The quarantine has forced us all to master various new skills. For me, my newest job was to be the family barber.
The day before yesterday I managed (despite his loud protests) to cut my husband’s thick black locks. His eyes almost teared up at the sight of our bathroom floor covered with an ocean of black curls.
“Is there anything left on my head, woman?” he asked me with a hint of fear in his voice.
Before we began, I had strategically taken off his glasses and sat him far away from the mirror to avoid his potential instructions, which could distract me. Then the clippers started buzzing and I started to gather enough material for two male wigs under my feet.
The end result took my husband by surprise.
“This doesn’t look so bad,” he said, obviously appreciating my new talent and, I have to admit, my head began to swell. But as they say, ‘pride goeth before the fall…’
The next day I turned my attention to our three-year old son. With a big dose of self-confidence I put him in my “barber chair,” as a sudden thought flashed through my head: It’s great that we won’t have to go to the barber anymore even after the lockdown ends.
I swiftly grabbed the clippers and ran it through my son’s brown hair. The following couple seconds resembled a slow motion movie scene and my hand stopped mid-air as I gasped.
“Oh my God!” I cried staring at the shaved stripe on his head.
“You changed the extension, right?” my husband shouts from the kitchen.
I had completely forgotten that he trimmed his beard in the morning and had swapped the 16 mm extension for a 3mm.
“Mommy, will you give me a piece of candy?” my son, Filipe, asked because he realized that something was not right.
“Sure, Fili,” I reassured him, even though I knew that a whole bag of candy would not fix this.
“Hey, make sure you don’t turn him into Sithric, ok?” my husband alluding to my favorite Viking from The Last Kingdom, whose hairstyle is alternative to say the least.
Since at this point there was no turning back, I continued buzzing stripe after stripe into our son’s head. For a short moment it seemed that rather than the Vikings of The Last Kingdom, Filipe would resemble their Anglo-Saxon enemies, who tend to sport what would charitably be referred to as bad bowl-cuts.
“Is it done yet, mommy?“ Filipe asks impatiently.
“I am not sure, Fili,“ I answered honestly, because I was not sure whether I was making it better or worse.
In the meantime my husband, with our newborn son in his arms, had walked up to the bathroom door.
“That doesn’t look horrible.”
“You think so?“ I asked, trying to convince myself as I was running around Filipe, checking him from all sides and angles.
“I think he has a stylish haircut,“ my husband reassured me.
In the evening while I was writing this, Filipe ran to me with his giant sword on his back and I realized that this was meant to be. I simply wanted a Sithric at home.