Finding The Happy

After 3 years, 10 months and 6 days, I finally relented yesterday and got Arddun’s hair cut.

And only because it had become a real handful to un-knot after every shampoo.

There’s a scene in I Don’t Know How She Does It, when Sarah Jessica Parker’s character finds out that she missed her son’s first haircut because of her busy corporate life. The hot nanny had gone and done it, displaying great initiative but inducing secret muffled Mommy sobs in the process.

It has taken me a long, looong time to come to terms with cutting Arddun’s Rapunzelesque tresses which, at last measurement, hung slightly below her waist. At first, I had been nervous about sharp scissors near an active toddler’s face, but as time passed and her ability to sit still and obey instructions increased, I realised how attached I had gotten to her mane… mostly because I had attached so much sentimentality to it. It had been something we had left alone, intact, since birth and which had since become her trademark. In the early months and after a decent length, her hair signalled to the world that she is a girl in a way that no number of feminine baby clothes did. Her hair texture told the world she came from my body, but its beautiful brown with occasional strands of gold whispered of her uniquely mixed heritage.

Most of all, there had been something so unspoiled about it. Her Original Baby Hair, untouched all this time. To me, anyway.

So it was a little Coming Of Age moment, when Arddun and I entered the hair salon together yesterday to get her hair shaped and trimmed.

We had practised not moving during the haircut, but none of us at the salon had quite expected Arddun to sit so still, nor to look that solemn throughout the affair. We sat next to each other in companionable silence, listening to the snip-snips, obeying gentle instructions.

And then she was done! I heard a “you can show your Mummy now!”, whereupon I turned to my left and looked at my little girl. Except she had suddenly grown up.

But then she goes and does this. Just so we remember that she is still a funny little girl at heart.