Finally, a Haircut!

Last summer Michael began resisting hair cuts. He had always had his hair cut fairly short before. I did the best that I could with the clippers and he was happy with it. Then he decided that long hair was cool and short hair was lame.

What's a mom to do? I am rather old-fashioned when it comes to hair on the opposite sex; it should be short and neat. I forced him to cut his hair a few times. We compromised by going to a hairdresser and having her cut it at a length that we could both live with.

Then Morgan stepped in. Morgan was raised a lot more liberally than I was. He told me that his mom made him keep his hair short and when he was a teenager, he rebelled by growing it long (among other things.) Morgan's philosophy was that if we give Mike control over his hair now, maybe he won't feel so inclined to rebel as much as a teenager. "After all," Morgan argued, "it's only hair."

I acquiesced, with the stipulation that if the hair was to be long, it had to be clean. So this is how Mike has looked for the better part of the last year:



It drove my mother NUTS! Every time she saw him, she would make a comment about his hair, telling him how much more handsome he would be if his hair was short. He quietly accepted her criticism until one day, when he told me that he wished she wouldn't say anything about his hair. I told her that she needed to stop and she did, but I could tell that it was painfully difficult for her to hold her tongue.

I'll be honest: at first I too tried to convince him to cut it, but he always insisted on keeping it long.

Then one day last week, out of the blue, he told me he wanted his hair cut. I tried to disguise my glee. Here is the final product:



I forgot that he had eyebrows! I also forgot how much he looks like my dad.

So, the big question: I knew when I married Morgan that we would have differences in how our children were raised, specifically because my family is/was a lot more conservative than his family. I didn't, however, realize how difficult it would be to go along with a choice that my spouse would make when it went against my feelings, and it was only hair!

How would you have handled it?