Mama-Come-Lately

My husband Mowgli (not his real name) is from Southern India, and as such, has certain traditions he follows when it comes to babies. Among these: Not cutting the baby’s hair for the first 11 months. Here’s some information on the custom if you’re curious.

I do not share my husband’s beliefs, but I support them, as he supports mine. Which is why I did my best to keep my kvetching to a dull roar during the four or five months I had to deal with the baby’s increasingly unruly hair. Here’s the kvetchitude post on that in case you missed it.

The date of Baboo’s haircut was fixed by consulting the Hindu astrological calendar. Rather, my mother-in-law, who lives in India, consulted a priest who consulted said calendar. If we lived there, we would likely have had a ceremony in a temple, but since we don’t, we simply plunked the baby in his high chair, put some Cheerios in front of him, and started snipping.

My mother was on hand to help us — a good thing, because not only was my husband sick, but she used to cut my and my brothers’ hair, and my hair cutting experience is limited to clumsy attempts at giving myself bangs in the mid ’80s. This is something I should never attempted, as I have a massive cowlick.

Grammie and I took turns making sure the baby was distracted by the aforementioned Cheerios or a glass of water while the other one wielded the scissors and tried to neither stab the baby in the neck nor give him a bowl cut. These twin goals were rendered more difficult to achieve by the baby’s insistence on whipping his head around to find the source of the snipping sounds.

Every last bit of hair we cut off Baboo’s little noggin was deposited on a paper towel so that it could be bundled with some money in a hankie that had been soaked in turmeric water and dried. This package will be sent to Mowgli’s mom so she can take it to a temple and do what needs to be done with it to complete the process.

After half an hour, with Baboo starting to get fussy, we called it good. There are a few spots we’re going to refine, but generally, we now have a baby who looks much more like a little boy than an infant.

And yes, that means I cried a little when I stepped back to look at the overall effect and recognized the transformation. Because even though I was more than done with being a baby hair wrangler, I don’t think I’ll ever be done with thinking of my baby as a bay-bee.