Long Haired Freaky People Need Not Apply

My oldest son decided approximately six months ago that he wanted to have long hair. LONG hair... like Jesus or Johnny Damon. Whatever. It's his hair I couldn't really care less how he wears it as long as it is clean.

Mostly I just ignored the hair growing or made jokes about putting bows in his hair. My joking was all in good fun and my son would laugh. His hair looked awful, like a big poofy mushroom cap sitting on top of his head. Especially when he takes off his baseball cap and the hair on the top of his head is plastered to his scalp and the ends of his hair are curled up and sticking out like a mane around his head. In the grand scheme of things, it isn't something I want to fight with my son about. However, it drives my husband crazy.

It is one of the very few parenting things that we have disagreed about. Rob keeps asking him if he would like a haircut. And the constant mentioning seems to make my son even more adamant that he is not cutting his hair. I think embracing it takes the rebellion factor out of the equation and shows that we respect him as an autonomous individual capable of making some decisions of his own. And honestly, I just don't care.

When I was his age I had long hair. Really long hair that was well past my butt. Every morning my mother would put it into two thick braids. I would have to stand up on the toilet lid so that she could reach the bottom of my hair without having to sit on the floor. Every morning would find me in tears as she dragged the brush through the snarled mass of my hair. And every morning I would get hit on the top of my head with the brush and yelled at to stand still. I hated it and hated my long hair. I begged to be allowed to cut it short. Short being a relative term since I really only wanted it to my shoulders.

Well, one day I came home from school and decided that I was going to cut my hair myself. I'm still not sure what possessed me to do it, or how I thought I was going to get away with cutting my hair and my mother not noticing. But I cut one of my braids off above my shoulder.

Then I panicked. And I did the only thing I could think of which was to dispose of the evidence.

And so I flushed my 2 foot long braid down the toilet.

But now the question remained, what to tell my mother about my missing hair. My first thought was to just pretend that I had no idea what she was talking about. I thought that when she came home from work I would just pretend like my hair had always been like that and that I had no idea what she was talking about. But even at ten years old I knew that was just wishful thinking.

Then I got the brilliant idea to pull all my hair back into a single pony tail in the back of my head. that way the short choppy hair would be camouflaged by the longer hair that still remained. I silently praised myself for this awesome idea and resolved to wear my hair in a pony tail for the next few years. Surely my mother would be none the wiser.

But when I tried this I realized I had cut the one side so short that it wouldn't reach the back of my head, let alone flow nicely into a ponytail.

Then I became desperate, though not quite desperate enough to tell the truth. I called my mother up at work and told her I had just arrived home and looked at myself in the mirror and realized that someone must have cut off my hair at school that day.

She asked the obvious questions like, "How could someone cut off your hair and you not notice?" "Why would anyone do that?" "Wouldn't you feel someone with scissors right next to your head?" "Wouldn't any of your friends have told you that the hair on half of your head was missing?" "Do you have any idea who would do that?"

And I gave the obvious answers, "I don't know." "I don't know." "I don't know." "I don't know." But the answer to the last question would haunt me and live on in family lore for the rest of my years, "Well, I did see Stacey with scissors today."

And my mother answered, "Well, we will just see about this Stacy girl when I get home. Don't worry we'll get to the bottom of this." And then she hung up.

Then I spent the next two hours ringing my hands and pacing around our house. I was terrified. And frankly a little incredulous that my mother actually believed my lie, or so I thought. I would find out years later that she spent the two hours laughing and sharing the story with all her coworkers, and all of them collaborating on what my mother should do.

Long story short, many embarrassing phone calls to my many friends and their parents and the school principal, I finally collapsed into a sobbing heap on the kitchen floor and admitted that I had, despite all the believable evidence I had given to the contrary, cut my hair myself.


Which brings me back to my son.

This past weekend Rob offered him cold hard cash in exchange for a haircut. They went back and forth over the amount of money his hair was worth. My son poured over his Lego catalogs contemplating future purchases. Finally they settled on $100.

My son sat outside on the stool wavering in his decision. Finally I said to him, out of earshot of my husband, that his hair could always grow back, but legos are forever. With a glimmer in his eye and thoughts of Bionicles, he picked up the clippers and shaved off the side of his hair.

And now I have four other boys who have felt the lure of cash and decided they want to grow their hair long also.