Parenting
I cut my kids’ hair and am very happy with the results – even if one does resemble a Lego man
How was the midterm? Did you go anywhere? The shop? The garden? The shop again? Back to the garden? Thrilling stuff, wasn’t it. In the run-up to it we thought it would be a welcome break from the homeschooling. I was so optimistic about it that I took a few days off so I could alleviate the stress and help out about the house. According to my wife, this was a terrible idea as it just meant one more person loitering about the place dropping crumbs and holding laundry to a different standard of dryness. Because really all she wanted was another trail of bread particles leading her to a wardrobe crammed with badly folded, slightly damp clothes.
But my few days off did give me some sliver of insight into what it must be like for those who are working from home; the claustrophobia, the monotony, the constant eating.
The entire country must be feeling a little bit like Spunky the polar bear, a resident of Dublin Zoo in the early 2000s who went a little mad. Animal behaviour experts were brought in to analyse Spunky and figure out why she was pacing back and forth in the same spot, or hopping from paw to paw for hours at a time, and naturally her spouse was to blame. It turned out that she needed space to escape from her domineering estranger partner Ootec. It got so bad that both of them had to be deported to a zoo in Hungary where they had a little bit more space for Spunky to avoid Ootec.
Now that we have all had a taste of confinement I think we can relate a little bit better to Spunky’s plight — even if you aren’t a distressed polar bear trapped in a glass case with a domineering spouse, the lockdown is hard work.
By the end of the midterm I was feeling it, a constant exhausting weight on my shoulders, clouded thinking, and a short-term memory akin to that of a goldfish. The kids would ask for a sandwich and by the time I got to the kitchen I had forgotten what I was doing there. One game of hide and seek ran for half an hour as once I was finished counting down from 30 I had forgotten what I was meant to be doing and my two youngest both think they are world champions. But at least I was there to give my wife some bit of breathing room, and that, unlike Spunky, we have a decent sized enclosure in which she can roam and find her own space.
It was during one of these moments when she wasn’t around that I had the bright idea of cutting the boys’ hair. Around this time last year I cut the eldest boy’s hair, and he still hasn’t forgiven me for making him look like he had escaped from a Victorian asylum. But in my defence, I did use a nasal trimmer to do it so it was never going to be perfect.
This time was different as I had a proper shaver, and the youngest two were keen; one had been primed by his sister to get a mullet, presumably so that when he goes back to school he can pretend he
‘I was fully convinced the garda would ask where I got the clearly professional haircuts — but she didn’t’
spent his time off living with an art collective in a Berlin squat, while his younger brother demanded a mohawk, a fitting look for the Travis Bickle of the family.
I think I did a great job on both of them, although neither got the style they wanted and both ended up with the highest of high fades, with the youngest deciding he liked it as it made him look like a Lego man.
I felt so proud of my work and how professional it looked that I decided to take them into town for a bit of a walk, only to be confronted with a garda checkpoint. I was fully convinced that the garda would ask where I got the clearly professional haircuts, but she didn’t and, in fact, I think she was laughing at their hair from behind her mask. Everyone’s a critic. But needs must — the barbers won’t be reopening any time soon, and it’s one thing to be going slightly mad and another thing entirely to actually look like you’re going mad with wild, crazy hair.
But the news the schools might be reopening brought some hope — a slight return to something like normality, a little bit of space to breathe, a routine, an escape from the enclosure for our freshly shorn cubs, and a faint whisper of hope that someday soon we will all be released back into the wild.