The other night I went out drinkin’ and fightin’ with some of my friends and got home at the ungodly hour of 9:00pm. True story.
While I had been painting the town that very pale shade of red, my husband was looking after the kids. I was about to write that he was “babysitting” but I realised that when I’m at home alone with the kids it is never called “babysitting” so why should it be regarded as such for my husband? What’s good enough for the goose is good enough for the gander. And all that.
Anyway, when I got the status report from him upon my return, the news was Not Good. Apparently, he’d left Mr Justice and The Pixie alone for “three minutes” (we should probably add a zero to that in the interest of accuracy) and Mr Justice took to his sister’s hair with the nail scissor.
The result? Well, let’s just say that for a couple of years there, The Pixie’s hair either looked “Rock-Chick-Mullet” or “Terry-Gilliam-playing-the-Jailer-in-Monty-Python’s-Life-of-Brian“, depending on which way you looked at it. A trip to the hairdressers last year finally sorted out all that damn layer confusion… until Mr Justice restyled her, that is.
Suddenly, where there was no fringe before, there was one. And where there was hair behind one ear, there was none.
And, as if to spite me, there was something quite funky about the way he’d done it. He’d added a certain volume and movement to her hair and I was very nearly tempted to ask him to have a go at cutting mine. Except that, actually, six year old boys attacking heads with sharp implements is definitely something not to be encouraged.
When I vented about all this on facebook, I had an overwhelming response, mostly very supportive of Mr Justice’s forays into the art of hairstyling. As “Some Guy in France” commented, it was truly a Rite of Passage.
Which got me thinking about other Rites of Passage that I may (or may not) have been through that might be lying in wait for my own children. In no particular order:
- purchase of first ever single and album (mine:”He’s My Number One” by Christie Allen and “Off The Wall” by Michael Jackson before he became creepy)
- seeing first teen movie featuring a scene where some girl’s top suddenly falls off without any warning or explanation or having any relevance to the plot
- sending off for X-ray glasses, as advertised in the back of a comic book, and finding out that they simply Do Not Work
- laughing so hard a french fry comes out your nose
- getting your first job at a fast food restaurant and spending half of it hiding in the broom cupboard and/or eating left over french fries that may/may not have come out of other people’s noses
- seeing what happens to a banana when you leave it at the bottom of your school bag over the school holidays
- getting drunk on school grounds on a School Play night and lying with your head in a Jeans West bag in a classroom when you should be on stage
- drinking from a cask wine buried in the sand with straws and subsequently falling down a stone staircase with a bicycle
- lying to your parents about where you’re going
- lying to your parents about where you’ve been
- lying to your parents about where you live and/or what you do for a living and/or who exactly you’ve become
- dating a sumo wrestler
When I laid it all out like that I realised the haircut incident wasn’t that bad after all, as rites of passage go. Hey, Mr Justice. I’ve changed my mind. Can you give me a Pixie Cut, too?
Not Drowning, Mothering. 