Growing up, I wasn’t allowed to cut my hair.
If I believe the stories my father told me, some time before I was two, my grandparents took me for a haircut without telling him that they’d be hacking my hair and he FdTFO. After that, I got a trim every year or so. But those were done in our living room, with a dull pair of scissors, and mainly only because the screaming when he’d tried to quite literally tear a brush through my hair seemed like I might have issues with tangles.
By the time I was 12, I was allowed a vote. I think it was my grandparents again who enabled me and I took the past-my-butt-all-one-length-parted-down-the-middle hippy hair and chopped half of it off. And got bangs. For the first time since I’d been four or so, my hair just met the middle of my back.
I must have lost 10 pounds.
Two years later, I got the next haircut, also provided by my grandparents’ wallet. I nearly cut it all off – an ear-skimming bob almost caused my father to cast me out of the family.
There was a lot of that, growing up. Obviously. If you’ve delved into the archives, first off I apologize and second, you’ve probably noticed a lack of empathy or autonomy in my childhood. I mean, yeah, I was given choices – about which punishment to take. {And then he would do the opposite, to “teach me a lesson’. I learned pretty young to say that I wanted the spanking, because asking to stand in the corner meant I’d be sitting funny later on.}
Anyway.
One of my first rules that I created for my self was that I wouldn’t use physical force on my child as a means to punish or intimidate. I fucked that one up, but the few hand slaps that I doled out (I think) won’t have the same effect on her as my childhood did on me.
The second rule was that any child I had would have choices. Yes, they’d have to eat their veggies, but they’d get to choose which ones. Yes, they’d have to do things they didn’t want to, but they would be rewarded for good behaviour twenty-fold the amount of time they were admonished for being bratty. They could pick their clothes, their toys, their books, their lives.
Then I had Isobel, who wanted from day one to tell me how things were going to be. She’s still doing it. And I let her tell lay down the law about the things that don’t really matter. I assert plenty of authoritay when it’s needed, but I’m no ‘bow unto me, child, for I am thy parent’ kind of person.
She picks her clothes, her snacks, her activities, books, movies, etc. etc. I only step in when she’s over her head or unable to make a choice. Then, she wanted a hair cut.
Truthfully, she wanted a hair cut about three months ago. Her dad wanted her to get it cut (all of it off, he said. He’s always told me to just get rid of mine, because it’s too thick, too heavy, too crazed). I didn’t want her to get it cut. Friends didn’t want her to cut it. Hell, even Mr Lady didn’t want me to cut it.
The past few days of her being sick and extra whiny and even a little terrified when her hair’s gone in her face? Made me think about it.
Today, I gave in and I only regret it like, a very very tiny amount.
But let’s all still pause for a moment of silence for the two years of hair that got hacked off onto the dirty floor of a Great Clips, okay?
