Yesterday my mother-in-law had my son’s hair chopped off without my permission. Or my partial permission. She claimed that she was taking him in for a quick trim and brought him back without his signature curls. She and I have been at war over his hair it was long enough to be at war over. My son, like his father, has beautiful long curls that just beg you to run your fingers through them. It’s the kind of hair that strangers stop me in the grocery store to admire and fawn over. And now it’s gone. The icing on the cake is that this is the first time she has spent any time with my son since her and I last fuoght over something petty weeks ago, and she immediately goes for something she knows would upset me.
There are a few hundred parental violations involved here. Lying to me about what her plans were, using my son as a pawn for her revenge, not seeing what an awesome kid he is, the list could go on. But what really pissed me off was after she left. As we stood in the bathroom looking in the mirror my son beemed with pride and declared that he finally looked like a “real boy”. Whoa. Way to take a kid’s natural desire to please the people he loves and turn it into a classic lesson in boy vs. girl. And here I thought it was his other body parts that made him look like a “real boy”. So what was he before the hair cut? Plastic? A marionette perhaps?
I really hate the idea that at 3 he’s already getting pushed inside a box of what is “acceptable” and what isn’t. I actually got a kick out him being too little to understand the way gender is seen by most. He was a boy that played fast and loose with the rules, and was lucky enough to have parents who didn’t care. So when he wanted bright red sparkly shoes to wear with his monster truck outfit I said sure. When he picked out the purple bag with yellow daisies to carry his toy cars around in I put that one in the basket. When he would dance around the room and call himself a pretty ballerina I would applaud and tell him just how pretty he was. But now the seed has been planted as to what is OK for him to do and wear by other’s standards. I knew this concept would come, but I certainy didn’t want it happening so soon.
I’m sure for some it seems silly. After all, it’s just hair and it will grow back. But to me it’s like a first step in the wrong direction. Today it’s “real boys don’t have long hair”, tomorrow it will be “real boys don’t care for kids” or “real boys don’t do housework”. And it seems like just another example of an overall culture that has pretty messed ideas on what makes one male or female while centering far too much on how a person looks.
I read a post about the book 
Thank goodness we don’t have that here in America. Here we have companies like 
while I was in college. Then while I was pregnant with my first son I read 
, which really planted to seed in my head on looking outside the norm.
