Flashback #2
Don’t freak out,” says my mother down the phone, so of course it’s the first thing I do. She’s at home looking after the boys, but she’s not completely hysterical so I know they’re not hurt. Have they drawn all over my favourite Indian bedspread? Burnt the house down? Oh my God, I think, it’s the dog, she’s gone and lost the bloody puppy. She’s never liked it.
“Milo cut Iggy’s hair…” she starts tentatively. My scream can be heard around the entire building.
Once I stop convulsing long enough for my vision to focus, she emails me a photo. My heart drops to a position somewhere around my knees, which are weak. I actually cry. I’m aware that this is a ridiculous, melodramatic reaction to a child’s haircut. But you have to understand, it was really, really good hair. Honey-toned, perfect beachy waves down to his shoulders, with sun-bleached, natural balayage… It was the sort of hair grown-up women spend thousands of dollars to barely get close to. I mean, sure, it hung in his eyes in a way that I’m not completely sure wasn’t detrimental to his Lego-building… And, yes, it did turn into a nest of dreadlocks every night that took an unhealthy amount of industrial-strength detangler to remove… And, okay, there was a part of me that got annoyed at having to stand behind him whenever he had a go on those laughing clowns and motion silently to the carnie that he probably wouldn’t be into the plastic tiara prize… And, yeah, it had been disturbing me a bit lately that he’d developed this sort of Bieber-ish hair flick at three years old and that, when he got mad with a decision I’d made, the worst thing he could think of to say was, “Your hair is not beautiful, mummy!” But it was worth it.
All worth it. Because it was really good hair. And now it’s gone. I stare at the picture on my phone in stunned disbelief.
It’s a short-fringed mullet, cut straight across the forehead to a couple of centimetres behind his ears. There are three very clear massive chunks taken out of what’s left of the rest of it. They did it with craft scissors. I know immediately that there’s nothing we can do. We shave it off.
This is a clear case of pride cometh before a fall. My own hairdresser, the venerable Renya Xydis, herself the mother of two boys, had long warned me about kids hair. “Little boys shouldn’t be taught to be vain about their looks,” she’d say wisely. “Shave it off until high school. No nits.” But I could never bring myself to do it. (FYI, we haven’t had a case of nits in our house ever since I started putting a dab of rosemary essential oil behind their ears each morning. That was two years ago and my kids go to Steiner, so that’s saying something. Also comes with the added bonus of having them smell ever so faintly of delicious roast lamb.)
Maybe it’s a youngest child thing. I remember a friend telling me when I was pregnant the second time that the connection with your firstborn is powerful and intense, like a marriage, but your relationship with the second is sweeter and almost romantic, more like a love affair. It’s true. And you definitely want them to stay babies for longer. Iggy had never had a haircut, except for a fringe that I’d just spent the year desperately trying to grow out. “Just a few more months,” I’d think every time it fell in his eyes. “We’re on the home stretch now.” [Insert bitter grunt here.] And I held firm, even when my nanna tutted scornfully every time she glimpsed Iggy’s little head dripping wet from the heat over the Christmas holidays. “He wouldn’t be sweating like that if he had a short-back-and-sides,” she’d say. And I’d spend the rest of trip circling him protectively, because everyone knows you can never trust an 80-year-old when there are
long-haired boys and poultry scissors around. All for nothing.
I ask Milo why he did it. He shrugs nonchalantly. “I thought his hair looked ugly,” he says, pronouncing it ugg-ell-y, and I’m appalled that a child of mine would have such bad taste in coiffure. Thinking back though, I can hardly blame him. A month or so earlier I’d given up on my attempt to shape Mi’s locks into an Ashton-Kutcher-in-That-’70s-Show shaggy pageboy (don’t say it, I already know what you’re thinking, and, yes, I loathe myself) and taken him to get a mohawk. It looked awesome. Later on that night, though, I heard Iggy in their bedroom saying “Mummy made you get a haircut but she likes my hair Just. Like. This,” shaking it around like a three-and-a-half-feet-tall Wella woman. He does love himself, Iggy. I guess Milo just decided to get his own back. Tou-frigging-ché.
It’s been a month or so now and I can’t say I’ve adjusted. He’s so… normal-looking. And I’m really missing that little-boy-sweaty-head smell. But Ig? He’s loving himself and his new haircut sick. Hair will come and go, but some things will never change.
Column originally published in SHOP 4 Kids, 2010
