About three weeks before my younger daughter started kindergarten, she was pestering me to trim her hair, particularly her bangs, which were getting in her eyes. I don't remember why I put her off, but I told her I'd get to it later. I was in my bedroom when she walked up, and said, "I got tired of waiting for you to trim my bangs, so I cut them off." And she had, all the way to the hairline. I remember clearly crying out as I sank to my knees, knowing there was no time to grow them out before picture day. An overreaction, perhaps. Now that I'm older, I can recognize that it was just hair, and it makes a better story having that goofy first school picture to show off. And I eventually got used to her hair misadventures. This might have been the first time (but I don't think it was), and it was certainly not the last. I'm not even sure it was the choppiest self-haircut to date.
The same daughter has had several eyebrow fails as well. (For the record, I'm not telling tales out of school. She has admitted to all of this on her own blog recently.) She has yet to figure out the proper shape her brows should be, nor does she understand the correct way to alter their color. When she was a freshman in high school, she was so frustrated with not knowing how to tweeze, that she took to shaving the shape she wanted. Her sister and I tried repeatedly to impress upon her how bad it looked, to no avail. This has been a point of contention for six or seven years now. And last week, rather than using a pencil to fill and alter the color of her brows, she used hair dye to match colors, and bleached a white spot into them. It was the bangs all over again. She shaved them off. Let me stress that word: Off. Unless you are Bob Geldof, referencing Syd Barrett, a razor should never touch your eyebrows. Even when I was in college and a very interesting trumpet-player friend dressed as the lead character from The Wall for Halloween, he used latex stage makeup to cover his eyebrows rather than shave them.
Why am I talking about my girl's hair catastrophes? I finally went back out and hacked at the grass in the back yard again. This is the third attempt, after all the rain, and the first since I came so close to heat stroke a few days ago. The longer it takes, the worse it is looking. Because I have to do so much mowing with the front wheels slightly elevated, and trying to focus on the longest sections, not where I mowed dog paths a week ago, the whole thing looks, in a word, horrible. It is shaggy and choppy and lumpy and every other word I can think of that suggests that it flat out sucks. It is possible that it is far worse than anything my girl has done in two decades of hair disasters. I really didn't want to show photos of it. But if she was brazen enough to smile proudly in that kindergarten picture, then I can be bold and show exactly what I have wrought in the Park. Unfortunately, I didn't think ahead when I tipped the mower over so far to take a picture after it jammed, and it flooded the engine with fuel, and refused to start again. So I gave up for the night, and I'm letting it settle in the shed. I will finish the last 400 square feet tomorrow, I suppose. Here's to looking like the goofiest kid in class.
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