There must be something about me that screams to a kid, “screw up her hair.”

Or maybe they figure it’s so far gone into frizzy that anything they’d attempt couldn’t possibly hurt.

With the guys, it had been relatively mild – a set of outrageous barrettes here, a clashing scrunchie there.

But that was before last weekend, when Big Guy found the scrunchie stash I’d kept carefully hidden for years.

“Mommy! Let me fix your hair! It’ll look great!”

The maniacal gleam in his eye told me “great” was not what he was going for, any more than it was my nieces’ goal all those  years ago when they emptied their barrette bags onto my scalp.

The girls also tattooed me from thigh to ankle that night with magic marker. I wore long skirts to work for days after, no matter how hot it got.

Big Guy started with one simple purple ponytail holder but quickly added a yellow scrunchie – must be lingering Lakers influence -  telling me my head wasn’t right. It’s not the first time I’ve heard that.

And then the scrunchies kept coming until I looked like Medusa.

“You know, I like this,” Big Guy said. “It’s kind of like M used to wear her hair at school.”

Ay, except M’s hair was in neat little cornrows were held together by glistening beads, not twisted, tangled chunks confined by the most godawful collection of fabric in hair-dressing history.

On the Big Guy scale, it didn’t measure up to last season’s green manicure. It’s borderline tragic that the movers wouldn’t pack that bottle.

And even he got sick of it eventually. “You look like you have creatures on your head,” he told me after a few hours.

“I better take them out then,” I said. “We wouldn’t want them to escape.”

“Nah, leave them in. I want to see it a little longer.”

At least I wasn’t scrubbing off magic marker this time.

Copyright 2009 Debra Legg. All rights reserved.

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