Brushing my daughter's hair is torture for both of us

News Editor

Adam Armour

I looked upon my young daughter, her face so much like my own and so much like her beautiful mother’s, and felt the frigid hand of dread grip my soul.

“OK, Arlie. It’s time.”

My voice, crossing through a desert-like mouth before emerging as dry and brittle as cicada husks, sounded almost nothing like my own. I licked my lips and tried again.

“We need to …” I took a deep breath of air before continuing. “… brush your hair.”

The sudden look of dismay that crossed my daughter’s face mirrored what I felt in my heart. Arlie’s hair, when properly combed, spills from her pate in gentle waves until reaching the shoreline of her shoulders.

But it’s almost never properly combed. She won’t allow it. And so, few tasks around our house cause as much consternation as brushing Arlie’s hair. There are days when I’d rather clean the litter box with my nose than sort through the knitted mess atop my 7-year-old’s head. Most attempts to sort the mess end with hands-in-the-air surrender at a declaration of, “Good enough.”

“Do we have to?” she said, using the panicked-little-girl tone she employs when in full manipulation mode.

Atop her head, a bolus of blond snakes twisted in and around each other in a nest of kinks and knots. Individual strands, each as long as my forearm, rose upward from her crown as if desperately attempting to escape the mob of fellow follicles. There was no order, only chaos.

I sighed again, this time in resignation.

“Yeah,” I said. “We better.”

“Oh, Daddy,” she said, her tone collapsing into a low, mournful moan. “I hate it when you brush my hair.”

“Me too,” I said as I gingerly retrieved her pink hairbrush from the precariously balanced collection of random junk that manifests atop her dresser moments after we clear the thing.

By the time I’d turned back to her, Arlie had vanished.

“Where’d you go?” I shouted from the center of her empty bedroom.

Silence answered.

“Arlie?” I said, utilizing a moderately severe variation of my “dad” tone to let my 7-year-old escapee know just how serious I was about disentangling the complicated disaster atop her noggin before we headed off to school.

“No,” she answered back from elsewhere in the house, defiant and fearful.

“Dude, we’ve got to,” I said, heading toward the sound of her voice. “Your hair is a mess. There could be rats living in there. Or at least mice … maybe a cockroach or two.”

I found Arlie in the living room, pouting from the couch.

“Daddy, quit that. There are no rats living in my hair.”

I shrugged.

“Probably not,” I said. “I haven’t spotted any poop pellets falling from your hair lately. But it’s impossible to be sure without checking.”

“You’re not being serious,” she said.

“Maybe not. Now stand up and let’s get this over with.”

Arlie rose from the couch and I took her place. I grabbed her shoulders and guided her to a position in front of me, then gently spun her so that she faced the opposite direction.

Before me lay an Escher-esque puzzle of incomprehensible twists and turns.

“Ready?” I said, grabbing a handful of hair and setting the brush against it.

“No,” Arlie squealed, hands immediately swatting at me.

“Stop that,” I said as I attempted to drag the bristles along the strip of hair one painful inch at a time. They snagged almost immediately, pulling against an army of tiny, stubborn knots.

“You’re going to have to stop that,” I said as Arlie pawed blindly at the flat of the brush. “Glue your hands to your side.”

The hands dropped slightly, then rose again as I resumed my attempt to loosen the knitting.

“Glue ‘em,” I said again.

“I can’t,” she said. She twisted her head to escape the brush and the pain it caused. In doing so, tangles of hair snagged in the bristles. The brush slipped from my hand as she scrambled away from me, hands still raised to her head.

The brush bounced wildly inside its nest of tangled hair as Arlie fled, its bristles buried deep inside the knitted, knotted mess.

I sighed again as she vanished into the depths of the house.

“Good enough,” I said, then rose to gather her school supplies for the day.

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ADAM ARMOUR is the news editor for the Daily Journal and former general manager of The Itawamba County Times. You may reach him via his Twitter handle, @admarmr.

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