~on grief and motherhood, transformation through phases of life, and choosing to move into the next chapter.~

I may be biased, but my son has the most beautiful hair I’ve seen. Well other than Moana, but Disney characters don’t exactly count. He truly does have a great head of hair. So great that every few months we need to take him to get a trim because it’s thick and long hanging over his brown eyes. We’ve tried several different salons, but ultimately are required to pay a heftier price to go to a place that has all the kid perks.

Despite my dislike for the name, “sit still”, I’m absolutely in awe of all this hairstylists there. They seem to have the patience of saints. My son is a relatively “easy kid", but when it comes to him being touched in any way that he doesn’t have control over like the doctor or a haircut or the dentist he absolutely rebels. I honestly can’t blame him. Being touched by a stranger in such an intimate way is not one of my favorite activities either. The kids salon we go to has these wooden cars that kids can sit in while they get their haircut and watch their favorite cartoons on an iPad. However, my son wants absolutely nothing to do with those cars or the iPad because all he wants is to sit on his mama‘s lap.

The first few times he got his haircut we had to have his dad hold him down and had me sitting underneath him, keeping his head between my palms. This is one of the hardest things that I’ve done as a mom that I did not expect. Every time the scissors or razors come near his face he screams and kicks, begging me to let him leave the salon. It’s heartbreaking to watch him struggle and plea for an alternative.

Some would say I’m a bad mom for forcing him. Who am I to force him to do something he doesn’t want to do? Who am I to decide that him not being able to see through his hair is worth this agony that he experiences quarterly? Well, I’m his mother and despite my belief in honoring autonomy, this is an area that I rebel against my own values for the sake of him not running into traffic due to obstructed vision.

Taking my son to get his haircut, the past couple of years has been triggering given the scene I just described. Once, when I didn’t have time to make an appointment at the kids salon, I took him next-door to my home to a men’s barbershop, which is primarily run by very young men with very little experience, cutting kids hair. The scene was so chaotic that the young man that was cutting my son‘s hair actually ended up cutting his own hand on accident because Ari was wiggling and wailing so much. So you can see why this occasion is correlated with a decline in my mental health through the week. When I was drinking, my husband and I would drink before and after the haircut to relax our nervous system. Now I don’t have that coping mechanism so I rely on writing in this way and energy healing for Ari when he’s in the chair.

This recent haircut was the most triggering of all. Because his movements were so difficult, the hairstylist recommended cutting his hair short as possible, so it would last longer and we’d all be traumatized a little less frequently if we did just that. She whipped out the razor, cutting off his long blonde locks until all that was on his head was a tiny bit of fuzz. I didn’t realize that the locks represented his baby stage but as they landed on the concrete floor, I saw the softness of his toddlerhood floating away.

When I looked at him, I didn’t see a baby but a young boy. This boy now looked old enough resemble my siblings and my dad. The back of my son‘s head looks so much like my dad that instantly when I saw it, I was flooded with memories of my dad and all of the haircuts he had in his life. I was also reminded of all the haircuts my dad gave my brothers during some of the toughest years of my life and theirs.

While I was happy for him to receive this big boy haircut while he was preparing for his first year at school, there were multiple waves of grief that washed over me. A tsunami of grief emerged with the realization that the tender, most intimate years of our relationship building were now over. He would go to school for several hours a day, and we would be separated. Not only was this chapter ending, but I was being shown a chapter where I saw the men in my lineage through the gentle face of my sweet son. Would it be possible to separate the pain inflicted upon me from those men and my son’s face? Likely so. However, it would take a lot of refocusing and care in order to do so.

The night after the haircut, I had a wildly potent dream.