Everyone could see the girl from our school was struggling with hair past her knees, and nobody understood her father — at the concert she said it herself: “I asked him to cut it. He said we have to wait until I’m seventeen.”
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My daughter is in the same class as Pia Drummond, whose hair goes past the back of her knees.
Her father is early to everything. Every assembly, every sports day, every concert. He comes straight off shift, so it gets done on site — he brings a little mirror in from the van, sits her on a chair in the corridor and does it himself.
French plaits. Ribbons. Pins. By the end of an evening not one strand has come down.
And half the parents melt.
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***Look at that dad. Not every man can even do a plait.***
And every single time, I look at it and I do
not understand.
It is not whether it is pretty. It is pretty.
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It is that the child is struggling with it.
The plait catches on the back of her chair. In PE she holds it in one hand. I watched her in the dining hall gather it into her fist just to be able to lean over her plate.
She is nine. I am a mother. I look at that and I think: why?
At the Christmas concert we were all in the corridor waiting for them to open the hall.
He was over by the window, plaiting, the same as always. He finished and she ran off down the corridor to the girls who were already in costume.
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And one of the mothers said it. Not under her breath. Out loud.
“Somebody should have taken that child to a proper hairdresser years ago.”
He did not even look up
from putting the pins away. “Thanks. We manage.”
“That’s not the point. Look at her. She carries it around like a rucksack.”
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And then the second one started. “You can see she’s uncomfortable. That’s not devotion any more, that’s something else.”
And the third one, quieter, but we all heard it: “Maybe you’re the one who can’t let go of something, and she’s the one paying for it.”
That was when he straightened up.
And that was when we saw that she had come back and was standing behind us.
