First Haircut, New York 2023
The day we first cut his hair — I write “we" because it does feel something collaborative, doesn’t it? Something done together. There is the one with the hair, the one with scissors, the one saying: yes, please, go and cut his hair (and what right do I have? But somehow, this, my mothering right.) And so there on a stool (the kind with a step for climbing) in the kitchen of a new friend (a mother from school), the day outside autumn cold, this room warm and smelling faintly of cabbage and popcorn, there she is cutting his hair in grand and graceful strokes, a conductor, a dance with hands and hair. When she has finished I am startled to find there is something new about him. The way this same hair now settles down around his face, something uncovered, a revelation: he is growing into himself.
I carry home all his precious hair in a plastic bag made for corn tortillas. There is no other reason I can name except: I cannot bear to leave it behind.
Days later, I discover something has been happening inside that bag for corn tortillas. The hair inside has grown itself together, has started to hold itself together, all those flinging leaping swinging curls now a single and solid thing I can hold all at once and with the tips of my fingers.
This hair, I can’t stop thinking it: the very ends of this hair — the hair he was born with, the hair there at his birth, the very moment of his birth — this hair knew inside my womb, once floated and drifted, tossed and touched and swam circles inside my womb.
And is this all that’s left? Can this be all that’s left?
I can’t stop thinking it.