Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

When I was three, I had long, silky hair which hung down my back in luxurious curls. It was a color my dad told me was “cow-eyed brown.” At the time I thought it was a compliment. (Not so sure about that now that I know something about cows?) Then I caught a nasty virus called impetigo, and the doc made my mother cut my hair to within an inch or two of my scalp so he could administer some kind of medicinal cream to the scabbed over blisters covering my head. Though I don’t remember the event, I’m pretty sure it was traumatizing since I haven’t been able to do a thing with my hair since.

That, and I had kids. The girls’ hair was manageable. I just let their hair grow and kept it in ponytails, but the boys were an entirely different matter. My plan was to buy a set of clippers and save a fortune by avoiding the barbershop. I was confident two-year-olds didn’t need a professional to keep them looking sharp.

The first time I used my new tools, I sat Son #1 on a dining room chair outside on our deck, wrapped a plastic cloth around his neck, and handed him a sucker. It didn’t occur to me that “sticky” was a magnet for loose hair until I turned the clippers on and put them within an inch of his throat. He screamed in terror, jerking his whole body violently in an attempt to escape the menacing vibration. One of his flailing arms knocked my hand. The clippers jumped, ripping a long swatch of hair out of the back of his head—every fiber of which immediately stuck to the sucker. I tried to pry the mess loose from his hand, intending to wash it off. He kicked me, lost his balance, and fell off the stool, cutting open his forehead. That was the easy part.

Getting him cleaned off and back on the stool required the involvement of my husband, who held him down and threatened him with a nap if he didn’t calm down. The two-year-old was way more determined than either of his parents. He howled and kicked every time I put that plastic cover cloth around his neck. We never even got to the actual cutting part. After about four tries with equally alarming results, I gave in and decided the barber was my friend. On the bright side, I owned a very nice set of clippers if the need should ever arise.

The Battle of the Hair faded into the background until several years later when my sister’s family came to visit. Sunday morning we cleaned-up the kids and walked the two blocks to the church together. Between us we had 14 children, so we took up a whole center row. (I’m assuming the Bishop was pleased with the attendance records we helped him set.)

Sometime during the morning, her son and at least two of my sons disappeared. Of course, we didn’t realize it because we were in an adult class and just relieved to let someone else deal with the kids for a while. When we gathered up the troops to head home, however, my sister squinted at her son. There was an odd aura around his head. Pulling him over to the natural light by the exit doors, she audibly gasped. My sons had dragged her son with them, sneaked out of church, zipped home, and dyed all their heads with raspberry jello. (Apparently, that was a “thing” at the middle school). My sons’ dark heads of hair didn’t show much change of color, so the dye on their heads was difficult to see. But her son was now a very nice strawberry blonde. (In case you want to know, jello doesn’t wash out easily.)

Then there was the day Son #1, always “a unique individual”, was elected Student Body President at the local high school. To celebrate, he had his buddies use my clippers to carve his initials–MPV–into the left side of his head and the high school initials—KHS–into the right side. He was 6’ 6’ and weighed about 160 pounds. The look on a tall, scrawny kid was less than appealing. (He loved it!) Fortunately, it grew out before graduation pictures. But his yearbook photo shows him hanging upside down from a gymnastics bar wearing his letter sweater and featuring a new, weird kind of bristly growth on both sides of his head.

Now half my sons are mostly bald, either by choice or by thinning hair. But that hasn’t deterred their enthusiasm for “original” styles. In November, they all grow outrageous facial whiskers which sort of compensates for what may have disappeared from the tops of their heads. Of course, they do it in honor of “Movember”—cancer treatment and eradication month—a purpose for which even a hair-shocked mother can approve.