Peer Pressure

My daughter is more like me than I like to admit and sometimes when I stand back and watch her I know exactly what my mother used to put up with. Using the word headstrong would be putting it mildly but not necessarily negatively. We are who we are and we don't often fall to the ways of others.

Growing up I had horrible hair and not because it was genetically incompetent but because my mother couldn't deal with my lack of interest in having a "hair-do". Her typical solution to my "ugliness" was to plop me down on a stool and proceed to hack it off, preferably the day before school pictures were to be taken. In the fifth grade she somehow talked me into a perm and because she was often taking her scissors to my head my hair was never long. I walked out of the hair salon with an afro, and yes, school pictures were the next day. If we owned a scanner I would I would post it and induce fits of laughter.

After the midwife put my first born in my arms and I discovered the baby was a girl I was struck with thoughts of what in the heck am I going to do with her hair, because as if to mock me she already had plenty on her head. I don't "do" hair, I wash my hair and up it goes, unless it is wine tasting night at the library. And true to form, like my mother, I had Seneca convinced that the local barber was the place to get her hair cut; that is until she somehow ended up with bangs that started close to the crown of her head. This was about the same time she discovered the color pink and realized that she was being dressed in farm duds. No more boldly striped shirts or pants and she wanted long hair.


Her long hair is beautiful when lovingly washed and brushed but she is a 10 year old girl and that is a battle I don't enjoy fighting everyday. So for about the past year I have tried to convince her that she would look great with her hair cut up to her shoulders. You know the story, easier to wash and brush, blah, blah, blah. But no dice, all she ever wanted was a trim, of less than a 1/2 inch.

Until today, when her seatmate at school suggested she cut it all one length.

I think I'll bake that seatmate some cookies and sneak her a note about what I want Seneca to do next.