Christa D'Souza

The distress call had to come. And so it did. My ten-year-old son, the one “with all the hair”, as he is known among my contemporaries, has finally decided he wants it all chopped off. Curses to the stupid debating course we sent him away on. That’s what must have prompted it, all those children he’d never met before mistaking him for a girl. Why, why, why, I wail to myself, did we make him do it? But you cannot turn back time, and besides, he is obdurate. Offers of money, a trip to Thorpe Park, a trip to bloody Six Flags in California, even, fall flat on the ground. So now all there is to do is to count the days, the hours, the minutes, before it actually happens. I need to get as much of those Annie-style ringlets as I can before they go.

 

If you wonder why I have kept his hair so long for all this time, you would not be in the minority. There are quite a few friends who look on it as a mild form of middle-class child abuse. God, but people can be intrusive when it comes to judging other people’s children, can’t they? Are they worried their own little boys will want to grow their hair long too? Is keeping a little boy’s hair long in some way semaphore for dirtiness, or worse, neglect? Maybe they’re scared of nits, which they surely shouldn’t be. There couldn’t be a more high-maintenance child than my ten-year-old, what with having to comb his hair out every night. Yet still my mother-in-law will always make a point of saying she only has to so much as look at him and she starts scratching her head . . .

 

There’s no twisting of an arm here. Hand on heart, I promise I have never prevented him from having it short. He has always, ever since he was tiny, wanted to keep it long and has assiduously assured us he never gets bullied, not even at football club. Where, um, it has to be said, either his nanny or myself are always standing on the side, cracking our knuckles.

 

Am I guilty of facilitating, of shielding him from real life? Well, maybe a little bit. The moment I got a whiff of playground teasing I whipped him out of one school into another where, not so coincidentally, lots of boys have hair long enough to put into a ponytail. Meanwhile, I try as hard as I can to keep a long hair positive household. His father, I know, has secretly been hoping he’ll have it cut for years, but neither he nor his three other brothers (all of whom have short back and sides) would dare articulate that in front of me. And anyway, its kind of fun having this little mop-haired kid around the house. Girls simply love it. As his 23-year-old brother puts it, he’s such a a babe-magnet.

 

I wouldn’t put it past his dad, who takes him regularly, a deux, to the football, to have sneakily set the ball rolling. He swore not, but when I delivered the sad news while he was away on business, I could almost hear the sound of air being punched.

 

And so the day inevitably comes. I wake up feeling a little like Anne Of The Thousand Days. At the same time, I know in my heart it is the right thing. Since he made the decision, it has all come tumbling out. How he DOES get bullied at football when we are not there, how they DO call him a she-male, and, sob, purposely not pass him the ball because he looks too much like a girl. He’s sick too of girls wanting to constantly touch his hair, sick of the way immigration officers always make jokes about his passport picture, not to mention the way it gets in his eyes when he’s playing football. God. Does that mean he’s only been keeping it long for his mother’s sake? Is that what his pre-designated role within the family is? To be, as it were, the house ‘dolly’? Is this all because I never produced a girl?

 

We treat the event as the important ritual it is, assembling a small crowd to watch at my hairdresser Josh Wood, me telling him every ten minutes that if he wants to change his mind, no problem, not even half way through — there are always hair extensions, after all.

 

An hour and a half later, he has short hair and a quiff and we can see the back of his neck. In short, he is not a conversation piece any more — he is a normal, perfectly handsome ten-year-old. Like his next eldest brother he has become a slave to the mirror, and his new obsession, after not caring about anything but football kit, is now Topman (could someone tell Philip Green to do XXXXS? Please?). I think he might have grown a bit too, not just emotionally, but physically. Are they perhaps only now discovering the link between very long hair on boys and stunted growth?

 

Meanwhile, the curls are in a paper bag under my bed. Ghoulish, I know, but I can’t let go: not just yet. Although in retrospect his hair was very long and I can now understand why it was a little infantalising, and why people might have perceived it, on my part, as an affectation, I miss those ringlets. The end of an era, and all.