Yea, I cut my hair
I was in the kitchen with Juniper while she was playing in the kitchen sink. It was an everyday moment. We were jabbering on about something. Who knows what it was. It was a typical awesome toddler conversation. I noticed I was greasy. I knew I had to wash my hair. It had been a couple days. I knew I had to get my hair cut. It had been a couple months. There is only a certain level of logistics I can handle before I sorta crack into taking action to alleviate draining money and time on something I don’t want to maintain. In this case, I didn’t want to wash my hair. I also didn’t want to set up an appointment, burn PTO from my job, and pay money to have my hair cut. So, I picked up a pair of kitchen scissors, gathered my hair in the back, and cut off my pony tail while my daughter looked on.
I didn’t make a big deal of it. I didn’t ask her to watch me as if I was a cartoon character. I just made a decision while we were going about our business. She looked on with interest as I placed my pony tail in the compost bin. She asked me, “Why did you cut your hair, daddy?”
“Well, I just wanted to cut my hair, Juju,” I replied to her. “I don’t want to wash my hair or get my hair cut,” I continued. She looked at me in the sorta bemused way that toddlers will look at you when they are trying to process something. While she looked on, I turned on my clippers and started to shave my head.
I felt like I was in a parody of one of those action movie scenes where someone dramatically altering my appearance to be able to evade detection. Just imagine the scene I just described occurring in a film called “HAIR OFF,” a riff on the classic b-film Face Off featuring John Travolta and Nicholas Cage, where I actively cut my hair off to confuse all the parents at Saturday AM gymnastics into thinking I disappeared. I wouldn’t mind other parents just leaving me be. I am not really a big “we both have kids, let’s talk” parent. I am the “I’m in an unhinged, imaginary playland with my child” parent. I end up being the pied piper for all the other kids regardless of what I look like.
Juniper and I had to finish up our nightly routine of lotions; hair brushing; jammies; sleep sack; hair and teeth brushing; story; and lullaby, so I paused my clippin’ for a bit. Once Juniper was down, Lily helped me clean up the back and I shaved as well. For the first time in four years I was completely free of hair. It felt nice to not have to shave or schedule an appointment for a haircut.
The next morning I woke and Juniper came into the bedroom. She looked at me and started manically laughing at me. Obviously, Lily and I asked her what was so funny. In between bouts of uncontrollable laughter, she said, “daddy’s face!” Ahh, the joys of being trolled by your child. Me in response:
In true “reality is absurd” fashion, the hits kept coming. I repeatedly was subjected to people acknowledging that I cut my hair and beard but did not note anything else. For example, I am on a staff meeting zoom call and my co-worker and the director of my office both state, “You Shaved!” and “you look so different.” I literally waved my hand and did not say a word. Its generally rude to point out a change in someone’s appearance if you are not going to say something nice. Like GTFOH with that garbage. The message was sent. The humans stopped making a mountain out of a small difference in my personal appearance. I think at this point I have entered into a knee-jerk word vomit roughly 55 times in three days to adults who want to summon an explanation for why I decided to change my appearance.
I came here to explain why I cut my hair, but now, I am second-guessing it. That word vomiting at the behest of a social body that cannot understand taking drastic measures to change one’s appearance is exhausting. I suppose if I wasn’t trying to run this essay series, take photographs of things that interest me, keep up with weaving commission work, launch two stickers, work full time, be a parent and a partner that I would have move space. But, I don’t and I resent that folx can’t just say, “hey, I like your haircut and shave.” It’s truly that simple.
I was given that balm of a comment during gymnastics Saturday morning. A parent who has shared soccer and gymnastics classes with me for the last 2 years said, “Hey, I like your haircut. It looks nice.” I looked at her relieved and said, “Thank you, you would be surprised at how few people will just acknowledge the change rather than just noting it looks nice.” I can’t tell you how nice that was to not have to explain why I would just look different. Go figure, its from a woman with children who likely had to constantly deflect comments about her looking pregnant when she was carrying her children.
All that tomfoolery aside, I have to honor my hair and beard, because it helped me through an extremely angry and sad period of my life. That hair and beard helped me deal with the pain of becoming a father and realizing how little fathering I received as a kid. It helped me face a society that was obsessed with pressuring Lily and I to breastfeed, rather than support a new mother and father through an insane threshold moment in our lives when Juniper had trouble eating. (Do not take the bait of baby friendly hospitals) It helped me face a culture that ignored a pandemic that posed an existential threat to my vulnerable pregnant wife and child with no immune system. It helped me face a job that would rather hand me busy work than allow me to use my skills and take my counsel. They were my symbol of resistance and anger to all that and more. You can go back through all those essays written in late 2022 and early 2023 that period in this project and see that seething anger. My favorite is probably “No more man babies,” which is linked below. In that essay, I pronounced in my full fury:
“I have no patience for the man babies of the boomer generation and their braindead disciplines that came after, let alone any of their “art”. I have suffered those fools long enough. Dudes’ can’t even make themselves dinner, let alone take care of another being. It’s a disgrace. And they have the audacity to try and claim that their art should be considered important. Dude, please. Get outta here. You couldn’t even follow the directions on the back of a box of mac and cheese, let alone change the world with your art.”
Yet, I think I have done a lot of the emotional and spiritual work necessary to be more at piece with that anger. In my therapy sessions for the last few years, we practiced being with this anger. Writing about my anger of being left behind by a father and a society allowed me to just be with that anger in a way that I don’t think I have ever allowed myself to feel. I was always either just pushing it off as things that are “part of life” or explaining them away with my toxically-positive spirituality du juor. I don’t know how many times in therapy that I would talk about how hard something is and how angry I am at the arbitrary conditions that created that difficulty. Each time, my therapist responded with a very matter-of-fact, “yeah, that’s hard and your anger is valid.” I mean, at first, that response is really fucking annoying, because you want talking about it with your therapist to solve the difficulty. Yet, over time, you build the capacity to just be angry at all the things that you cannot change without needed to flame out in dissociation: genocides, inadequate responses to pandemics, patriarchy, homophobia, structural racism.
I feel lighter now and don’t need my hair and beard to signal my antipathy for the world. And it’s not for lack of things to be angry about. No, I am not ignoring the reality of the horrors of the world, nor am I disengaged from actively working to make the world a better place. I am more devoted to my “no retreat” mentality than I ever have been. I have no hope that I will make the world will be a better place and I am about as happy with the tiny role I play in doing the work anyway. You know what my secret is? I dropped the rope long ago. In my sessions with my therapist, she would ask me if it would feel good to just not try so hard to keep pulling the world in the direction I wanted it to when it wasn’t working. There is a lot of wisdom in this question. What would it feel like to drop the rope of the expectations that we place on ourselves to single-handedly stop global, regional, or local horrors? For me, it feels good and helps me get out of my own way when I feel I am on the verge of defeatism. Instead, I just continue to plug away at actions of mutual and resistance that just signal my love for the people that I want to uplift and help.
So, ironically, cutting my hair is a sign to the world that I am ready to love it again. I am ready to care. I am ready to just keep plugging along finding magic in the everyday. I hope you are too. Thanks for being here. I hope you are safe and satisfied where you are tucked in.
Until next time, dear reader,
James
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