Haircut

I got my hair cut very short about a month ago – it’s the shortest cut I’ve ever had as an adult. The change was dramatic. So dramatic that when I picked up the girls from daycare right after my haircut, they both cried. Monkey would not come to me, wouldn’t let me touch her, and wouldn’t look at me. N was with me that day because we were going straight to San Antonio for my grandfather’s funeral from the daycare. Monkey clung to him and buried her face in his chest rather than look at me.

Turtle cried, too, but I was able to carry her to the car. “Momma got her hair cut, but it’s still momma,” I explained as I put her in her seat, and I rubbed her hands through my hair. She seemed satisfied. I tried the same approach with Monkey but she just screamed when I got near her. I got in the car and told N, “I feel like Hester Prynne after she ripped off her ‘A’ and Pearl had a total melt down.” He looked at me blankly. “You know, in that scene towards the end of The Scarlet Letter,” I said. “Mmm,” he said as he drove off. Sensing he wasn’t in the mood for a discussion of nineteenth century literature with two screaming kids in the back seat and a long drive ahead of us, I let it drop.

Monkey accepted my new look by the end of that evening. But I couldn’t stop thinking about her initial reaction, so when we got home I pulled out my copy of The Scarlet Letter. I had always been really annoyed at Pearl for freaking out when her mother finally relieved herself of the burden of that scarlet A, and even more annoyed at Hester for buttoning the A back on, just to make the little brat happy. I reread the scene:

Pearl. . . suddenly burst into a fit of passion, gesticulating violently, and throwing her small figure into the most extravagant contortions. She accompanied this wild outbreak with piercing shrieks. . . “I see what ails the child,” whispered Hester . . . “Children will not abide any, the slightest change in the accustomed aspect of things that are daily before their eyes. . .”

So there it was, a little parenting lesson from Nathaniel Hawthorne circa 1850: Don’t go chopping your hair off without any warning if your toddler happens to have a flair for the dramatic.

I can’t imagine how a mother who goes around comparing herself to tragic literary heroines could have possibly ended up with an overly dramatic daughter . . .