The offer was just too good for any minor under the age of 18 to refuse. Twelve CDs for just one penny! Then, every subsequent month, they send you one CD and, if you don’t like it, simply return it and they’ll refund your money? That seemed like a perfectly manageable membership to a seemingly benign club – until they kept sending CDs every other week and I had to ask my mom to help me cancel the membership and she got all angry at me because I was responsible for the return shipping and, having no money, Mom had to pay for it, cancel the membership for me, and there I was left having to wash dishes, empty trash barrels, and fold underwear and match socks from the laundry loads of whites for six weeks. “Let that be a lesson for you!”

Live and learn, they say. And most of the time I like thinking I’ve learned from past mistakes, only to twenty years later write out a check for $1 to receive ten posters of my choice and then receive one poster each month after which, if I didn’t like it, could ship back (at no charge this time) and the membership could be cancelled at any time. Sounded great until another poster arrived right away, followed by another, and soon I’m being billed $90 for five posters they sent me in that first month alone.

Nice job renewing your membership to the “too good to be true” club.

Just recently I renewed my membership to a different club that no woman ever wants to enter. Yet, for many of us at one point, the temptation is simply too great and we forge ahead trying our hand at do-it-yourself haircutting.

I have not only once, or twice, but thrice renewed my membership to the “I-cut-my-bangs-too-short” club. After I did so the first two times, I proclaimed, and I quote, “I will never try to cut my own bangs again.” Time passes, the hair grows back, and then one day once again I find myself with the same haircut I’ve had most of my life – a shoulder-length wavy bob that is for the most part all one length. And for the same reason that many people get a new tattoo or some body part pierced or an outrageous unnatural Easter egg hair color – boredom and perhaps a dollop of disquietude mid-life – I went for it.

It started when I approached the mirror with a front section of hair carved out above my face. I folded the hair over itself and asked my partner if he thought it would look cool if I cut my bangs “like this.” Sure, he said, likely assuming the question was hypothetical in nature because I probably wouldn’t go through with it. And, honestly, I wasn’t sure that I would. It wasn’t like I had forgotten the last time I cut my own bangs, an act that spawned a series of additional corrective self cuts to straighten them, thicken them, thin them, and re-straighten them again, all over the course of the ensuing month.

“You should just put the scissors down,” I kept thinking.

But just like the second time years ago when I stood there with that same section of hair slated for the scissors, I was possessed by an impulse I imagine as some oxymoronic state of brash hesitation and overconfident uncertainty. I held the hair to the scissors for some time with no sudden movements. But then, with a blink and a wince, I started snipping. The hair fell to the sink in a permanent state of detachment from my head.

“Whoa, wow!” said my partner, looking astonished. “It’s cool, right?” I asked, a little embarrassed, trying to sound casual while inwardly mortified at what I had done. “Yeah. It’s shocking. But I like it.”

At first I think liked it, but the next day I wished I could just wash it and somehow it would return to the state it was in before I cut it just a smidgeon too short.

I settled into the bangs, but with some of my friends it has become an ongoing joke, almost like the bangs had a life of their own. “How are the bangs?” one friend asks me every time we text or speak. “Two more weeks and they’ll be perfect,” I’d retort sounding confident. Yet on days when I hadn’t washed my hair – bangs up and puffy from sleeping side to side all night long – it was hard to believe what I was telling myself and others: “They’ll be perfect in just a couple weeks.”

I’ve vacillated between liking them and regretting them. Some days I am simply too busy to care either way, but when I see that friend on, perhaps, a third day of not washing my hair, my bangs as puffy as Betty Paige’s after a long hard day at the office, the joke subsists. Last weekend was the first time he referred to them as the “unfortunate bangs,” which had me both laughing hysterically in agreement while lamenting that lesson unlearned from years ago. But still, even today, after having said all that, I again took the scissors to my own hair to add in some layers to the side to soften the blunt edge of my unfortunate bangs.

Sigh … We live our imperfect lives and learn. Or, apparently, not! But to my relief, this time I managed to not completely wreck myself and avoided the addition of “unfortunate layers” to exacerbate the ongoing bangs joke.

If you do ever find yourself a member in this unfortunate club, just remember that the membership will expire “in just a couple more weeks,” too. But if you’re standing in front of that mirror with that front section of hair in your hand, put the scissors down now lest you be the next victim of a series of unfortunate bangs jokes.

This Imperfect Life

By Jean Perry