It’s summertime and the kids and I are so grateful it is finally here. We are all more than ready. To celebrate the season, I have resurrected the annual ritual for the second year running of letting them let their hair down, literally. My daughter is sporting a new short haircut with blue streaks and my son is now the proud owner of a Mohawk. There are no teachers who will judge their school performance by their outer appearance for three more months. Summertime is when I let them have creative license with their hair, letting them appear as menaces to society so that they won’t be tempted to rebel in real life.

“It’s just hair,” I tried to tell my parents when I was young and shaved my head in a moment of my own attempt at creative license. It was done on a whim at a slumber party of an old friend. Her dad, a single father, had already retired to bed long before. We stayed up in the determined intent of staying up all night, listening to Nine Inch Nails and feeling the full effects of teenage angst as we denounced everything and everyone. The other three girls had already shaved their heads, and I was the outsider with a full head of hair. In that moment, the only world existed in that old redwood home, and I was out of place against the norm. And the more I looked at how truly punk rock they were, the more lily white I felt. So when they brought out the clippers, I only squeezed my eyes shut with a giggle in my throat and a vision of how cool I would look. I walked away with a hideous hairstyle and a father who wouldn’t speak to me for weeks, barely even looking at me as long as the look remained. And back at school, the reception for my new look was not received with the awe I had expected, but incredulous stares and questions about why I had done it. I found that the real life I lived in the outside world was hard to maintain as usual with half my hair missing. Teachers who had once marveled at my essays and work ethic hardly saw my new look as inspiration for creativity, and stopped taking me seriously. My passion for ballroom dancing was not seen by my instructors who surely passed me up in my efforts to move up in the ranks despite the fact that I really could dance well. My self-confidence suffered as the stares I had been hoping to receive were not so easy to accept once I was actually being stared at. One rebelling act to express myself resulted in something that didn’t express who I was at all, and I ended up even more out of place than I had felt before as a plain preteen that blended in with the crowd.

My hair eventually did grow back. It went from strikingly bald to looking like a boy’s haircut, to short hair that stuck out awkwardly under the rest of my long hair, to finally reaching the point of normal. Soon the memory of my rebel act only resided in myself, everyone else forgetting as they often do when it doesn’t pertain to themselves. Try telling that to a preteen, though, who is sure that they are on center stage of everyone’s ridicule and mockery.

There are still times when I feel the shocking sting of the intended ugliness I placed on myself. In times of self-doubt or awkwardness, I am that geeky preteen back in Jr. High who dressed all in black, half my hair in a bun and the other half missing, as beautiful as a shiny pink thumb. Maybe allowing my kids self-expression now in their summer months through their hair isn’t really true to the lessons I learned myself in those years. But even still, perhaps blue streaks and summer Mohawks in my children’s younger years will keep them from more serious acts of shock when they are older, and still allow them to feel free with who they are trying to be as individuals. Of course, the rule is that when summer comes to a close, their hair will once again be just like everyone else’s. That is, unless everyone else’s hair is blue streaked Mohawks.

Shave and a haircut at winecountry.singlemom@yahoo.com