Heidi had her first hair cut a few days ago. I cut it along with Whitney’s using a pair of hair sheers I bought for the occasion. Even though they’re just little girls, and I mean Heidi isn’t even talking yet, they reminded me of women leaving a salon after a particularly good, swingy cut. A little more animated and a little more, I don’t know, swingy?

I just kept thinking of all those women I’ve seen while they pay their bill at the salon’s reception area – how a group tends to huddle around the receptionist’s station. There’s the client (happy with new style), the stylist (happy with client’s happiness and charmed by their own talent), some other random stylist (I don’t know what their purpose is) and one receptionist (happy to be part of the happiness – and seriously what’s she so happy about?).

Heidi and Whitney, too, were very happy with their own new little swingy cuts. However they weren’t obsessively peering into the mirror, as I do at every single controlled intersection on the way home from my hair appointments. But even the newest, swingiest of cuts have their flaws. And the cuts I gave them were no different. – they were flawed.

The girls didn’t seem to notice and if they did, they didn’t seem to care. They didn’t subject Ben to long conversations regarding the advantages and disadvantageous of this cut, or why the front was intentionally left longer, or how the back will now require less maintenance. And he nods and makes umm sounds when appropriate but really all he’s thinking is Good lord woman do you have no mercy!

I’m not a professional stylist and it shows. Whitney’s hair was cut much too short. Her curls tight against her scalp. Heidi’s cut was better than Whitney’s, so I redoubled and refocused my energies obsessing over Whitney’s cut. In the end, to appease my angst over their little cuts, I bought bows for their hair.

However before I could get a grip, and like Ben suggested I “get over it”, their hair started to fill in around the uneven cuts, and the bows I bought have yet to resurface from the abyss of the truck’s floor, where they were promptly, and unceremoniously, chucked by the girls before we made it out of the mall’s parking lot.