Chop This Way

It must have been first grade, maybe kindergarten, when I finally took matters into my own hands. For months I had been asking, quite likely begging, but my mother was firm, "No, please. No bangs, we don't have bangs", as if bangs were the facial badge of the working class. From her royal post she could not be swayed, and the fact that my best friend, and next door neighbor, had them did not help. My mother looked across the hedge at them with disgust, her mother apparently did something truly atrocious when eating fried chicken and my mother, the renowned expert on proper fried chicken eating, was horrified. Those bangs next door were just another way of saying "hell no, we have no idea how to eat fried chicken correctly", and so my face remained free of any hairs banging on my forehead.


Until I found the scissors, and then I lopped off a good chunk of the front, nice and short and choppy, uneven and unpolished. Just exactly what was necessary to truly appall my mother, she was furious. She scrambled for a way to push the offending hairs back off my face, but they were too short and could not be contained. There I was, eldest daughter of the Royal Fried Chicken Eater, face adorned with bangs.


Mary found the scissors at four, and it was not about bangs, or terrorizing her mother, at least I hope not. For my Mary it was sheer exploration, a child who revels in "what if?" and has very few fears, none of them at all related to lopping off a good chunk of the front of your hair.



Furor, my first reaction. Then terror, as I realized how close to her eyes she had wandered with an apparently rather sharp pair of scissors, and then quiet amusement when they slipped and revealed that Kate had jumped in and coiffed a hair or two, although every hair on Kate's head remained neatly in place, as I would expect. Mary jumps in puddles, Kate walks oh so carefully around them.

Mary's kindergarten picture will be a nice reminder of this leap to independence, of the day when her raging curiosity simply got the best of her. But not of fried chicken, she has never had the offending bird, I can't stand the stuff, and I never really learned what was the proper way to gnaw fried meat off a bone. The hair will grow back, it always does.