Parent Moments: A Hair-Raising Haircut
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"I want to grow my hair -- long," Henry announced the summer he turned 7.
"How long?" I asked, surprised at this sudden proclamation.
"Till I can't see my eyebrows. I don't like them."
Outside of occasionally exiling Bob the Builder and Barney from his T-shirts (they are sooo 4 year old), Henry hadn't shown any concern for his appearance before. Pants on, shirt on, good to go. But his father and I tried to nurture this latest step toward adulthood and gave Henry the OK to let it grow. We even bought him a brush for taming his new mane.
But after several weeks, just as school started, Henry began to look a bit feral. His hair, a beautiful brown with golden highlights, didn't grow out neatly. Instead, in raised-by-wolves fashion, it was always tangled or standing up in straight tufts. Henry loved it.
"Don't you think it's time for a cut?" I asked eagerly after two months of unchecked hair growth.
"Nope," he replied with a smile.
"But it's way past your eyebrows already. We can barely see your eyes."
We couldn't, and I wasn't sure he could see out. In fact, it seemed he couldn't hear that great either, as he began adopting a wild-boy persona to match his unruly hair.
A couple of weeks later, when his hair was so long and unmanageable that it thwarted any attempts to make it neater, I insisted on a cut. He argued vehemently until I changed my tactics and downgraded it to a "trim."
"You've got to work us in," I pleaded with the receptionist at our local salon. I took the first opening they had and asked my mother to bring Henry to his appointment. On trim day, I met them at the salon about 15 minutes into the cut.
Henry was already seated in front of a mirror, but when I saw him, I did a double take. Who was this boy? The stylist had combed his hair into an angular part and clipped 3 large pink plastic hair clips to hold up the different sections. The stylist smiled at me distractedly as I came in and went on cutting Henry's hair. When she was finished, the front of his hair was trimmed neatly, but the back was strangely long -- like a shapeless, lackluster mullet. Back home, and with Henry safely out of earshot, my mother blurted out what I had been thinking but had been terrified to say: "She thought he was a girl!"
My son Henry, who had been wearing Converse All-Star sneakers and an orange shirt with a skateboard on it, had been mistaken for a miss.
"But his name is Henry!" I cried.
"She didn't listen to his name."
It explained everything -- the strange cut was a girls' hairstyle, not a malformed mullet. And that was why she had used pink hair clips.
The next day, I brought Henry back to the salon and another stylist "fixed" what we told him were some "missed hair pieces in the back." After the other stylist lopped off the "girl'' coif from the back, I breathed a sigh of relief.
As bad as this sounds, I secretly hoped that this case of mistaken identity might deter Henry from wanting such long hair, but it didn't. He continued to insist on growing it long and we let him (swearing, of course, to never return to that salon).
But as any mother of an elementary school child knows, long hair is a lint magnet. One evening, while I combed his hair after a shower, I saw something dart along his scalp. Lice. My hands shook as I poured olive oil onto his hair. Henry had to wear a purple plastic shower cap with the only bandana we could find -- pink -- wrapped around the outside to prevent the oil from staining his sheets. It took six days of nitpicking, and a good, short haircut, to be lice-free. Months later, I still flinched whenever Henry went to scratch his head.
Today we've compromised on "medium" hair for Henry, and we managed to escape the last lice outbreak at his school. But I still miss our pre-wild-boy Henry -- the one whose hair length was determined by my husband and me. As in so many parenting matters, my control was suddenly muted, yet I still have my hand in: Just like his breakfast each morning, I provide the milk and the box of cereal, but now he pours. And Henry has learned and gracefully accepted that with personal responsibilities there are certain risks -- being mistaken for a girl and providing a nice home for lice -- that are all part of the surprises along the way of growing up.
What's the worst hair moment you've had with your child?
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