When I was a little girl - probably about 5 years old - I had beautiful hair.
It was long and golden and well - from the pictures I've seen - it was just gorgeous.
My kindergarten pictures show a little girl (who decidedly looks like a boy).
Those locks were cut off in a terrible boy-cut. My mother - probably sleep deprived and desperately seeking some area of her life to control with a preschooler and newborn - decided that she was tired of listening to me whine and complain about having my hair brushed.
So she went a little off the deep end.
I think part of me still holds a grudge to this day (sorry, mom - but you already know this!).
I hated it! Not only was it short, but it was a terrible cut - millions of layers that required agonizing months if not years to grow back.
Twenty-five years later my hair has yet to recover - I blame this one cut on my inability to ever successfully grow my hair to a longer than shoulder length.
Where am I going with all of this you might wonder?
Well you see - I have a daughter - with the most brilliant blue eyes and beautiful golden, blonde hair that has been growing for more than 4 years. I suffered through the in-her-eyes-and-face-all-the-time phase when she was a toddler - resolving never to cut her bangs short. I invested an obscene amount of money on bows and hair do-dads in an attempt to help her look cute when she was in that awkward growing out stage.
We've cut her hair three times in her short lifetime. Once when she was 2 years old - just to clean up the ends and even things a bit. A short trim again about six months after that and then just a few weeks ago we cut a whopping 4 inches off her hair because she had been begging me for months to get her hair cut short.
It was at this last hair cut that we discovered her hair is actually wavy, perchance even curly. The stylist explained that some kids' hair actually changes around their fourth year - as she showed me how my normally stick-straight hair daughter had hair growing out spiral from the roots.
So tonight I was in the bathtub with Master Wyatt - who has had a terrible fever all day long. He was happy for the moment pouring water all over the bathroom floor (why should it stay in the tub, he wonders?).
Mike walked in with a section of hair - Maddie's hair undoubtedly. It was LONG. He'd seen it on the floor or maybe on her bed.
I think I said something about going to look for the scissors to put them up - but instead he returned with substantially more hair.
"MADDIE!" I yelled from the bathtub.
What I saw made my stomach lurch and I asked myself how I missed this and when did she commit this atrocity? I recalled how she had "locked" herself in her room and I'd discovered that she'd eaten all her Easter candy from her class party. I am usually a detail person but I totally missed the hair laying on the floor.
It looked like she'd grabbed handfuls all over her head and held them up and cut them off. There was no rhyme or reason - some was the top layer, some the middle and bottom - several large sections were all the layers.
There's one particular section where she cut it all - leaving about 2 inches to her scalp - it encompasses one whole side of her face.
At first she refused to divulge where the scissors were, "I don't know," she tried to tell us.
But after a little prompting (threats?) she said they were behind her baby crib.
Mike found the scissors - but he also found a good bit more hair.
After things died down a bit - there was some screaming and crying and lecturing and yelling and all sorts of hullabaloo - I called her preschool teacher - who I love dearly.
She reassured me that despite her deviousness at hiding the scissors and hair that my daughter was not a psychopath! She did in fact have a conscious and she knew she'd done something wrong.
Apparently no matter how frustrating it is to me her behavior is normal for her age. Ms. LaVina told me she loved me and sent me back to the terrible trenches of parenting - with a few suggestions for disciplining my dear daughter's deceitfulness.
I made her vacuum her room - which she protested terribly - but ended up deciding she kind of liked.
Tomorrow we are going back to the stylist - and she is getting a much shorter hair cut - to try and "fix" what is left of her hair. She's not happy about this - in fact she wants to leave it the way it is, but I can't do it.
She will not watch TV tomorrow and she's not allowed to have a treat after the hair cut.
And hopefully she won't put me through this ever again. I vowed never to cut my daughter's hair short like what my mom did when I was a child - but she's already got it started and the job needs to be finished now.
