What was wrong with this picture?  As I stood in my kitchen talking on the phone with my girlfriend, I kept glancing out the window suspiciously, towards the sound of singing.  My five-year-old sat contentedly on the swing set in the back yard.  Something was not right with what I was seeing, but I could not put my finger on it. 

          You see, it is usually the absence of noise that signals childhood mischief, but I could see her clearly and she was simply swinging…wait a minute, that’s it!  I could see her but not clearly because of the distance between us.  I asked my girlfriend to hold on a second, momentarily placing the phone on the counter.  Leaning out the back door, I called my child over to me.  Hopping off of the swing happily, she skipped toward the house.

 As she drew near, my eyes became riveted to her forehead, where her bangs had once been.  My baby gave herself a reverse mohawk! I saw what looked like a small monk!  She had somehow sheared off all of her forehead hair.  In mortified shock I grabbed the phone up and cried to my friend, “You have to come over and look at my baby girl’s hair”!  As I hung up the phone, I asked my child what she had done.  She looked concerned at my anger and said, pointedly, “My hair was in my eyes, so I got out your sewing scissors and cut it off”!  I was in tears by the time my girlfriend walked in and I turned to her for comfort in my hour of need. 

All I received, though, was her hysterical laughter.  Point in fact, she laughed for a good bit, to my dismay. 

“How can you laugh” I cried!  “It’s not funny”! 

As she tried to contain her laughter, and not very well I might add, my friend said, “I know this seems awful, but her hair will grow back.  Look, kids do things like this.  I am sorry for laughing but I can’t help it!  Its hilarious, really it is!  I am sure you will look back on this and laugh someday.  In fact, you can laugh at anything my kids do to me when it happens.  I will even call you first.”

After my girlfriend left, I had to hunt down all the evidence to be found.  Underneath my own bed, I retrieved my scissors, as well as a massive pile of hair.  There was a lot more contributions of hair than I had anticipated, which was alarming to me.  My thoughts raced to my other children, then to the dogs and cats we shared our house with.  When I asked whose hair this belonged to, she confidently took me to her toy pony.  The poor jumpy horse had received an army style crew cut, and was never the same after that, the poor thing.   

Of course, my girlfriend was right! I did look back and laugh. 

And if you are wondering, I did have the occasion to take her up on that offer.  Several years later I got to laugh at what her child did to her.  That, however, is another story…