Wiggy Hugs


It is said we need 4 hugs per day for survival, 8 per day for maintenance and 12 hugs per day for growth.

I love hugs. I love giving them and receiving them. I love hugs as the expression of caring and connection. I love them as reassurance and encouragement. I love hugs as greetings and goodbyes, as the absorptive tissues of sorrow and the exclamation points of joy and excitement.

But when I lost my hair and donned a wig my hugs turned wiggy too. ‘Wiggy’, has two meanings. The slang term means: excited, eccentric, crazy. The rarer usage of wiggy is: pompously formal.

When I wore that wig, hugs became crazy and took on the degree of concentration required to navigate an obstacle course. Was the person I was hugging wearing glasses or anything on their ears that might get caught in the fibers of my wig? Did their clothing – hats, collars, pose any threat? What danger lay in wait from a benign piece of jewelry? Was my overheated head dripping sweat?

If someone came up behind me while I was sitting in a chair, looking up and back over my shoulder to see who it was pushed the wig up and formed a large mound on top of my head. It looked as though I’d magically transformed the wig into the teased bubble style of the ‘60s. Worse yet, it would start to slip off sideways and I’d smack the top of my head to catch the fall and ram it back into place.

I became hypervigilantly protective of my movements. My hugs became stiff and formal. It was a Really Bad Case of Wiggy Hugs. People asked: “What’s happened to you? Are you alright?”

I worked at a retirement home and worried that a bald head might be offensive or stressful to the residents.

“No,” I finally wailed. “I’m not alright. I’ve lost my hair and I’m wearing a wig and the stupid thing gets caught on everything and drags around sideways on my head. I constantly have to check if it’s on straight and I’m getting very hug deprived and crabby - it’s driving me crazy.”

After a moment of startled silence, one resident shuffled up to me with her walker and whispered in my ear: “Then take the darn thing off!” She was hard of hearing and didn’t realize her whisper was quite loud. I looked around. The rest of the women were sagely nodding their heads in agreement.

Isn’t it something how the people we are so worried about offending are the most often the very ones who’d rather have real hugs than fake hair?