Golden child

After more than nineteen months of it, it’s still amusing to me when people look at my unremarkably medium brown hair, and my wife’s luscious dark red hair, and then look at our little Samson’s fair blond hair and try to puzzle it all out. The cognitive dissonance fun continues when we inform them that I was blond for the first few years of my life, too; apparently it might be harder for some people to picture me blond than it is for them to picture me acting shy.

So yeah, given the fact that me and both my brothers and our dad all started out blond, and we have four different hair colors among us now, I wasn’t surprised at all by Samson’s lightly-pigmented locks. What I was a little surprised by was the reverse male-pattern baldness his hairline has followed. The fringe from above his ears around the nape came in first, eventually filling in on the top of his head, but thanks to the head start in back, until recently he looked very much like he was rocking the Compensatory Mullet look. Not that any of this bothered me, or worried me (for once!). I knew a full head of hair for Samson was in the offing, and many a child goes bemulleted for a while before his or her first haircut.

I thought that said milestone was quite a ways off, even though whirling clouds of ringlets were sprouting from behind my son’s ears. My wife had gone from vowing to never cut his hair (she has also vowed to keep him forever and ever, specifically living in our basement well into his 30’s, so, you know, that was an “uh huh, we’ll see”) to engaging me hypothetically on the subject of taking Samson to Kartoon Kuts or whatever, and whether or not that was a worthwhile idea. (My take was that if she wanted to take him to the mall for haircuts in the future, no time like the present to get Samson acclimated; but if my wife wanted to cut his hair herself for a while, no need to make a big excursion event out of the first shearing.) As one half of a marriage of overthinkers, I usually expect the hypothetical discussion stage for any given topic to last anywhere from two months to two years, so it threw me for a loop when my wife asked me to get the hair-trimming scissors last night as Samson was finishing his bath. But I obliged, and a minute later he was out of the tub and sitting in the sink, while my wife snipped off an inch or two from the hairs on the back of his head.


And just like that, boom, milestone reached and in the past. Which is exactly as it should be, it’s not like we’re talking about graduation here (be it kindergarten, college, or other), it’s just a haircut. It’s not a milestone that Samson actively reached, like “wow now he can sit up” or “wow now he’s walking” or “wow now he can climb up on a chair and from there to the dining room table and is someone going to get him down from there before he basejumps onto a pile of trucks with very sharp corners?!” I guess when I look at it, it’s more of a milestone actively reached for us, his mother and I, because it means we were ready to let go of the “baby who’s never had a haircut” aspect of him. And I didn’t even know I was ready until it had already happened.