"Samson" Gets A Haircut

What an itchy summer. The heat has been getting to us in a huge way. Waves and waves of it hit us first thing in the morning as we get up out of bed, shading our eyes from the treacherous sun that has gotten in through the blinds. And at night, we toss and turn despite the air-conditioning, our nightclothes sticking to our sweaty skin.

Woog has raised bumps and welts on the folds of his elbows and knees. Atch has had a major upsurge of flat warts on his neck, red and angry like adolescent acne. And Eli, poor Eli with his shock of Afro curls. Not even the mini-scrunchies give him relief from his sauna-inducing hair.

Krusty the Clown

At night, he dug his already short fingernails above his ears where his hair ticklishly fell, giving rise to red scratches on his delicate baby skin. So we decided to give "Samson" a haircut.

In the ordinary course of events, this is no big deal. It's hot. Give the kid a haircut. But this is third-world superstitious Philippines, and the kid is three months shy of his first birthday.

Way back when we gave an 8-month old Woog his first haircut, also for the same reasons (and he had even longer hair then), we never heard the end of it: "But he isn't even a year old!" "Think of what the evil spirits might do!" "Your son is going to be sick, mark my words."

For the same reason that in certain Moslem countries, a male child is left bareheaded except for a thick knot of hair on the top of his head (easy access for Allah to pull him up to heaven when the time was right), children in the Philippines are not given haircuts until they reach a year old. Well, at least in the most superstitious of communities they are not. A haircut before the child reaches that crucial first year is supposed to render said child vulnerable to a host of malicious spirits who will endow the child with all sorts of sickness and general ill-health. So no haircut.

Which is all well and good if you happen to be a bald sparse-haired baby. Unfortunately, Eli is not. He has inherited the thick curly hair from both sets of ancestors, which will continue to grow and thicken until he reaches his thirties, when said curly luxuriant mane shall start to copiously shed both front and center (also genetically predetermined, poor boy).

Before this post goes all off-tangent into the realm of premature balding (and totally bald) family members, suffice it to say that Eli did get his first haircut: kicking, screaming and frantically twisting, nearly giving his mother a heart-attack after several near misses of neck and ears.

The result was a fringey, choppy, uneven Friar Tuck do which we all laughed at, including "Friar Tuck" himself, who giggled in relief at finally being set free:

Samson does a "Friar Tuck"

So we showed him off and waited for the usual barrage of doomsday prophecies. But none came. Even my mother who led the naysayers during Woog's first haircut years ago was surprisingly silent. Well, ok, she did say "Wow Eli, you're so gwapo!" And for a woman who prominently displays Feng Shui bric-a-bracs along with statuettes of her favorite Catholic saints in her house, that's saying a lot.

The whole upside of the situation is, Eli is faring wonderfully better in this heat. He no longer scratches, he no longer whines. And he's so gwapo!