Imagine even shorter bangs!
I have gotten up early my whole life, except for my teenaged years when I ran marathons in my sleep and didn’t wake up until I finished. As an early morning child, after finishing my sugar-laden cereal, I could explore drawers and closets without anyone asking, “What are you looking for?” This is the kind of unanswerable question that grownups ask curious children. Imagine walking through the woods admiring the trees, and as you bend down to look at a mushroom, someone asks you, “What are looking for?” The answer is nothing, everything, I’ll know when I find it, or maybe, you are asking the wrong question.
Most of life is hidden, and just as the birdwatcher needs time and patience to see the birds beneath the canopy of trees, so the child needs space to explore her world, including drawers and closets, the repositories of grownups’ secrets.
Looking through places in the house became a habit. In the mornings, I could go through most of the house, but not the bedrooms, at least not the only bedroom of real interest: my parents’ room. Entrance into that room required an invitation, and if occupied, a knock.
But parents are not always at home and big sisters have better things to do than follow little sister around. I must have been in second grade when I sneaked into my parents’ bedroom. In the small drawer next to where Mother kept her underwear, I found a picture of a tiger I had colored in school. I had pressed down on the crayons, so the vivid yellowish-brown eyes glowed from the orange and black-striped creature that stood among the green, yellow-green, light green, and turquoise leaves. Seeing it there secreted in her drawer was like coming face to face with a real tiger, one of my own creation, which now lived in this unexplored place. I felt happy that she would keep the colors that flowed out of me.
In that same drawer, I found a small envelope with her name written on it in textbook-perfect cursive letters. Inside were short, brown hair clippings, not more than a tablespoon worth. They were mine.
One day during craft time in first grade, my best friend, Donna, leaned over and said, “I can see your bangs growing.” Her words both thrilled me and alarmed me. Donna could see the tiny hairs, still alive at the roots, pushing into the world, threatening my eyes.
Cutting your own hair was forbidden in our house, but nothing had ever been said about having friends cut your hair.
Our teacher was busy helping L.D. wash his hands, which he had painstakingly covered with the paste he had developed a craving for. Donna held the blunt-nosed scissors and clipped quickly. In those days, teachers had eyes in the back of their head; at the second clip, she turned around and looked directly at Donna and me. Just like a game of Swing the Statue, we froze, Donna keeping the scissor hand suspended in the air, waiting for the teacher to come over and touch us to unfreeze us.
Instead, she said, “Come here girls.”
A moment earlier I had been enthralled at Donna’s powers of observation and her willingness to help me. The look on our teacher’s face and her tone of voice shook my confidence in my friend.
“Scissors are for cutting paper, Donna,” she said.
Donna started crying. Everyone in the room quieted down and looked at us. We were facing Mrs. Severe, so they could see only the teacher’s solemn face and the shaking shoulders of Donna as she cried. Mrs. Severe reached into her desk and pulled out a small envelope. She walked over to the small tables where we sat, gathered up my hair clippings, and put them inside the envelope.
“I’m going to call your mother tonight to make sure she gets these.” Then she went to the shelf where we kept our lunch boxes, opened the metal clasp, and put the envelope inside.
And she did call. Mother got out her haircutting scissors and evened out Donna’s work, leaving me only about an inch of bangs. Above my freckled nose loomed a white forehead, best hidden. The short hairs looked like the edge of a failed crew cut.
Mother had kept that envelope and the picture of my tiger. She was not very affectionate toward me, but here in this hidden, intimate place she kept parts of me. I opened her perfume jar and inhaled her sweet smell and loved her, secretly, like she loved me.
year-struck 
So, how many times does this make that you’ve made me cry?
I imagine you know Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays.” This ending struck me a bit like that…
I love Hayden’s poem. When I write about my mother, I feel like I am going through the memories, still looking, and sometimes finding, what it is I need to find.
Beautiful….
Thank you.
A lovely post. We never stop missing our moms do we? No matter how long they’ve been gone.
Never.
Lovely story.
Thanks so much.
This post is beautifully written.
I appreciate your comment.
Touching and well written.
Thanks, Kate.
Beautifully written!
“Imagine walking through the woods admiring the trees, and as you bend down to look at a mushroom, someone asks you, “What are looking for?” The answer is nothing, everything, I’ll know when I find it, or maybe, you are asking the wrong question.”
This quote made me think about the perplexed look my nephew, Sam, gives me when I ask him what he’s doing. “I don’t need the kind of narrow purpose you old people do,” his look says. He knows we adults like to get specific, concrete answers, so usually he invents something: “I’m playing.” Which is about the truest answer he could probably give, though it also occurs to me that we aren’t satisfied even with that answer. Inevitably someone asks, “What are you playing with?” Sam comes up with an answer, “I’m playing with my monkey,” which leads to more questions from the adults: “What’s your monkey’s name? What does he like to do? Who gave him to you?” I realize that we’re training him to be like us, to break down reality, to categorize and locate everything into some kind of convenient framework, to come up with reasons for doing things.
Thanks for the great post!
Thank you for your comments and for reading. If life were a frog, most adults would feel the need to dissect it. They would gain mastery over the frog by knowing how it could jump, eat, procreate, etc. Then they would write books about it. Children would hold the frog, let it wiggle and jump, and splash through puddles with it. And most of all, children would love the frog for no special reason. I want to be like that when I grow up.
One of my favorite quotes: “And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes—how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know.”
–Albert Camus in “The Myth of Sisyphus”
You write so beautifully — it makes me cry. I want to write like you when I grow up.
Thank you so much for the compliment.
This recollection just made me cry…again!
I just discovered how to click on a button and see updates from the blogs that I follow. Wowsers! I’ve missed so much good writing! lol
Thank you for reading. Isn’t it great to figure out something like that.
This is so beautiful that it hurts. You touch the core.
Thank you, Myra. It encourages me a lot that you read it and liked it.
That is such a sweet story…Love it!
Thank you, JSD.
i love how you wove this one. very sweet and touching… hello, ms. yearstricken 😉
So happy that you liked this one.
o, it touches the heart whenever one reads a post about mother-daughter relationships… your mom must be a tough cookie, ms. yearstricken… 🙂
I’m glad you liked the story about my mom. She was a tough cookie. (Again, sorry about the delay in responding; another one in my spam folder.)