Adventures in home haircutting

When it comes down to it, despite our differences, I think all parents want the same thing for their children. And that thing is that their kid doesn’t end up killing them as revenge for a horrifyingly awful home haircut they received when they were 2-years-old.

No? Just me then?

Well, rejoice and sleep tight tonight because I sure as hell never will again.

I’m not even sure how it all got so out of control. One minute I’m trimming his bangs and then suddenly BAM! I’m reenacting the topiary scene from “Edward Scissorhands.” Mercilessly I hacked my way across his skull as bits of murdered fluffy baby curls swirled chaotically in the air and the snip, snip, snip of the pathetically dull scissors filled the room.

I should have known things were going bad judging by the utter terror on my husband’s face.

But it just didn’t hit me. And so I kept going. Snip, snip. Oblivious. Snip. Reckless. Snip, snip, snip. And SOBER, for god sake.

Until, suddenly, horrifyingly, it did. It did hit me.

Hard.

And as I surveyed the damage on the tiny battlefield I could only think one thing:

“There goes any chance I had of ending up in a decent nursing home.”

I had turned my beautiful baby boy into Lloyd Christmas. Into Moe from “The Three Stooges.” Into, god forgive me, Shia LeBeouf post-meltdown. My baby’s hair was a mess. Just…oof. Such a hot mess.

The back looked like it had lost a battle to the death with a deranged weed whacker while the left side looked like a terraced field in some exotic land. As for the right, it looked like the bastard child of a pixie cut and the mid-90’s Caesar haircut, a la George Clooney on “ER.” Most of the top was confusingly left long while the front resembled my own bangs that I brutally hacked as a child right before school picture day in 1988.

In my defense, I’m an idiot. An idiot who thought years of butchering my Barbies’ hair with asymmetrical mullets could translate into real world haircutting skill.

Hint: It doesn’t.

But, oh, how I want to be the kind of mom who can do these types of things. You know, those Do-It-Yourself queens who can sew buttons back onto their children’s shirts and can serve a beautiful, homemade birthday cake without the disclaimer “The middle is still a bit raw and I may have lost my wedding ring in there so be on the lookout, everyone.”

These are the moms who make their own non-toxic cleaning solutions and actually attempt to get stains out of clothes instead of just convincing themselves that the wine stain makes that skirt look even MORE trendy. They can do crafts that don’t end up looking like rejects from an animated Tim Burton film and they have nice handwriting and they actual own first aid kits. They know how to fix things and make things and don’t have to pay other people to do all this stuff for them.

Legend has it there are even women out there who can cut their family’s hair without making them look like a Simpson character.

And then there’s me, who has yet to pick up her 2-year-old son’s birth certificate from the county clerk’s office, has not one, but three, giant mystery stains on her hardwood floor and is banned from ever using a glue gun again because of an unfortunate accident involving a rather sensitive part of her husband’s body.

The good news is that ultimately all this makes me a fantastic parent if you consider the definition of a parent to be “someone who, if they’ve done their job right, have made themselves obsolete.” I mean, hell, I’m pretty much obsolete now. As soon as he learns to cut those crusts off his sandwiches, he might as well move out because we will pretty much be at the same adulting level.

Then again, who knows? Maybe I can learn to be one of those moms. I mean, if he go from a leaky lump of clay who sticks spoons into his eyeballs into a short, almost-human who can average getting roughly 65 percent of his chili in his mouth using said spoons, then honestly how hard can it be to remember to buy band-aids and rubbing alcohol so I’m not frantically running down the aisles of Walgreens with a screaming and bloody toddler in tow?

Hell, maybe I’ll even attempt the very adult act of throwing a dinner party again.

Just as soon as I figure out where my husband hid all the knives after last year’s Gumbo Disaster of 2015.