While the stylist clips and colors, a remarkable exchange occurs, more intimate than many pillow talks.

As the sign says in my own stylist's salon (Basil's): "What happens in the salon stays in the salon.

So it makes sense that it was in a chair at Mitchell's Hair Salon at North Hills, on the Tuesday before Mother's Day, that Claire Meyerhoff revealed a secret she'd been carrying around for years:

"I hate Mother's Day."

Remarkably, her hairdresser, Janice Pilarczyk, had a confession of her own: She hates Mother's Day, too.

The reason: Both women had been deeply affected by the deaths of their own mothers. So even though these two are mothers themselves, when it comes to Mother's Day, neither feels much like celebrating.

"People tell you, 'Well, you have kids, you're a mother yourself,' " said Meyerhoff, rolling her eyes a bit. "They say, 'Now it's about you.' "

"You never get too old to miss your mother," Pilarczyk said.

So on that Tuesday before Mother's Day last year, Meyerhoff and Pilarczyk commiserated -- and formulated a plan.

They had just been discussing a video Meyerhoff had been working on, introducing potential donors to the Ronald McDonald House in Durham.

In the pro bono filming, Meyerhoff had discovered that in telling the stories of sick children, she was also telling the story of mothers. Mothers living through the nightmare of watching a child go through treatment for a serious, perhaps terminal, disease.

Meyerhoff, sitting in her protective plastic cape with her hair spiked in pieces of aluminum foil, wished aloud that she and Pilarczyk could do something for those women on Mother's Day.

How about haircuts? she asked.

How about this Sunday? Pilarczyk countered.

So began the first annual Ronald McDonald House Mother's Day haircuts.

These are not fundraising cuts. They're professional styles for women living at the Durham Ronald McDonald House -- women who have neither the time nor the money to be thinking about haircuts and highlights. Much less Mother's Day.

This year, Pilarczyk's daughter Hallie is assisting as part of a two-year project at Leesville Road High School.

Pilarczyk is also trying to persuade other Mitchell's hair salons -- locally and nationwide -- to make this a signature project at Ronald McDonald Houses in every community that boasts one.

"We went in thinking about our own sorrows and met these amazing mothers and kids," Pilarczyk said. "It helped them; it helped us."

Last year in Durham, even the mothers who didn't want or need a cut gathered around to shoot the breeze and take advantage of a really great hairdresser's secret weapon.

Not highlights or lowlights. Not sculpting gel or rosemary-mint conditioner.

It's called in-the-chair therapy. Let the confessions -- and the cuts -- begin.