My nine-year-old looks like a tiny, unhoused Victorian orphan, and I have made my peace with it.
Mostly.
The hair is down to his nose now. Past it, if he tilts his head. When he eats, he does this practiced little flip to get it out of the way, the way surfers do in movies, except he is not a surfer, he is a small engineer who has been eating the same nine foods since 2022 and has strong opinions about the structural integrity of a taco.
People notice the hair. They don't say *hobo*, they're too polite for *hobo*, but I can see them doing the math. Nice enough kid. Clearly loved. So why does he look like he wandered in off a freight train. His typical 9-year-old refusal for a bath or shower long enough to actually get fully wet or use soap isn't helping much either.
I want to explain him. I want to hang explanation signs for each of my kids around their necks before they encounter any public person or place. I don't, and explaining my kids takes too long, and honestly, I'm so tired of translating my kid in my head a hundred times a day, that I'm just glad most people are too polite to voice what they must be smelling. And my heart breaks a little bit when I see he has been discounted - because they person or people who judged so quickly won't meet the little man with 2 different color eyes, an amazingly soft and loving heart, and one of the sharpest minds they will ever encounter.
But I'll tell you.
Everett is autistic.
Everett is autistic.
The reason I said it twice is because the first time, most people hear it as an explanation, or an excuse, like I've handed them a form that closes the case. It isn't. It's the opening of a much longer sentence, the start of an impossible little man that I struggle to understand, and an impossible diagnosis that means SO many different things to SO many different people. So today the rest of that sentence isn't the list I could recite, it is about hair.
Here is what a haircut is, for Everett. It is a loud room. It is a stranger with a buzzing machine getting inside the six-inch bubble that keeps the world at a survivable distance. The buzz causes him to wince the moment we walk in the door, before he even gets to sit in the fun little car or plane seat. By the time it's his turn to start, his shoulders are scrunched so high you wouldn't be able to find his ears. It is the feeling of tiny cut hairs raining down the back of a neck that already reports
everything:
every tag, every seam, every wrong sock, straight to headquarters at full volume. It is his own reflection changing into someone he didn't agree to become. And it's tears if he doesn't make it through the cut, because little kids can be, and are, mean. They will make fun of him for any number of reasons. Uneven hair, color that's turned, a bloody nose, or his inability to understand the nuance of "comedy" for any other 9 year old boy.
For me, a haircut is fifty dollars and a setting aside some time on any random Tuesday. For Everett, it is a small controlled demolition of the one thing he can predict, the one thing he desperately wants to retain complete control over: himself.
So he says no. And he means it the way he means all his no's: completely, at the cellular level, with no back door, no compromise, no bribe.
Here's the part where I'm supposed to have won this:
I'm the mom. I'm bigger (for a few more years, at least). I have car keys and clippers and the moral authority of a woman who would like her child not to be mistaken for a folk singer. There is a version of this where I decide the hair is coming off, and it comes off, and he cries, and it grows back, and we all move on, because that's what parents did to us and we turned out ...gestures vaguely... fine.
I don't do that version.
Not because I'm soft. Because I did the math too, and it came back different than the strangers'. What I'd be buying, with that firm foot I'd stomp down, is a kid who learned that his no about his own body doesn't count when it's inconvenient for me. That the people who love him most will hold him down for tidiness. That the bubble isn't real if the right person decides it isn't. I might be bigger, but I do not consider myself
Better, and I refuse to stomp out what makes my kid, my kid.
That's an expensive haircut. It's not worth it.
So the hair stays. It stays until *he* decides, and he will, eventually, on some random ordinary day, announce that today is the day, the way he announces everything, out of nowhere, fully decided. And so then I'll drop whatever I'm holding and drive him ever so quickly to see Ms Candace, before he changes his mind. He may even be willing to shower after than haircut since those little hairs drive him crazy. Win/win for me?!
Until then, my kid looks like a hobo.
A loved one. A chosen one. One I wouldn't trade for anything or anyone in the world. A hobo who knows, all the way down, that his no is a real thing that the biggest person in his life will honor even when it embarrasses her a little every time we walk out the door.
I'll take the hair. And the love and gratitude that come along with that compromise.
It's his head, anyway.
-
Holly
| The Other Side of the Screens
