There are moments in life when you have to ignore your feelings of sick apprehension and simply push through. Bungee jumpers and parachutists have to do it, the first time they force their reluctant bodies into the blue. Probably, once they jump, their anxieties dissipate as they realize they’re dropping easily and it’s all going to be fine.
Well, lucky for them, because it’s not nearly so nice a sensation when you’re holding a buzzing set of hair clippers and you’ve just accidentally swished through the wrong thatch on your unsuspecting child’s head.
If you want a sense of sick apprehension, that’ll do the trick. Your child — in my case, a son old enough to care about his looks but not quite old enough to admit it — sits trustingly beneath one of those plastic pinnies meant to keep bits of hair from getting under his collar. You stand over him with your clippers, aghast, because you know what he doesn’t: You’ve gone too high with the No. 3 setting, and he’s got a little lane across his scalp, like a pathway mown through a field of wildflowers.
“Yikes, that’s short!” remarked an unhelpful person who had wandered into the kitchen just as I was approaching the moment of pushing through.
“No, no,” I said, too quickly. “This is how it’s supposed to be. Your brother needed a proper haircut.”
“More like a scalping,” said the maddening intruder.
“You’re not cutting too much, are you?” worried the boy.
“Not at all,” I lied.
It was the moment of commitment, and I jumped. With the machine whizzing and no obvious alternative, I ran the thing over his head, back and forth. Blond locks fell to the floor. The pathway through the wildflowers expanded and from what had been a wildly overgrown Beatle emerged a round-faced adolescent, fully shorn.
Short haircuts can be terrific. A good one can make a boy look like he just walked off a Marine parade ground, or out of a 1950s comic book. But a bad short haircut can make him resemble a hedgehog, or a Chia pet, and that is what, to my horror, I’d just given my own child.
“That’s enough!” said the alarmed not-Marine, running his hand over his head. “Uh, thanks, but — ” And wriggling out of the apron, he dashed upstairs to his room.
Instantly I did what any loving mother would: I madly texted everyone we would see that day, entreating them to react placidly to our son’s transformation.
All of which goes to show how little we may grasp the resiliency of those closest to us. Oh, at first we couldn’t pry the baseball cap off him. But once we did, and he re-submitted to the clippers (“Back and sides only, I swear!”) the hedgehog grudgingly gave way to 1950s boy.
Next day after school, we asked gingerly how his classmates had reacted.
“Everyone was like, “Whoa, big haircut, dude!” He smiled. “Actually, now I think it’s kind of cool.”
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
