You already know my guest today as the co-host of #iPPP and the writer at the Sunday Spill. Sarah is a fellow mom of four little ones, and wears many, many hats (wife, mom, photographer, doula, waterbirth expert, childbirth educator, writer). She’s the very inspirational blogger behind the self-portait a day project, in which she is personally taking a self-portrait every day for a year. She writes things that make me think, and laugh, and cry.

Sarah is smart, funny, cool and calm. I’m so happy to have her as an online friend (and hopefully, someday, and in-real-life friend, too). Thank you for taking time out to be here today, Sarah!

What’s this?

My hair stylist shut off the dryer and held out a much, much shorter chunk of hair underneath the long layers she’d just trimmed for me. What happened? I meant to ask you about it earlier when I was putting the dye on. So, breakage?

I looked at her in the mirror standing behind me. No… I began. No….. I cut it myself. I stammered. I had to. It’s kind of embarrassing. But. That shorter piece is the result from a mistake I made almost a year ago. Last April.

She stood looking at me. Wondering. Waiting for something further.

I had to cut it because…because I’d watched this You Tube video and I was all inspired to try a dread lock I hurried up and spit out. So I did. I tried one dread lock.

There. I’d said it. I waited for my hair stylist to laugh. I had plans to laugh it off as well if that was the case. But she didn’t. Instead, she nodded her head and waited for me to continue.

Actually, I said, I had plans to dread my whole head. But I wanted to try just one. Underneath. You know? In case it didn’t work out.

Well friends, I’ll snub out the lingering suspense and tell you it didn’t work out. No one liked that ratted up, knotted, waxed piece of my hair. My kids asked me what was up. My husband hated it. My younger brother (in his early twenties) saw my dread lock and was like, why? Why a dread lock Sarah? Can’t you just clip a feather into your hair instead? My own mother asked me if I was having a crisis. A crisis! Because of a dread lock. I believe she even referenced Britney Spears and the whole shaved head incident. Say wha?!

To be fair I understood a smidge where they were all coming from. A dread lock on a thirty year old caucasian woman rocking preschool pickup day to day is a little unexpected.

But I’m a believer that sometimes the unexpected things in life turn out to be fantastic. Beautiful and poetic even.

Sometimes however, the unexpected things, big or little, just fizzle. They flop. You pronounce them duds. And in the end I did pronounce my dread lock a dud. Not because of what my well-meaning family was saying, but rather because I grew tired of that lock. I just wanted to shampoo and brush my hair as I had before. In the end it came down to practicality.

But I want to let you know that the duds are alright too. Sometimes with one fell swoop of your scissors–you cut out the whole mess you made. You throw it in the garbage.

You wait for the regrowth, the chance to one day share your story, and laugh about it all then.

You can find Sarah at her blog, The Sunday Spill, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.