My baby girl has a hockey haircut.  Her honey-blonde shag is short across the forehead, long at the neck– a classic mullet. 

My husband thinks it’s funny.  “You look like you’re from Duluth,” he tells her in a Midwestern accent, but I am mortified.  I want her immediately restored to feminine cuteness, either under my power or someone else’s. 

She’s always had a sturdy build.  Born a scrawny newborn, she plumped out within weeks into pink rolls of baby-fat, prompting the nickname “Dumpling” which she still deserves.  The hockey hair is not flattering.

I find my old haircutting scissors, once used to cut an ex-boyfriend’s mop-top on the back porch of another era.  They are rusted from languishing in a basket in the bathroom, but I have no option. 

I plop the toddler in her high-chair and attempt to trim her shag.  This is a creature who only sits still to eat spaghetti and is otherwise a whirling dervish all day.  “You could power a generator if you harnessed that child’s energy, ” observed her grandpa dryly during the December ice storm when he lived without electricity for 13 days.

I snip tentatively across the ends of her mullet but she twists away.  How do I avoid spearing the tender skin at her nape?  In the end I give up and take her to a salon, where a hip blonde stylist puts her in a Snoopy cape, sits her on my lap and gives her an adorable bob.  I wish I could be the kind of mother who effortlessly cuts her children’s hair, but that’s one more domestic skill I don’t have, like baking bread from scratch or filling a rainy afternoon with fun and meaningful art projects.

There’s too much psychic baggage associated with haircuts anyway.  I’ve never pulled a Britney Spears and shaved everything off, but I have my own tress traumas.  In 2^nd grade my mother took me to an old bald barber at Lord & Taylor’s department store.  I felt small and shy around Mr. Farmer, afraid of his arsenal of scissors. 

One day my fears were confirmed when we discovered he’d cut my hair unevenly, two lengths on each side of my face.  I had to go to school the next day wearing different length braids-an unspeakable embarrassment.  We returned to Lord & Taylor’s that afternoon– up the elevator, through the shoe department, into the back room where Mr. Farmer waited by the haircutting chair, his jar of combs floating in blue Barbicide.

I’d been holding in tears all day and burst into sobs at his concerned, wrinkled smile– Why were we back?  My mother explained the crisis and I sat sniffling in my black cape as Mr. Farmer cut the long side to match the short.  Even once the hair was fixed, even after I was safe at home tucked in bed, my throat seized up at the insult to my being. 

Years later, in adolescence, I viewed every haircut as an opportunity for transformation.  I was inevitably disappointed when I looked in the mirror and saw my same face staring back at me.  In 8th grade I got a terrible perm, enduring chemical smells and blasting heat to emulate the girls in Seventeen magazine. 

I read Seventeen in a daze of longing and envy, agonizing over which model I’d rather be, the curvy brunette in the fluorescent mini, say, or the willowy blonde in pink chiffon.  Then I’d emerge from the magazine and realize I hadn’t changed at all.  I still had my Jewish nose, my freckles, tummy flab, and short legs.  Eventually I got over Seventeen, but I never outgrew wanting a magical haircut.

Ask Samson– the power of our hair is both symbolic and literal.   Hair holds our identity, whether crew-cut or dreadlocks, curls or braids.  My last year in college, I got a short boy-cut for the first and last time in my life.  It was a socio-political decision: I’d recently come out as bisexual and wanted the lesbians on-campus to notice me.  During a visit to San Francisco, I got my nose pierced with a tiny sapphire and my long locks shorn above my ears.

My piercer’s name was Chance– he had a goatee, a face full of metal, and a gentle bedside manner, ushering me like a kindly dentist into his gleaming cubicle at The Gauntlet (the oldest piercing joint in San Fran).  I was terrified but determined, and didn’t even gasp when the long needle penetrated my nostril. 

I never regretted the blue stone that marked my face, but for months after that trip I grieved my lost hair.  I used to dream I was lying across the bed with my long hair spread out over the side, the ends sweeping the floor.  Even in my sleep I could sense that mane tingling like a phantom limb.

So there’s high emotion at stake with my children’s coiffures.   I’ll chase my preschooler around the house with a brush and endure screaming protest during shampoos, all to avoid shearing her tresses into a practical pixie cut.  I try to relax and view hair as an emblem of impermanence (lush during pregnancy, falling out post-partum…).  After all, healthy hair grows ½ inch every month.  No matter how bad your hair day, it’ll grow out eventually.  Case in point: my toddler already has a fresh mop hanging in her eyes, begging for another trim.

*Published in “Spilt Milk” in The Brattleboro Refomer on May 9, 2009.

Tags:   haircut · mullet · Seventeen magazineNo Comments