My husband and I are not speaking. He is not speaking to me in the kitchen, while clearing away the dinner things. I am not speaking to him upstairs, where I am aggressively if ineptly folding laundry.
This marital discord has divided parenting acquaintances firmly along gender lines. The mums we’ve polled have sided with me immediately, proffering the names of reputable divorce lawyers and ululating along with me in grief-stricken empathy, as though I was a squatter, browner Florence Pugh in Midsommar. Whereas the dads have just looked confused and said: “But it grows back.”
You see, my husband and I have two boys, aged five and two – one blond, one brunette; both largely adorable and only slightly feral, and blessed with glorious, shiny mop-tops of thick, sproingy hair.
At least, they were until this afternoon, when my husband took them to the hairdresser for “a quick trim”, and returned with Phil and Grant Mitchell off Eastenders.
The boys had been shaved. Actually shaved. Sheared with clippers, like sheep in summer. Every detail on our five-year-old’s scalp is now totally visible; his thick, dark-gold locks are all erased but for a tiny, gelled-up peak on top of his head. The two-year-old was very brave about a stranger running a lawnmower all over his head right up until they reached his crown, at which point he wriggled away, which is why he now resembles Brother Cadfael.
And me? Well, I received no warning of this, so when the front door slammed open and I found myself under attack from two tiny Jason Stathams, both shouting “MUMMY, MUMMY, OUR HEADS ARE FUZZY LIKE PEACHES, TOUCH THEM! TOUCH THEM!” I may have given a little scream of alarm.
So, my husband is not speaking to me because I wasn’t supportive of our sons’ exciting new haircuts, and I am not speaking to him because he allowed this atrocity to take place at all. It seems impossible to explain to him why this feels like such a betrayal without sounding like a stereotypically “hysterical female”, so instead, I have stropped off. But perhaps I can explain it to you.
Obviously, I know it’s just hair. And, having encountered hair before, I know it grows back. And I know it’s not rational to be so emotionally invested in my kids’ hair when their nail clippings are swept away without a second thought.
My mum-friends understand, though. Our kids’ hair is special. I still have the first curls I ever cut from my sons’ heads, sealed up in envelopes, and I wept over each one.
Only a couple of years ago, our five-year-old was a tubby, pink-cheeked little chatterbox, with rosebud lips and ringlets so pale and golden Botticelli himself might have dreamt him up. Now, he’s a long, angular schoolboy whose hair is darkening to a golden brown. Not only does this new shaving make him look, to me, too grown-up too soon – and too much like a newly-shorn army private for comfort – but the last of his baby blondness was there among the hairs the hairdresser clippered off his little head.
And I hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye.
So much of parenting – outside the everyday care-taking of small humans – is thrilling in the newfangled people children grow into every day, while secretly mourning the softer, younger versions they were six months, a year, five years ago.
These new kids are fast and exciting and squeeze your heart just as hard as the old ones did – but that doesn’t change the fact that those previous children are forever gone. Each haircut seems to dispatch them faster into history.
All this comes spilling out of me later, when the clothes are as folded as they can ever be, the kitchen is completely clear, and my husband and I are unburdening our souls to each other. Gradually, it becomes apparent that the real reason the haircuts rankle so much is because I feel I’m already missing out on too much of my kids’ childhoods.
Outside of work, the only parenting I do is transitional: putting them to bed, getting them to school, yelling at everyone to put their shoes on. The newer, harder-edged selves these haircuts seem to reveal only deepen the sense that my kids are becoming little strangers. “But they’re not,” my husband points out. “They couldn’t wait to come home and show you their new haircuts. And then you screamed,” he adds, needlessly, I feel.
And so, a little late-night maths is done; and a decision is reached. One month from now, the kids will start reduced childcare hours, and my working hours will be spread more thinly across the working week, so I get to spend more time – and decent time – with my children.
By then their hair will have grown in a little, and I will never ever let anyone else take charge of their haircuts ever again. Ever.