Another first, sooner or later
Our baby had a lot of hair. The kind of wild, unkempt hair you'd find at a 1984 Quiet Riot concert, or maybe in a Tarzan movie.
"How old is she?" a grandma at the park asked as she pushed her well-trimmed grandson on the swing.
Heck, that's a good haircut, I thought, noticing the way her grandson's hair didn't hide the fact that he had ears.
"He's 16 months old," I said, pushing my baby boy in the next swing over, his blond locks flowing in the breeze.
"Oh, I'm sorry," she said, trying to cover the fact that she mistook my future quarterback for a debutante. "I thought ..."
"A lot of people do," I interrupted, giving my son another push. "His mother doesn't want to cut his hair. She thinks that'll make him grow up and start smoking."
At 16 months, our son had never had a haircut. He looked like the Beatles before they broke up, somewhere around "Yellow Submarine." Yeah, he had enough hair to knit a sweater.
"He's got a mullet," I told my wife when my son and I got home. "He looks like an extra from 'Dukes of Hazzard.'"
"It is not a mullet," she said, twirling his curls with her fingers. "It's beautiful. He's a ..."
"Pretty princess," I finished.
There's something about a wad of bouncy hair on a baby's neck that turns mommies into the mad character from a 1950s sci-fi movie, if not slightly more obsessed. Remember the one about the scientist who took his fiancée's head out of a car wreck and kept it alive in a lasagna pan? Yeah, moms are something like that.
Mommy logic goes like this: A big mess of baby curls is a symbol that the baby will be a baby forever and will, therefore need mommy forever. Where this logic fails is the fact that big-and-tall stores don't sell onesies for a 38-inch waist.
What mommies also don't realize is that when their baby boys are 37 and living in their basement, the now-balding baby will still need mommy because he can't pick up after himself, cook or hold a conversation that doesn't involve the new episode of "Stargate Atlantis." And, unless mommy is finally ready to get her baby out of the house, she'll be happy about it.
Please hold me, I'm scared.
"He's a big boy. He walks, he knows a cow says 'moo,' and he's figured out how to flush the toilet," I said. "When are we going to get his hair cut?"
My wife smiled, brushing the baby's hair from his eyes.
"Never."
Our baby got a haircut two days later. Not because of anything I said, of course. He just kept tripping over his bangs.
