I’ve reached a stage in parenting sooner than I was expecting, sooner even than I was ready for.
The stage is image consciousness, or, more precisely, my son hates his haircut. My four-year-old recently got what I’ll call an unfortunate haircut — I’m not going to say who gave it to him to protect my wife’s feelings — and to my surprise it quite bothered him.
I was not expecting any such reaction from a four-year-old.
I don’t remember giving a darn about my appearance until about Grade 7, and even then it took an unstoppable wave of peer pressure to get me to swap in some jeans for my preferred Calgary Flames jogging pants. In particular I don’t recall having any real concerns about how my hair looked during my elementary school years, let alone preschool.
Maybe, however, I’m just blocking out my school years as a way to erase from my mind some of the truly horrendous haircuts I ordered up for myself. There were the “spikes,” which I’m still not ready to acknowledge or talk about. There was the “mushroom cut” and its anarchist cousin, the “undercut.”
Even in my 20s I went through a phase of letting a friend cut my hair — I’m not going to say who it was to protect my then-girlfriend, now wife’s feelings. It’s a phase of my life where I can look at any photo from that time and immediately identify it as the “home haircut” phase. Maybe my unnamed stylist was just trying to mark her territory, let all the other ladies out there know that this young fellow with weed-whacked hair was taken. Of course I would never say that out loud to protect the feelings of my ... well, you know.
Speaking of my wife, she has a hair-cutting history that goes all the way back to her own childhood days. When she was five she got so fed up with a cowlick located right in the front of her head that she tried to cut it out. Although nothing previously written in this column would give you any impression of her hair-cutting ability, you may be able to guess how her first foray into hairstyling turned out.
OK, now here’s the part of the story where I give my wife enormous credit. We’ve got no interest in taking our boys — the youngest one just turned two — to a hair salon just yet so we’ve been cutting their hair at home. And when I say we’ve been cutting it I mean solely my wife, because I am far too much of a coward to take a pair of sharp scissors anywhere near my boys’ squirmy little heads. If it were left up to me they would look like ZZ Top by now. So to my brave wife, hats off to you (which I can safely do now because I no longer get my haircut by a certain unnamed someone).
She actually does a pretty good job of it too, particularly given the squirminess of the situation. This latest haircut that my four-year-old got was something different though. For some reason he and my wife decided that they should try out the clippers on him, essentially giving him a buzz cut. Except I’m not sure either of them realized how buzzy it would be.
The poor guy was so distraught when he looked in the mirror that he announced he wasn’t going to school anymore — he didn’t want his friends to see his hair.
No matter how many times we told him he looked cool, he resisted.
We did manage to get him to school but when the classroom door opened to start the day he hung back. His lovely teacher knelt down, asked him what was up.
He slowly, shyly took off his toque and twisted it nervously in his hands.
“Well, you look a lot older,” his teacher said. And with that he got a huge grin, threw the toque behind him and raced off to show his friends his new hair.
My wife has a theory that it wasn’t that our son cared about what he looked like, he was just upset that he no longer looked like himself. He’d had the same hairstyle throughout his living memory and now he was staring at a completely different boy in the mirror. I’d like to think that’s true.
I’d like to think that we’ve got a few years left before we have to worry about the way our sons and all their friends think and talk about their images.
But most of all I’d like his stylist — who I’m not going to name here — to feel like she’s off the hook on this one. And maybe next time we’ll just pay the $22.
Andy Prest can be reached via email at [email protected].
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