On a Saturday morning while the girls were still in pajamas and I was frantically doing 16 loads of laundry, I set the girls up at the kitchen table with items from their art box: paper, crayons, stickers, markers, and scissors (a central item in this story). Twenty minutes later as I power walked through the kitchen I noticed two things: an absence of either child and a lock of hair on the floor.
"IVY!!!" I yelled. She appeared. "Did you cut your hair?" I asked calmly while holding up the forsaken pieces.
"No, Mommy," she answered, and I believed her. Lately she has an unrelenting conscience (another blog for another time).
"Oh, Stor-y!!!!!" I called in a sing-song voice. Moments later she walked into the kitchen....with bangs. Bangs she didn't have before the art box activity was started.
Amazingly in control of my temper, I crouched down to her level and held up the hair. "Did you cut your hair?"
She looked me straight in the eye and said, "Yes, Mommy."
"Why?" I asked, and she shrugged with all the nonchalance of a teenager. Seriously? I thought. No explanation??? No remorse???
My temper, not so in check anymore, flared. I unleashed a lecture on cutting your hair and how it was bad, and tried to make her feel guilt by alluding to the fact that our hairdresser would be very disappointed in her. I dragged her to the bathroom and made her look at her bangs. She started crying, giving me the reaction I needed to ensure she'd never again cut her hair.
On further inspection, I had to admit- she really hadn't done a bad job. The bangs didn't look to bad...the were crooked, but really in a cute, face-framing kind of way. But I still didn't let her in on that fact; I was going to use every tool available to me to make sure she never cut her hair again. Later that evening, I found more cut hair embedded in the carpet of her closet, and I launched another tirade.
In the meantime, I was comforted with horror stories of other "hair-cuts" done by preschoolers. I learned that many, many worse things could have been done with safety scissors.
Two evenings later, my husband drove her to the hairdresser so he could fix the disaster. Upon questioning, Story admitted that she was trying to make her hair yellow, like Rapunzel. You know, that movie Tangled? The one where Rapunzel's yellow hair turns brown when it's cut? Story thought her brown hair would turn yellow.
Thanks, Disney.
