Big boy haircut

I just had to cut his hair off. Beau is a tiny bit heartbroken about it, but I was confident the time had come for our baby boy’s first haircut.

Beau, you see, never worried much about trying to comb out our active 2-year-old son’s curly golden locks. I mean dreadlocks. Because that’s the direction he was headed in before I intervened last week.

I had told Beau the night before I did it that I was going to have to cut Muggins’ hair, and Beau agreed, but I guess in his mind he thought I meant it was something we would have to do eventually, way off, far off down the road — like how we’ll probably have to buy nursing home insurance some day.

So when Beau came in from feeding the next day and discovered I had given little Muggins, the baby of the family, his first haircut… he was sad.

(Nine-year-old Asher got a haircut too. Ever since he was a tiny guy he has wanted to grow his hair out long, like a wild Indian’s hair, and many times we’ve allowed him a couple months of growth… but he always looks like such a ragamuffin that we have to overrule his desires and cut it off again. Still, he keeps trying for long hair. I don’t know if he’ll ever make it past the awkward over-the-ear stage as long as he lives with me.)

The truth is, I find it’s easier for me to like my kids if they look nice. If they have good haircuts and they’re wearing cute clothes, I really like my kids a lot. Bad hair and frumpy clothes… the love doesn’t flow so naturally. I know that probably seems shallow, but I’ve questioned other mothers about this phenomenon and I find I’m not alone. The feeling across the board seems to be this: even mothers have a hard time fully loving their own kids when the kids look like ragamuffins.

So I guess it’s my job to keep my kids looking nice. It’s for their own safety and my mental health. And I wasn’t convinced that Muggins was looking nice or cute in his never-been-cut, more-likely-to-mat-and-nap-than-curl-and-bounce crazy-man hairdo any longer.

Here’s what they looked like before: