Major Bad Hair Day

When my son Tyler comes home from college, he’s way overdue for a haircut. Tyler attends school at the University of South Carolina so homecoming is at Christmas, spring break and summer. He claims the barber on campus does chop jobs and won’t go there anymore.

At Christmas, Tyler simply borrowed his friend Chad’s clipper set, complete with several attachments to dummy-proof the length of hair clipped. The clippers I have for my cats has just one blade length and God forbid my child use a tool on his beautiful head that had touched cat hair. I clipped Tyler’s hair at Christmas with Chad’s clippers and had very positive results, both of us happy that we’d saved money too.

The evening before Tyler was scheduled to take the Greyhound back to South Carolina, he borrowed Chad’s clippers again. However this time, the clippers made a sporadic ear-splitting noise at somewhere around 90 decibels. Occasionally, the cacophony would suddenly switch to the healthy low-pitched buzzing and we’d sigh with relief. Then, it would start back up again. I experimented with different settings and blades to see if I could fix the clippers, but nothing worked for more than a few seconds.

Tyler and I resigned ourselves to just trying to get his overgrown locks trimmed quickly in spite of the distracting dissonance. After trimming the bulk of his thick, brunette hair, I blame the raucous clippers for what happened next. I folded down Tyler's ear in order to clip the hairs behind it. I had taken the attachment off so I could trim closely. A demon possessed the instrument of evil and touched the side of his head in two areas, leaving parallel stripes about a half inch in width, three inches long. Tyler said he knew it was serious when I dropped the F-bomb.

I was horrified; Tyler was too…initially. I apologized profusely, memories of the time I convinced my mother to let me cut her bangs coming back to haunt me. Back when I was a teen, and probably now too, bangs weren’t normally worn only one inch down from the hairline.  

Thank goodness Tyler has the ability to forgive and see humor even at his own expense. His sister Kelsey couldn't stop laughing and promised that if I’d messed up her hair like that, she’d hate me forever. I suggested he wear a hat until it grew back out and offered to take Tyler to a hair stylist for a fixer-upper. He didn’t think my mistake could be covered up and came up with a solution of his own; I had to give him a Mohawk and make it look like an intentional new doo. A Mohawk was on his bucket list anyway, or so he says.

Tyler took the clippers and got his Mohawk started. I finished it up and did the back. My son looks pretty good considering; kind of like the character Puck from Glee. He’s been told he looks “badass”, but cautioned not to complete his new look with gauge earrings or tattoos. Tyler says he still loves his mother, although I’m sure he will use this little incident against me for years to come.



Kelsey and Tyler