Months had passed since my last haircut and I was running the risk of looking like a Canadian ice hokey player from the 1990s (read mullet), so I dropped into my neighborhood salon for my quarterly crop. As the scissors snipped round my head and the electric razor buzzed my cranium, I thought about Reina’s hair. In 3.5 years, not once has her hair felt the cold edge of a pair of scissors, not even a trim.
Early on in Reina’s first year of life, Chinese friends and neighbors in Shenzhen asked when we planned on shaving her head. As I understand it, this is the norm in China. It is believed that this makes the hair grow back fuller. Chopping off that corn silk fine baby hair may have been a good idea, but Reina did such a thorough job rubbing most of it off in her sleep at night that we did not see the point in shaving what little she had left.
So we let it grow, and grow, and grow until it reached about the middle of her back. Then something peculiar occurred shortly after her second birthday, Reina’s hair appeared to stop getting longer. While Reina grew around 8 centimeters in the past year, her hair did too and, consequently, it remained in lockstep with her overall growth.
Though I voted to trim her sun-bleached ends recently, Mama and Reina are resolutely against it. I know someday Reina will get her hair cut, but in the meantime, I’ve banned all copies of the Guinness Book of Records in our home, as I don’t want her getting any ideas about growing the longest head of hair in the world. I think I’d rather see her shave her head.