How did you possibly think you could do this? Of course this was going to go wrong. Why must you always think you can do everything yourself? There’s a reason why other people get paid to do this. Your punishment is a crying child with hairs in his mouth and a weird-ass haircut (gavel banging).
These were my inner-judge’s thoughts on my brilliant idea to give my son a haircut at home. I am the kind of woman that buys an Ikea entertainment center and puts the entire thing together herself. I love puzzles, building, making things and Tetris. When I was faced with needing a website, my first response was not, “Who should I hire to do it?” but, “I’ll just learn HTML!” Overall, this “can-do” quality has served me well and my maiden name is now a term lovingly and jokingly used in my family much like “MacGyver” (as in: I’m sure we can MacGyver it), but truth be told, there have been a lot of “projects-gone-awry” in my life. That is the technical term for them. One my husband loves to throw around when I tell him I’m about to teach myself to make drapes, because how hard could sewing drapes really be!?
A few weeks ago, I’m looking at my 5-year-old son’s hair that already needs another haircut and I get this idea that maybe if I just watched a YouTube video about cutting hair, I could do it myself and save the money and the frequent trips to the salon. When I watch the stylist do it there, it seems rather logical and simple – sides, back, front, snip, etc. I can do that. Upon further investigation, I stumbled upon a video clip from a company called Freestyla who makes a product that supposedly makes hair-cutting a cinch! They have this comb/hair guide tool that you effortlessly use to keep the hair in place and even and then you use standard clippers to trim the excess. It basically does all the work for you – the modern day Flowbee. That’s what I need! I order it.
Last night, I got out the clippers, my Freestyla, a tall chair to recreate the salon feel and watched a few more videos to get really trained on the Freestyla. My son was as hopeful as I was – how fun we were doing this at home! He bounced up onto the chair, we draped a towel around him, I plugged the clippers in and we were off…
There’s nothing like the first stroke, cut or chop of anything to help reality sit in – there is no going back. You can’t tape hair back on. In theory, the Freestyla should have made this uncomplicated, but once I got in and made the first swipe, I was scared shitless. All of the simplicity of sides, back, front, clip spiraled into a tangled web and I was the only one who could hack my way out.
Barely even one minute in, I’m panicking inside but try to put on a face of composure for my son who isn’t buying it and has started to cry. The dry, cut hairs are falling all around him and they are sticking to the towel, his neck and his face. Crying only makes the entire situation worse as the tears attract more hair. He begins to sniffle and then (OH GOD NO) wipes his face with the towel with all the hairs on it. I am in hyper “get-this-done” mode even though I have no idea what the hell I’m doing and so I tell him, “STOP CRYING OR IT’S GOING TO GET WORSE!” He tries to cry silently, but the face that accompanies that makes his mouth gape open in despair. “SHUT YOUR MOUTH OR YOU’LL GET HAIR IN IT!” I warn, but it’s too late, they’re already in there. Mouth open or closed, it’s a massacre. He tries to buck up, stop crying and close his mouth and eyes but I can hear him whimpering. My compassion finally overrides my perseverance and I look down at his angelic face that has tiny hairs stuck to every inch of it. He looks up and pleads through tears, barely discernable, “It’s itching me,” and I realize, I am stuck. We are stuck. I cannot abandon this project but I know this is torture for my son. And it was all my doing. But I cannot stop and say all the lovely mommy things right now. This is no time for attachment parenting – I have to press on so that this slaughter will be over quickly.
I briskly brush his face off with a clean towel and get back to work. Doing what, I don’t know exactly, but I put the $45 comb in his hair and clip and then clip some more and then mimic what I thought I saw the snake-oil salesman in the video doing. My son is now cowering with his head down and shoulders up to protect himself and I keep telling him to sit up straight and he cries and wipes more hair on his face, but I keep moving. Keep clipping. Must get us out alive. While crying, my son wails, “I really wish this was done right now! I wish I could go back to when I was four-years-old!” You and me both, son. I wish I could go back to who I was before I thought I had the skills to do every profession out there.
Everything looks distorted. I can’t see straight – nor can my son with hairs poking out of his eyeballs. The top part of his hair looks too long and yet too short all at the same time. I see lines and patches and spots and rightfully so – I was grasping at straws while clipping. My only hope is that somehow my subconscious retained even an ounce of the instruction given in those videos and while I was in blackout/clipping mode, it took over. I want to keep going to smooth edges and even out, but I know if I don’t stop, I will keep trying to fix without knowing how and he will be bald and possibly comatose too.
We head straight for the bathtub. Please take away the sins I have just committed, California Baby Calming Bubble Bath. When all the hairs have been rinsed out, please let there be some passable style lingering on his head. The water and bubbles bring my son back to life. How am I going to explain this? When people ask about his botched haircut, how do I sum up this experience in a quick sound byte in the school parking lot? “Project-gone-awry” should cover it.
After the bath, when the hairs still left on his head have been cleaned, conditioned and combed and we’ve both mostly recovered from the atrocity committed in the bathroom on this dark, dark night and set ourselves up for a nice family game of Sorry (irony at its best), I take a step back and look at him. I see inconsistencies, I see places I want to clip just one more time, but I also actually see a passable haircut. A pretty-good-for-someone-who-has-never-been-trained-professionally haircut. But the price we just paid for this semi-deranged haircut was far too high for both of us. I ask my son, “So, do you think you want to do that again next time or should we just go to the salon?” and he vehemently says, “NO, I want to go to a salon next time!”
The funny/frustrating thing about this incident is that I am sure that in six months, a year, five years down the line, I will try this again. I will forget what a wide-awake nightmare this was and I will once again say, “How hard can hair-cutting be?” I guess the vicious cycle will finally stop when all my family members go running for their lives the minute I get out the clippers. I pray for the ones who haven’t been initiated (nor conceived) yet, for they do not know the horrors of the Freestyla at the hands of their overly confident mother.
