His hair just grows and grows

Kia ora dear friends, paid subscribers will know I was sick last week. It turns out it wasn’t strep, it was Influenza A, and gosh I went down quickly. I was sick and then I was Very Sick. Got patched up very well at hospital but I have brain fog and no energy.

So here’s an essay for you that you might enjoy instead of the usual newsletter. We will be back to schedule next week. Still hoping to deliver Friday Night Chats but it might not happen. Thanks for understanding and sticking with me. I appreciate you more than you know.

When he was a baby, and he screamed, and screamed, and screamed, and screamed I would cry hot tears into his fuzzy head. Once my husband said he had Donald Trump hair and we both looked at each other aghast before dissolving into manic laughter.

His hair was thin, combed over, so often it was slick with sweat and tears. His fat body stuck to my bare chest, his tiny fingers pinching me again and again and again.

His father would reach for him and he would hiss and rake his tiny nails against my chest. I would cry, into his damp honeyed hair.

“We don’t know why he does that” was a common refrain. Why he screams at the sight of people, even family. How if you’re not his mum or his dad or his brother, if you move from the kitchen to the lounge room, even if he sees you do it - he is horrified by your sudden presence. Every appearance a jump scare.

“We don’t know why he does that” walking on tiptoes, yes it must hurt. Why he hums a deep, committed exhale, constantly. Why he won’t talk except to hum my name. “Mmmmmmummmmmm”.

A mother says, “the nights are the worst” and I don’t know how to say that sometimes I don’t know if it’s night or day. He never sleeps. The humming is constant.

His hair grows and if anyone touches it he becomes upset. He rubs his locks between his tiny fingers and closes his eyes. I cut his hair while he’s asleep and feel awful when he wakes to the betrayal. I promise myself I’ll never do it again.

His hair just grows and grows and it is so thick. It falls dead straight, not a curl in sight so it’s his father’s not mine. There’s no crown, no part and I can’t understand it. As I lie exhausted in bed, his body so much bigger now, trapping me - I search. How can you not have a part? I have a double crown, yet his hair just grows from nowhere.

I cut his fringe and I can finally see his eyes, staring up at me blazing with fury. Later I watch his familiar movements, he swishes his hair back and forth, back and forth, I watch it brush his neck and I can see how much he loves the feeling.

Self-stimulatory behaviours, that’s what they’d call it.

One day he tells me he wants all of his hair cut off. I try to reason with him but his mind is sometimes a steel trap. He has been reading a thesaurus and every day I hear words on words on words.

He is adamant, determined, dogged, headstrong, inflexible, intractable, ornery, persistent, relentless, rigid, single-minded, steadfast, tenacious, unshakable, willful.

When it is over, and plaits of his long hair cover the deck, he looks at me and says “I love it”. Two hours later he is sobbing. He swishes his head back and forth, there is nothing but a terrible emptiness behind him.

Barbara Hepworth’s Mother and Child 1927

His hair grows so fast and soon it covers his eyes. I try to create a part and it is impossible. He picks out colourful clips and screams when I try to put them in his hair.

I tie up his fringe and it reaches skyward, a whale spout and he looks in the mirror and smiles. At night I wake to hair, he tries to pull me closer and closer and I want to run. I dream of being choked by hair, swallowing and gasping as it wraps around my throat.

We try headbands and hats and three pony tails at once. I feel like a failure. Every child has hair and I can’t tame my child’s hair. I want to approach women in the supermarket with their thick-haired daughters and say ‘teach me’.

I watch Youtube videos on plaiting and I hate the women in them. “I’ll do it slowly this time” they say. But they don’t. They never do it slowly enough.

I am not enough for him. I am sure of it. He trails after me and in my exhausted state I say ‘Just five minutes alone’ and he says ‘no, I need mum. I need my mum’. His hands move at pace, drawing angry skies with twitching fingers. ‘Mine’ he says over and over as he pinches my neck.

I draw the comb through my hair, make a perfect part. I slick my hair and tie it tight. I am orderly. I look at him with his mane, he swishes his hair back and forth. I have shaved the back of my head to give my nape room to breathe.

He wraps his arms around my neck and says “mum” and it sounds like “mine” and it sounds like “more” and I wonder if I have anything left.

I pull his hair into a ponytail and it springs free immediately. He looks up at me and giggles - toothless and beautiful. He is so beautiful that I can’t breathe. His long fringe cannot cover his eyes filled with love.

His hair grows and grows and so does he and so do I and we try and try. And there’s so many highs and so many lows and every time a tooth comes loose he swallows it.

He runs around the house horrified. Mouth open like a scream. Without words he begs me to explain why parts of his body are gone, going, what will go next?

And then suddenly his fringe has grown long enough to tuck behind his ears. He is a tiny Neil Young in pink tracksuit pants with binoculars around his neck.

I brush his hair and he pinches at my thigh. He turns around and his moon face is inches from my moon face.

Everyone says we have the same face.

As his hair has become domesticated, mine has become wild, greying with curls that take up space. Longer than it has ever been.

He loves it.

He moves my head in the shape of a no. He teaches me how to feel my hair on the back of my neck. He teaches me. He is always teaching me.

He squeezes my cheeks. Touches my nose. Then climbs into the skin of my neck.

It hurts at first and then it doesn’t. Then it feels as if it was always meant to be this way.

He crawls into my diaphragm, turns slightly to the left at my sternum. He settles there in my chest, between my right and left lungs, protected by my rib cage, surrounded by the pericardium.

I am tired. But I am lucky. I know he is safe there. His hair curls around my ribs and softens any blows from the outside world.

His hands make maps, the geography of my heart forever changed by him. The roads he has made, the streets he paved - a little red pin in the centre of my heart for him that says ‘you are here’. When his fingers tap and pinch I feel flutters through my skin between every beat.

It is an arrhythmia I have come to understand so well. The unsteady beat reminding me there is love in every cell of my body because of that little boy.

We grow, we grow. Together we grow.

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