Should I have cut my nearly 4 year old hair?? Some people think I'm odd for never taking her to the hairdressers (Including her dad!) - Kate
The cliché of motherhood that I have found to be the truest is that it all goes so incredibly fast and the pace is made even more disorientating by the fact that there is so much to take in. You're changing daily, the kid is changing nightly; it became so intense at one point, I thought I was going to wake up to be greeted by Tom Hanks in a babygro.
The worst thing about this is that we encourage it. Societal pressure and the inbuilt desire to see out children succeed sees us pushing the tot towards the next milestone with dogged determination - no sooner have they rolled we want them to crawl, they crawl we need them to walk and when it happens we sigh with relief, instead of bidding a fond farewell to the immobile days.
What does this have to do with hair? Everything. Don't feel weird, hair is an amusingly common source of angst for mothers. I've known friends to cry hot, angry tears over some unwitting relative doing them a 'favour' by giving their cherub a trim, even when the tot was literally blinded by their overgrown fringe. For many of us, never is too soon for the first hair cut.
My personal belief is because this is the only thing that we can leave unchanged without feeling like we're holding our child back. Those long locks are the very last piece of evidence that your baby is still your baby, in fact the hair on the end of those tresses is the very same hair that you stroked as you fed and comforted your newborn.
Sometimes I think the early days is a bit scary for the parent that isn't the primary caregiver, particularly when a mother is breastfeeding. It's such an intense relationship, I imagine it can feel a bit isolating for the old man to be reduced to an in house jester/pizza delivery service. As your daughter has become older his role has been able to grow and solidify and become something just as special and unique as the one you have with her. I might be going a bit Freud here but it would make sense to me that he is eager to get rid of the last vestige of those baby days.
So are you odd - no. Should you cut it. In my opinion yes. Partly because, who has time to braid three feet of hair every morning? And also because it's important for you to know that however high she grows and however far she roams, she will always be your baby.
Kate makes the most darling handcrafted creatures over at her shop Grace and the Monkey