Please, Hide All Scissors

I’m a bad mother. I should really know better, and I apologized to my kids profusely after the fact, but the fact still remains: I messed up. Badly.

Fact number one: my boys are toddlers. One is almost five, the other almost two. Under no stretch of the imagination should I expect stillness for a prolonged period of time from either of them. In my defense, I just wanted to trim a little bit around the ears. You know, tidy up their hair until I managed to get them an appointment somewhere. That’s all. I mean, they’ve needed haircuts for at least two weeks now, and I haven’t managed to find the time to take them in.

So I started with the little one. Actually, I intended to cut only his hair (and not his brother’s), and while he was sitting on the floor in the hallway upstairs in a t-shirt and diaper, his brother read him a story. And when he grew impatient, I got my mom on speakerphone to chat with him. The nice thing is that his hair looked so bad before that I really couldn’t mess it up too badly. Or so I thought.

I finally gave up and was ready to give the boys a bath. But then, my elder son said it was his turn. Fine, I thought, I’ll trim around the ears and get rid of what’s looking like a tail.

Good stories are made up of dramatic scenes. Memories are made of photographs, physical or mental, which remind you of particular moments. And so now, forever, I will picture my son sitting cross-legged in his undershirt and underwear, head tilted downward, his right hand above his head holding a lock of his hair, asking me to shorten it a bit on top.

I should have said no. A good mother says no to her kids every once in a while: set limits, teach boundaries, and prevent bad things from happening.

But a bad thing did happen. Again. I trimmed, and trimmed. I’ve watched my kids get haircut after haircut. I’ve gotten plenty of haircuts through the years. But over-confidence really doesn’t become me.

Fact number two: Watching haircuts and giving haircuts are nowhere near close to the same thing. I don’t think I can stress this enough to those of you out there who ever consider cutting anyone’s hair without training.

I apologized to my boys for giving them bad haircuts (let me reiterate that I gave not one, but TWO bad haircuts). And my elder one, the only one who actually had a clue what I was talking about, reassured me, telling me “it’s okay” and, looking in the mirror, said, “it’s not a bad haircut.” And one of the two stories he picked out tonight was ‘I Love You So’ because “I love you so much, Mommy.” All this, of course, made me feel much, much worse.

So now, on President’s Day, I will find a hair salon that is open (because my usual one is closed on Monday and I can’t bear to send him to school Tuesday looking like that) and I will take both my kids and make up for the horrible crime I committed against my children. (I wonder if this blog entry would turn up on a Google search of child abuse or violence against children, what with all the metaphors I’m using) But before I go, I will have to take a picture – not to embarrass them in the future, but to remind me never EVER to attempt to do this again.

Fact number three: I have had my fair share of bad haircuts. I’ve had long hair, short hair, super-short hair that I spiked (using Close Up toothpaste as the only styling product that would hold up – and by adding just a touch of water halfway through the day, the hold would last for ten hours), and countless perms. I went to Fantastic Sam’s for years, figuring that a bad haircut will grow out eventually. And they did. And between cuts, I would trim my own bangs. But finally, I learned (until today, evidently) that this is one of the reasons money exists. Hair is image. And saving money on something that so affects your identity (whether you’d like to admit it or not) is just plain foolish.

After grad school, I moved to Michigan and, after a successful interview, got a job. I decided to get a haircut before my first day of work. I had heard of the Welcome Wagon, but never thought it really existed (at least not in this day and age). Well, we got a basket that included a coupon for a free haircut. I decided to try it out. Friday afternoon I went to the place (I forget the name) and presented my coupon. At the time, I sported the “Friends” cut, the hairstyle of both Rachel and Monica during the early seasons of the show. That’s what I asked for: a layer on top that curled under and a lower layer that flipped out. Well, this happened to be the first day out of the academy for my stylist, and I went home with two layers, the top of which resembled an overturned bowl that only looked good with a baseball cap on top of it.

On Saturday, I went to a more expensive salon, where Marcia saved my hair and my self-image. She admitted later that she was afraid when I took my cap off that my hair was styled like that intentionally, and was relieved to hear me ask to fix it. And on Monday, I started my new job, self-respect intact.

So now, I only go to reputable salons to get all my hair treatments done, be that cut, color, or an updo for a fancy party. Not being able to get in for an appointment on the same day – or not being seen on a first come first serve basis – are considered admirable qualities in a salon. And with few exceptions, the salon should not be located with a mall, and should never be associated with a department store (though I will confess that I have never actually been to a department store hair department and may be judging unfairly).

So after a lifetime of bad decisions, I’ve obviously learned. And with my young children completely dependent on me for their wellbeing, I consider it a breach of trust, an abuse of power, to have subjected them to this bad judgment of mine. Common sense flittered away tonight, out of sight, and left behind two kids who are cute enough to still look cute despite me.

Sure, my elder son likes wearing a black and white horizontal striped t-shirt with his blue and white vertical striped jeans so that he can “look like a zebra,” and his fashion sense seems to be that ever-elusive sixth, or maybe seventh, sense. But letting him go out in public in a crazy ensemble of his creation is encouraging self-expression. Making him sport a bad haircut that I gave him is unnecessary cruelty.

I'd like to say this made me feel better, getting this out of my system, but the truth is, when they wake up in the morning, they're going to still have these haircuts regardless of how I feel. I only hope my husband gets up and leaves the house before they wake up (or we get out before he wakes up) so I don't have to hear it (I'm not sure if he'll express disappointment, anger, or jokes; I guess it depends on when he wakes up and if I can beat him to the punch).