It seemed like a good idea at first. Then again, most experiences that impact one’s life at all usually begin with those fateful words. It was the fall of ’96 and my life was about as exciting as the common four-year-olds could be. My mother, who was, and still is, a die-hard garage-saler, had left me at home for a period of eight minutes. Thinking to herself that she’d be right back and I would be just fine, she locked up the house, got in our maroon-colored Voyager mini-van, and drove down the road to our neighbor’s home for a quick look to see what they had to offer. My father couldn’t be home to watch me at the time because he worked 5 days a week for a company that drove around fixing other people’s broken electrical devices: fire alarms, hidden cameras, trip wires, and other “booby traps” of the sort.
With my father at work and my mother out gallivanting about the Croixwood area, I was at home, by myself, with probably something I was supposed to do but, like any other young child who had their wits about them, wasn’t about to do it unless bribed or forced. Each moment ticked by like an eternity creating time for my mind to wander off to better places. Dragons, Barbie’s, Lego sculptures, and the random Disney princess flitted across my subconscious vision as I dreamed dreams of adventure, love, and creation.
In those moments, while sitting in our whitewashed livingroom without a care in the world, I began to scheme. Scenarios, each with their own separate outcome, played themselves out in front of my mischievous, crisp blue eyes. The entire thought process lasted about thirty seconds in real time but what were a couple of tick-tocks on a clock to someone who had fought epic battles on dragon-back against the evil hordes of Barbie dolls, and had built massive structures out of Legos that would make even the most esteemed of architects gape in raw admiration?
As soon as my envisioning had begun, I came to a decision on my plan of action. Today, I still do not know why the idea revealed itself to me at that moment in time but what I do know is, is that I was not alone in that particular area of trouble-making. Before I knew it, the scissors were in my hand. So much for being “child safe,” my emerald green and snow white molded plastic scissors were to be this child’s demise.
My heart pounded in my ears as my fingers recklessly mowed through my sun-kissed locks. With each subtle snip of the twin blades, and each individual curl dropping onto our milk chocolate-colored worn carpet like the leaves falling from the majestic oaks in my backyard onto the decomposing earth below, I recalled every hated moment with those particular hairs. Combing them was a hassle, bathing was ridiculous, and having every other adult walk by and exclaim in an awe-stricken voice about how they wanted my hair made life just not what it could be.

A little too late, my mother pulled into the driveway. Entering our split level entry-way and walking up the steps with a Cub bag full of her latest finds, my mother espied me covered in hair and sporting a new look that would make even the arch-angels cry out in horror. No words could describe the look on this child’s mother’s face as she saw the damage done to her little princess. With that same look permanently plastered where her face should have been she dropped the bag of knick-knacks, grabbed me by the wrist with her vice-like grip and nearly dragged me down the steps, back into the still air-conditioned mini van. That drive to the nearest Cost Cutters went by so quickly, I can barely recall the details. Either it was because she was driving ten miles over the speed limit due to her penned up anger, or I simply zoned out enough to protect my youthful sanity as she screamed at me form the faux velvet-cloth covered driver’s seat, we arrived at the parlor in record time.
Since we didn’t make an appointment ahead of time, my mother and I were forced to sit in the waiting area with the pungent scent of burnt hair and aerosol stinging our noses. Me, with my lovely-cutting job, and my mother, with the occasional flame still escaping fro m her mouth, waited for what seemed like infinity before a chair opened up within the main body of the barber shop. Marching me to the vacant, black leather chair, my still seething mother proceeded to hover in the background as the poor, young, pierced-lip newbie consistently failed at attempting to make conversation. Attaching the tablecloth like poncho around my skinny neck, the multi-colored hair employee went to work fine tuning what was left of my fix-all hairdo. Soon she was finished and my parental unit and I went home to face my other guardian, good old daddy. A couple of hours and a thousand tears later, it was time for bed. I had survived the first onslaught but what I wasn’t prepared for was what was to occur the following morning.
They say reality begins when you go to college, get a job, get married, and have kids but those speakers obviously never went to day-care. Turdy Trudy’s day-care was as horrifying a place to me as being trapped in the Chamber of Secrets with a basilisk was to Harry Potter. Constantly having to fight for one’s own place at the lunch table, growing up there was quite educating. I learned to get under a bed in less than a second’s time, steal someone else’s kiwi off of their plate when they weren’t looking, and how to eat faster than anyone else in order to retain the greatest nap-time location. It was truly a “Hard Knock Life.”
The other children there didn’t quite understand me and we did not get along very well. That fact also did not help when I entered through the gates into my own personal version of hell with barely any hair to my name. The ruthless pre-schoolers jumped all over the opportunity to drill in their hair superiority. Being named “Devan,” a unisex name more commonly used for boys than girls, and having a boy-like haircut did absolutely nothing to help my case against their accusations of me being a boy. When my pitiful claims failed to make even a dent in their offensive lines, I retaliated the only way I could, with a few choice words of my own.
Having the worst timing possible, Turdy Trudy chose to walk into the cluttered toy room at the particular moment of my tantrum of desperation. As the spoken words of the forbidden language reached her ears, the same look that had crossed my mother’s face “copy and pasted” onto hers. She and my mother must have had a small discussion on the topic of the disciplinary actions to take on account of me breaking the rules because she proceeded to yank me out of the room with the same vice-like grip I had experienced the previous afternoon from my mother. Up the stairs we went, my dismal pleas bouncing off of her obscenely large person like moths hitting a bug-zapper and falling to their untimely deaths.
With my last ounce of strength I ripped loose my hand from her iron grasp and did the very last thing I thought I would ever do, I mooned them all. In those final moments of my Turdy Trudy residence, I clutched the paired elastic waistbands of my black polka-dotted skirt and my Tinker Bell undies and thrust my arms downward to reveal my pale, round, rump to those satanic children who just so happened to be watching the procession from the bottom of the steps. Shakespeare may have said, “hell hath no fury as a woman scorned” but, then again, he never experienced the revenge of a vexed day-care child.