as That Lady Always with the High Pony.
Mostly, what I feel when I look at my girls’ ponytails is awe — and love. I feel something different toward the ponies that pass me when I am running.
Toward ponytails attached to lean-limbed college girls in sports bras and tiny shorts, I do not feel big-hearted and appreciative. I feel small and dumpy and mean. I am certain that these young women, like my daughters, take their ponies for granted. They decide to go for a run, grab all of their shiny, healthy hair into rubber bands on their way out the door, and never think twice about their ponies. As if big, bold, bushy ponytails are a birthright that will last forever, or at least as long as the college girls themselves. Oh, ladies. As if.
I wonder when I will start to see women like them not as arrogant, preening competitors, but like I see my daughters. I await the day when I will register the undimpled thighs and perky ponytails of college girls as features to admire, not covet; as parts of a past that is rightfully, naturally, over, and that wasn’t, in its insecurities and uncertainties, any better than the present. Already, I know the young women gliding past me uphill do not see me as competition. I know, because I used to be them: They don’t see me at all.
It turns out, even though my ponytail is a sparse shadow of its twenty-something self, I’m not actually losing my hair. I was donating blood to the Red Cross too frequently, because I am a saint, and that plus my running plus being in my mid-40s — the combo was stressing out my system, which reacted by shedding more hair than usual, or so my doctor concluded. So I dialed back the blood donations. I bought more of the expensive shampoo.
It took a couple of months, but my pony rebounded.
It remains more stubby than flowy; it will never be sufficiently long or thick to sculpt into a proper high pony. But as it’s regrown, I’ve grown to respect it. I’ve determined that “ponytail,” while perfectly descriptive, is also a misnomer. “Ponytail” sounds babyish, even though we all know by now — cowgirlmagazine.com does not want to have to say this again— ponies are not baby horses. And a tail is usually the end of something.
But my daughters’ ponytails, like the ponytails that prance and wave behind the college girls ascending past me, are not the end of anything. They are just beginning.
